Never Been a Time (39 page)

The riot came at the midpoint of a notably bloody year in a notably bloody decade, a year whose pivotal events would haunt the world for the rest
of the century and beyond. As blacks were being slaughtered in East St. Louis, American soldiers began dying in France. In Russia, the violent period that came to be known as the July Days commenced in the embattled streets of the capital, days of slaughter that led four months later to the Bolshevik Revolution. To the south of Russia, Turks continued the ethnic cleansing that, by the end of the year, would leave 1.5 million Armenians dead. And Germany introduced mustard gas to the battlefield—a weapon of appalling cynicism and cruelty, designed not to kill but to maim and thus add to the cruel burden of the enemy. Meanwhile, the British army marched into Jerusalem to fight the Turks in the name of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Thousands died, as many thousands more would die in years to come.

In America in 1917, labor disputes turned violent across the nation, from the shipyards of Brooklyn to the coal mines of southern Illinois, the lead mines of southeastern Missouri, and the steelyards of San Francisco, where marines were sent in to protect plants from twenty thousand striking ironworkers. By the end of the year, there had been forty-two hundred strikes nationwide, far more than in any previous year. Nightriders lynched blacks across the South, and throughout America dissenters from the war fever that seized the nation were brutally beaten, hanged, shot, and burned with hot tar. In the spring of 1917, as he prepared to bring the nation into what he would describe to Congress quite accurately as “the most terrible and disastrous of all wars,” President Woodrow Wilson said despairingly, “Once lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance.”
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The World War I years were a time of great intolerance brutally expressed, of war and revolution and global chaos, the first movement of a dissonant century of unparalleled freedom and democracy and unparalleled tyranny and mass murder. As Hannah Arendt so eloquently has written, the “magnitude of the violence let loose in the First World War might have been enough to cause revolution in its aftermath even without any revolutionary tradition and even if no revolution had ever occurred before.” It was a period whose defining notions came from nineteenth-century thinkers like Marx, Freud, Darwin, and Nietzsche, their theories and musings often perverted by vengeful demagogues. It was a period dominated by the new religions of class struggle, historical inevitability, survival of the fittest, racial purity, and the deep desires of the subconscious, a world many saw as purged of moral absolutes, where nothing was forbidden and everything was permitted. “The
blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned,” a great poet wrote despairingly in 1919. The East St. Louis race riot and those that followed it were, in one sense, yet another bloody episode in the continuing American tragedy whose precipitating event was slavery. In another sense, they were manifestations of the agony of the emerging twentieth century, the most violent century of them all.
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Bluesman Henry Townsend, who worked juke joints with Robert Johnson during the Depression and was still performing in his nineties, ran away from home as a boy in 1919 and rode an Illinois Central freight train 125 miles north from the river town of Cairo, Illinois. When he climbed down in the freight yards of East St. Louis, he discovered the riot was still “a fresh thing, it hadn't cooled off.”

“Being a nine-year-old kid, I still knew what was happening,” he recalled eighty years later. “I had to know because I'm still here … East St. Louis was a major migration area for people from the South. And everybody out of the South had a .45 or a .38 or something. And that was underestimated among the whites that got this thing kicked off.”
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In the years following the riot, the black migration to East St. Louis slowly resumed. Even though the black population of East St. Louis remained a minority until the 1960s, the small city on the east bank of the Mississippi—in spite of the riot, or perhaps in part because of it—became known as a regional center of black life, epitomized by the impassioned music the migrants brought up from the fields and crossroads and whitewashed country churches of the South. “The East St. Louis Blues,” essentially the lament W. C. Handy had heard on the St. Louis levee decades earlier, was recorded by Blind Willie McTell, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and Furry Lewis, among other historically important blues musicians. And in 1927, Duke Ellington celebrated East St. Louis's reputation as a tough, bluesy old town with one of his greatest compositions, “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,” for many years his theme song.

