Never Been a Time (9 page)

W. E. B. Du Bois was in Alabama doing research for the United States Census Bureau when the riot struck. On the way home in a segregated rail car, worried sick about his wife and young daughter, he wrote an angry elegy he called the “Atlanta Litany.” Without mentioning Washington by name, he indicted his policies. “Behold the maimed black man, who toiled and sweated to save a bit from the pittance paid him. They told him:
Work and Rise!
He worked.” And now, Du Bois wrote, “this man lieth maimed and murdered, his wife naked to shame, his children to poverty and evil.” Du Bois asked God to show him how his “mobbed and mocked and murdered people” could rise out of its suffering, and he heard no answer. But he admitted he felt “a clamoring and clawing within, to whose voice we would not listen, yet shudder lest we must, and it is red. Ah God! It is a red and awful shape.” Increasingly, as time went by, Du Bois would advocate as a last resort the message of that “red and awful shape”—physical defense against the inhumane incursions of white America.
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In the meantime, Du Bois called for federal intervention to stop further racial violence in Atlanta. It never came. President Theodore Roosevelt made it clear that he felt racial problems—including lynching and riots—were best solved at the local, not the national, level. “Next to the negro himself,” he announced not long after the riot, “the man who can do most to help the negro
is his white neighbor who lives near him, and our steady effort should be to better the relations between the two.”
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In the immediate aftermath of the riot, Atlanta's white leaders met with selected blacks—not including W. E. B. Du Bois, whose effect on whites, a colleague suggested, was generally to make them “angry or miserable”—to discuss how to prevent future racial violence. Periodic interracial meetings to head off potential trouble became known as “the Atlanta way.” Some cheap saloons in the riot area, black and white, were closed down, and there was a crackdown on the illegal carrying of guns by both blacks and whites.

But the only real changes were retrograde. Segregation became even more rigid, as if putting further barriers between blacks and whites would dampen the fires of racial hatred, and scores of middle-class blacks fled the city. In trials growing out of the riot, the hand of the law landed much more heavily on blacks than on whites. Some fifty-four African Americans were convicted on weapons charges as opposed to about five whites. Numerous felony charges against whites accused of brutal acts were reduced to misdemeanors or dropped completely. White Atlanta worked hard to forget the unpleasantness. Only two days after the riot, one newspaper declared, “Atlanta is herself again, business is restored, and the riot is forgotten.” For months after the riot was officially over, blacks were assaulted on the streets of Atlanta by small gangs of whites.
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The following year, the Georgia legislature, which had only one black member, passed the new governor's disenfranchisement bill, a bundle of restrictions based on ancestry, economic status, and “character” designed to shut most blacks out of voting. “Nowhere in this bill,” boasted one white legislator, “is the word ‘nigger' written.” In a subsequent referendum, the voters of the state by a 2 to 1 margin approved making the bill an amendment to the Georgia constitution. Neither the national Republican Party nor its Georgia branch gave any support to the blacks who opposed the new law. By 1910, the percentage of Georgia's blacks who were registered voters had plunged from 28 percent to 4.3 percent.
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Although the Atlanta riot initially energized the opposition to Booker T. Washington, political infighting between Trotter and Du Bois and their supporters split the Niagara movement, and the organization was languishing when the struggle for black rights was galvanized in 1908 by another riot, this one in the North.
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In Springfield, Illinois, the white wife of a streetcar conductor said that a black man had raped her. After the man was arrested, thousands of whites assembled downtown in front of the city jail. When they discovered that the accused rapist and another black man who had been accused of murdering a white railroad engineer had been taken to another town for safety, the mob burned and pillaged black neighborhoods, destroyed parts of downtown, including white-owned businesses, and lynched two law-abiding, middle-class black men, including a black barber who was hanged from a tree in front of a saloon. It took state militia men, who eventually numbered in the thousands, two days to stop the riot.
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Springfield, the home and burial place of Abraham Lincoln, seemed like a highly unlikely place for a race riot. It had a very small black population of about twenty-five hundred out of a total of forty-seven thousand, and the black population had not being growing, as it had been in most other cities hit by race riots. What Springfield did have was a corrupt city government that permitted vice districts to flourish in and around downtown, serving the large population of well-heeled men who travel in and out of any state capital, men who are single, at least for the time being, and looking for a good time. Much of the shady activity was concentrated in and around Springfield's downtown, including a heavily black area of cheap saloons, whorehouses, and gambling joints known as the Badlands. According to stories in the newspapers and pronouncements from the pulpit, crime and public indolence were on the rise in downtown Springfield, and blacks were blamed.

