“Once again, the history of St. Louis forecast the nation,” remarks Walter Johnson at the beginning of the story of the the E. St. Louis Massacre. It was followed by comparably violent attacks on Blacks in 1919 in Chicago and Washington, D.C. and in 1921 in Tulsa, recently recalled during a Trump campaign rally there. In E. St. Louis (1917)
- three hundred buildings were burnt down
- 5,000 African Americans crossed the bridge for refuge in St. Louis
- 39 died or “hundreds” depending on whom you believe
- 82 whites were indicted; 9 served significant time
- 23 Blacks were indicted; 12 served significant time
- 7 policemen were implicated; 3 were given misdemeanors by lot
The city of East St. Louis in the twentieth century was “a paradise for high and frequent dividend and the piling up of wealth to be spent in St. Louis and Chicago and New York,” said W.E.B. DuBois. The business owners lived outside the city, which already had a very low tax rate. A 1913 investigation by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch revealed that the mayor, the city attorney, and several aldermen were taking bribes from the railroads. The records of those transactions were destroyed. Property assessors were also bribed to keep their assessments low. The packing plants, aluminum manufacturing plants, and America Steel were assessed for “cents on the dollar.” The entire property of E. Louis was valued at $13 million, “a figure that might have been more accurately applied to just one of the larger plants” (222).
The city economy focused on vice: saloons, storefront casinos, and brothels. Technically illegal, the businesses were protected by the influence of the vice landlords, including free services for the police. DuBois wrote, “there was no veil of hypocrisy here, but a wickedness frank, ungilded, and open” (223).
The Great Migration eventually brought up to six thousand Black citizens to E. St. Louis, where they were considered back-up workers for whites. The positions they were assigned included working in the stinking fertilizer division of the meat-packing plants, driving bolts into farm animals’ brains, tending molten metal and carrying castings and hot slag to the furnaces, where the temperatures reached 120 degrees. The AFL union, although it organized primarily skilled workers, never allowed Black workers to join, and Blacks were prevented from their own organizing by the employers themselves.
World War I raised the demand for products made in E. St. Louis, such as aluminum, shell casings and canned meats. Companies added shifts and new jobs attracted Blacks from the South, estimated at 2-5,000 between the 1910 and 1920 census. Johnson comments the increase was “not overwhelming to a city with a population of over sixty thousand,” but it did create outrageous rumors that stoked fear:
- that persons unknown had hired entire trains to carry Black workers north
- that 2,000 Blacks per week were arriving in the city
- that plans existed to use the votes of migrant Blacks to “colonize” E. St. Louis
- that political bosses were standing outside polling stations passing out $5 bills to Black voters
The Central Trades Labor Union hired observers to sit at the train station and count the number of Blacks arriving on northbound trains; some claimed 200 at a time would disembark from the trains. This employment paranoia fed directly into the frenzy that precipitated the massacre of 1917. “Black people were taking over the streetcars, sitting in the breezy seats by the window or ‘jump[ing] in to get a seat by a white woman,’ according to a local Democratic Party boss Thomas Canavan” (227].
The newspapers reported on Black crime from the fall of 1916 to the summer of 1917: Blacks were responsible for eight hundred holdups, twenty-seven murders, and seven rapes. “There was just a reign of terror in city of East St. Louis for eleven or twelve months . . . .” AFL Organizer, Henry Kerr [228].
Walter Johnson believes it was the outsider status, not merely the racial / inferior status that motivated the contempt.
. . . these Black people were out of place and they needed to be driven out. Or exterminated. Thus began the dialectic of segregation and removal that would define Black life in the United States-– a shifting set of alliances between industrialists, real estate rentiers, and white labor to control the Black population and settlement, to take advantage of Blacks when they could, and to drive them out when they could not [228].