The riot was not forgotten, at least not among blacks. In 1932, in “East Chicago Blues,” the Sparks Brothers sang, “East St. Louis is burning down.” In the early 1940s, Harlem artist Jacob Lawrence made the East St. Louis riot integral to his “The Migration of the Negro” series with a highly stylized tempera view of a prone black man being attacked by whites with clubs and knives, now in the Museum of Modern Art. And in February of 1952, Josephine Baker spoke of the East St. Louis riot at length and with great passion when she came back to her hometown for the first time since the early 1920s. She talked and sang and danced and modeled the latest Paris fashions for a crowd of about six thousand at Kiel Auditorium in downtown St. Louis. The crowd was racially mixed—a rarity in the St. Louis area in those days.

Baker, who had lived for many years in France, where she was revered as an artist, a humanitarian, and a hero of the resistance, was on a rare tour of the United States. She had tears in her eyes as she looked out into the vast auditorium.
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“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “believe me when I say that it makes me profoundly happy, it makes my heart swell with pride to see in this beautiful audience tonight, salt and pepper. I mean by that colored and white brothers mingling.”

She recalled that she had left St. Louis many years before in great part because of the East St. Louis riot:

I can still see myself standing on the west bank of the Mississippi looking over into East St. Louis and watching the glow of the burning of Negro homes lighting the sky. We children stood huddled together in bewilderment … frightened to death with the screams of the Negro families running across this bridge with nothing but what they had on their backs as their worldly belongings …

So with this vision I ran and ran and ran … but that glow in the sky of burning houses, the screams, the terror, the tears of the unfortunate children that had lost their parents—this kept coming before me on the stage, in the streets, in my sleep … I was haunted until I finally understood that I was marked by God to try to fight for the freedom of those that were being tortured.

She said she had finally decided to return to America and use her position of prominence to speak out about the tragedy of racial prejudice. She said, “Americans, the eyes of the world are upon you. How can you expect the world to believe in you and respect your preaching of democracy when you yourself treat your colored brothers as you do?”
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In the early and mid-1950s, another wave of blues musicians came up to East St. Louis from the South, including bandleader Ike Turner, singer Little Milton Campbell, and guitarist Albert King. Chuck Berry would drive over from St. Louis to play guitar and sing with pianist Johnnie Johnson at the Cosmopolitan Club at Seventeenth and Bond. In 1958, a teenage girl from St. Louis named Annie Bullock with an exhilarating gospel-drenched voice began singing in East St. Louis with Ike Turner. Soon, she married him and became Tina Turner. Many years later, after she had become an international singing star, she recalled that St. Louis was “a fairly sedate place” in the mid-fifties. But across the river, particularly after hours, East St. Louis was something else entirely. “East St. Louis had
action
, and it never seemed to stop.”
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East St. Louis black poet Eugene Redmond calls his hometown “East Boogie.” “This was the hotbed, Paradise and Mississippi,” said Redmond, gesturing at a now-vacant intersection of unpaved streets in Rush City, a section of East St. Louis between the South End and Monsanto chemical plants, whose stacks tower over the landscape from the adjoining company town of Sauget. “You could hear Ike and Tina Turner, B. B. King, Lightning Hopkins, Jimmy Reed. When I was a kid, the population of Rush City was around fifteen hundred people. Now it's down to perhaps two hundred.”

“Paradise Street,” he said, laughing. “From time to time, Monsanto would emit a colorless, odorless gas that would send the people of Paradise Street choking to the emergency room.” There were a few remaining shotgun houses and trailers scattered among the weeds along Paradise Street. In the distance, on the opposite shore, we could see the gleaming Gateway Arch, a monument to westward migration.

Redmond, a poet and professor of English at Southern Illinois University in suburban Edwardsville, grew up in East St. Louis in the 1940s and 1950s, spending the early years of his life on Paradise Street. Like Miles Davis two decades earlier, and like thousands of other black kids growing up
in these parts over the years, Redmond heard about the massacre of 1917 long before he started grade school. “There has never been a time when the riot was not alive in the oral tradition,” he said.