After the riot, the local papers reported that white petty criminals and unemployed saloon loafers had formed the core of the rioters. That was undoubtedly true in part, as it often is in race riots. However, many of those arrested for rioting were single young white men with low-paying jobs, which is also often the case. Initially at least, the rioters were encouraged in their attacks by middle-class white spectators. Black criminals and their haunts may have been an original target of the rioters, but as the riot went into its second day, the attacks shifted to a middle-class black neighborhood about two miles from downtown. A black woman who had been a little girl during the riot recalled many years later, “See, the people that they harmed and hurt were not really the no-gooders. They were busy hurting the prominent … We owned property; many whites didn't. There was a great deal of animosity toward any well-established Negro who owned his house and had a good job.” Historian
Roberta Senechal, who made a thorough reevaluation of the Springfield riot in the 1990s, concluded, “Although what triggered the riot may have been anger over black crime, very clearly whites were expressing resentment over any black presence in the city at all. They also clearly resented the small number of successful blacks in the city.”
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Later, the woman whose rape accusation had ignited the riot admitted she had lied. It appeared that she had invented the story to hide an affair—with a white man. The accused rapist was set free, as were dozens of whites arrested for rioting. All-white juries acquitted all but one of the men whose cases came to trial. That man spent thirty days in jail.

The Springfield, Illinois, riot shocked the nation, perhaps in great part because the events took place not just in the North but in a city so closely associated with the Great Emancipator, a connection that was not lost on the rioters. Reportedly, members of the mob shouted “Lincoln freed you, now we'll show you where you belong!”

In reaction to the riot, an interracial organization called the National Negro Conference was formed to fight for African American rights. This time the impetus came from white liberals, who would dominate the organization in its early years, but W. E. B. Du Bois, Monroe Trotter, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett—in 1895, the fiery crusader had married black lawyer-journalist Ferdinand L. Barnett—were also among the founders of the conference.

After a long and volatile series of meetings in New York in May and June of 1909, the National Negro Conference, now one thousand strong, voted to reprimand new president William Howard Taft, who had said he would only appoint blacks who were approved of by the South to federal positions. The conference called for strict enforcement of civil rights laws, enfranchisement of African Americans in all parts of the country, and equal educational opportunities for blacks. The following year, the National Negro Conference became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and W. E. B. Du Bois left Atlanta University for New York to become the organization's director of publicity and research, the top salaried position. The first task he set for himself was to start a national monthly magazine that would focus on the black struggle in America. He wrote later, “Stepping, therefore, in 1910 out of my ivory tower of statistics and investigation, I sought with bare hands to lift the earth and put it in the path in which I conceived it ought to go.”

The magazine, called the
Crisis
, was an almost immediate success. And within a few years the NAACP—and W. E. B. Du Bois, its principal spokesman—became dominant forces in American black thought and political action. By 1914, the NAACP had fifty branch offices and more than six thousand members.
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Every major city needs a workbench, a trash heap, a washbasin; some kind of repository for the unattractive yet essential elements of urban life—slaughterhouses, smokestacks, rail yards, and even those who make them work. Industrial suburbs house those elements. Philadelphia needs Camden, Chicago needs Gary, Cincinnati needs Covington, and St. Louis needs East St. Louis.