He was conducting a personal and historical tour of his hometown, something he frequently does for visitors, who come in increasing numbers from as far away as Europe and Japan to see the town that produced Miles Davis and Ike and Tina Turner.

Redmond has been a professor and poet-in-residence at colleges across the country, from Oberlin in Ohio to California State University at Sacramento, but he came back to East St. Louis in 1986 because of “a chronic case of homesickness.” Redmond then became poet-in-residence for the schools of East St. Louis, going into some of the toughest classrooms in the country and encouraging kids to learn about the rich history and culture of African Americans, getting them to write poems and essays and short stories. Redmond has been the mentor of several generations of writers from the area and he is the editor of a literary magazine,
Drumvoices Revue
, which publishes local poets and fiction writers alongside the work of nationally prominent black writers like Amiri Baraka and Maya Angelou. Eugene Redmond is the official poet laureate of East St. Louis, a title he takes seriously, always working on the next gala poetry reading or jazz concert or cultural celebration in his hometown. His latest project was what he called “a mini-World's Fair” in 2008 to celebrate black culture and the large role East St. Louis has played in it. “East St. Louis ain't dead yet,” Eugene Redmond says. “I got the scars and tattoos to prove it.”

Redmond, wearing an African black-leather hat, circular with a slanted top like a beret, and an old sweatshirt promoting the Miles Davis Arts Festival, put his battered old compact car in gear and we left Rush City and headed north, past acres of rubble-strewn vacant lots struggling to become prairie once again.

We crossed into the South End, bouncing across rails—not an old streetcar track, a freight rail line that runs right down the middle of a wide street with houses on either side. There were many vacant lots in this part of the city, south and east of the shabby downtown business district, but the houses that remained were larger than the tiny ones in Rush City.

He slowed down as he said, “This neighborhood was prosperity for the
blacks in the early part of the twentieth century, and the rioters sacked it. A lot of it was never built back up.”

We drove past houses where well-known East St. Louisans had grown up: Olympic champion Jackie Joyner-Kersee; film-director brothers Warring-ton and Reginald Hudlin; Barbara Ann Teer, who founded the National Black Theater in Harlem; Miles Davis. Redmond pointed out the red shotgun house where Ike and Tina Turner lived. In the African tradition, poets are part magician, and Redmond has an almost mystical belief in the ability of East St. Louis to turn out exceptional people. He has a point. There is something remarkable about the number of prominent men and women who have come from its financially gutted schools, its dilapidated housing, its polluted environment, and its mean streets. East St. Louis not only turns out athletes and musicians and other people in the arts, but also people like Senate Democratic leader Richard Durbin, Donald McHenry, ambassador to the United Nations under Jimmy Carter, and Ellen Soeteber, editor of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
from 2001 to 2005.

We crossed Bond Avenue, a main thoroughfare for aspiring blacks in the first half of the twentieth century, and, in July of 1917, the street where two white policemen were fatally shot to trigger the deadliest race riot of an era. We continued through the city to the North End and the old stockyards. The cows and pigs and sheep were all gone, and what remained had an ominous post-apocalyptic feel—bare pillars and weather-eaten smokestacks and multilevel structures that look like ruined parking garages three and four and five stories high, where pigs by the thousands once walked up ramps to slaughter. We stopped for a moment. “Listen,” says Redmond. The wind rustled through the weeds and thistles and moaned around the bare superstructures of the abandoned slaughterhouses. Redmond smiled sadly, and gently shook his head.

“I come here and meditate on East St. Louis and sometimes I can hear the squeals of the pigs that died here when I was a child.”

We headed east past the abandoned stockyards and turned onto an interstate highway. “They built the first freeway in 1964, and it ruined East St. Louis,” Redmond said. “Now the rich people could just drive right past it, right over it.” We were still well within the limits of East St. Louis, driving east through land that was mostly vacant, land that Redmond envisioned just
waiting for the bulldozer or the plow. “The city is twelve square miles. See all this land?” he asked. “There is enough land to feed everybody.”
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