—Andrew J. Theising,
Made in USA: East St. Louis

St. Louis, Missouri, founded by French fur traders on the west bank of the Mississippi River in the late eighteenth century, became in the early nineteenth century the main beneficiary of the immense wealth generated by the virtual decimation of the beaver population of the western territories. Across the Mississippi in Illinois, a tiny mercantile settlement named Illinoistown struggled along on leavings from the fur bonanza. Between the two towns—near the middle of the Mississippi and carved by swift brown currents—lay a no-man's-land of shifting sands and the flood-bleached carcasses of dead trees that made a perfect locale for a popular male pastime of the era, the fighting of duels. The island where men shot and killed other men came to be called Bloody Island.

The St. Louis fur trade depended on the city being a viable port with direct access by water to the Ohio River, New Orleans, the Gulf of Mexico, and the world. Then something ominous began to happen. The channel along the west bank of the Mississippi, which carried the river past the long rows of head-high fur bundles on the St. Louis levee, was slowly silting up.

More and more of the water in the river, it appeared, was flowing along the east bank, deepening the channel on the Illinois side. When the largest boats began getting stuck in the muck at what was billed as a deepwater port at St. Louis, powerful Missouri businessmen and politicians decided something had to be done. They looked to the east, to Bloody Island.

Any doubts as to how to solve the problem, and to whose benefit, were overridden by the political reality. Democrat Thomas Hart Benton of St. Louis, who ironically had helped give the wayward island its name by shooting another lawyer dead on its river-washed sand, was the most powerful man in the United States Senate, in great part because he was an old friend and former military aide de camp of President Andrew Jackson. And so, in 1837, Lieutenant Robert E. Lee was dispatched with a group of muckers from the Army Corps of Engineers to the east bank of the Mississippi, and they built a dike between the Illinois shore and Bloody Island. Over the next few years, millions of tons of water, frustrated in its easterly course, flowed west of Bloody Island and scoured out the channel on the St. Louis side of the river so the city was once again a deepwater port. To the east, sediment built up around the dike and soon attached Bloody Island to the mainland of Illinois. The island with its legacy of death became the riverfront, and, eventually, the railroad yards and westernmost slums of the town that in midcentury became East St. Louis.

It would not be the last time that the interests of the larger city to the west prevailed over those of its smaller and less-affluent namesake across the water, but the leavings for East St. Louis were not inconsiderable as the century advanced. Because of its location a short ferry ride east of America's fourth-largest city and westernmost metropolis, the gateway to the West, East St. Louis became one of the nation's major railroad centers, the western terminus for twenty-two eastern rail lines. And the rail yards attracted industry.
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Until the ruggedly graceful, latticed-iron Eads Bridge was built across the Mississippi at St. Louis in 1874, crossing the southern tip of the land that had been Bloody Island, everything that went west from East St. Louis had to be unloaded off wagons or railroad cars, ferried across the wide, deep, swift, perilous river, and loaded up again on horse-drawn carts that would haul the goods up the St. Louis levee to wagons and freight trains pointed west. And even after the bridge was completed, a monopoly held by minor-league robber barons in St. Louis, who had paid dearly for it in a fight with major-league robber baron Jay Gould, charged exorbitant rates to cross what they
thought of as “their bridge,” even though it, too, was in part built by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Not until the fall of 1916 was something called the Free Bridge finally completed a mile or so downriver from the Eads Bridge. At that point, the Free Bridge accommodated only foot and automobile traffic, no trains or streetcars. But at least it was free.
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In the Civil War era, both St. Louis in eastern Missouri and the cities and towns of southern Illinois had been torn over the issue of slavery, as a population that in great part sympathized with the South found itself in states officially aligned with the Union. The area was touched by the violent demonstrations that broke out over the Civil War draft, but the focus of the draft riots was in the cities of the Northeast, particularly New York.