Johnson argues that the Black and White workers should have been allies against owner exploitation, but the racial history of America as the “white man’s country” prevented them from working together. During World War I, the increasing need for labor to meet the production demands of the war could have put all workers at an advantage, but the owners used replacement of white labor with Black as a threat and the labor unions used the same threat as a means for keeping union discipline. In 1916 the rumor mill stoked these fears:
- the mayor had traveled south to recruit Black labor
- the Chamber of Commerce had taken out ads in South papers to attract Blacks
- industrialists had arranged for 1500 Negroes to be shipped to East St. Louis to break strikes
With this undercurrent of fear, the launching of the racist movie Birth of a Nation, a threatened walkout at Aluminum Ore and the dismissal of two hundred white laborers with their replacement by Black labor, the stage was set for a standoff between labor and management throughout the city. In April 1917 two thousand workers at Aluminum Ore struck, followed by workers in other local plants. Management questioned the patriotism of the workers, suggesting the strike was “pro-German in origin.”
Among the replacement workers were some Black laborers, who were protected as they marched into the plant. The unions took their case before the mayor. In advance of the meeting they published their own preview:
Negro and cheap foreign labor is being imported by the Aluminum Ore Company to tear down the standard of living of our citizens . . . . Come and hear the truth the press will not publish [233].
At the meeting the union leaders demanded that the mayor prevent further migration of Blacks to East St. Louis, and the mayor promised to try to prevent them from boarding northbound trains in the South. White voices shouted. “East St. Louis must remain a white man’s town” [233].
As the white laborers left the hall, rumors again circulated among them:
- a Black burglar had shot a white man
- a Black man had insulted a white woman
- two white girls had been shot
- a white woman had been shot
Up to three thousand whites took to the streets, dragging Black men off streetcars and beating anyone else they could find. The mob began to loot local businesses, while the police stood by and watched. Finally they decided to disarm the Black residents. The mob burned out its fury in the early morning hours of May 29. Hundreds of Blacks left the city over the bridge to St. Louis.
Contrary to actual events, the newspapers were reporting that embattled whites were being attacked by Blacks. Police began to conduct searches of Black homes for weapons. Rumors began to spread that Blacks were planning to drive white people out of town on July 4.
Over the weekend of May 28-29, the St. Louis police department prevented Blacks from driving over the bridge to purchase guns, the E. St . Louis police force stopped and searched cars in the street, and the Illinois National Guard conducted searches of the houses of Black residents of the city. They were responding to rumors of an armed insurrection by seizing firearms.
During the last week of June, Aluminum Ore replaced all union leaders with Black workers, as the strike continued.
On the night of July 1 a carload of whites drove a Model T through a Black neighbor hood, shooting into houses. A church bell was rung as a signal to Blacks of the attack. An unmarked police car was dispatched to find out if Blacks were rioting. According to a St. Louis Republic reporter, the police confronted “more than 200 rioting Negroes” who shot into the car, killing two policemen. The bloodied car and its deceased officers was left in front of the police station for all to see on their way to work next morning.
Walter Johnson describes the riot of July 2 as a series of photographic images, beginning in the downtown around around 10 a.m.
- a Black pedestrian was knocked down, kicked in the face, then shot “three or five times”
- Black men were pulled off streetcars and beaten in the streets
- crowds of white men, some in jacket and ties, laughing around a fire burning the body of a Black man
- white men throwing paving stones at a Black man stunned in the middle of the street
- a crowd cheering the lynching of a Black man killed by a mob as he was hoisted over a lamppost
- white women shooting at the feet of a Black woman, her blouse torn, running back and forth between them
- Black men holding off a white mob at Thirteenth Street, according to W.E.B. Dubois, “The Negroes fought. They grappled with the mob like beasts at bay.They drove them from the thickest cluster of their homes and piled the white dead on the street” (237).
- The East St. Louis police stood by and watched or jumped in on the side of the white mob
- At midnight:”The mob outside was working its way along the blocks, one group setting fire to the houses from alleys behind, while another waited in front to shoot at the Black families as they fled their burning houses” (Wells-Barnett, The East St. Louis Massacre, 4-7).
The oral histories of this devastation is recorded in greater detail by the Black journalist Ida B. Wells. The strategy of burning and shooting follows the pattern of Indian massacres in the western territory, so Johnson prefers “massacre” over “riot” to describe it.
Johnson owes most of the sordid detail of the massacre to three sources:
- W.E.B. DuBois, who wrote metaphorically with deep bitterness of the murder and exile of Blacks
- The subsequent congressional investigation, which emphasized the corruption of East St. Louis city government and the greed of the industrialists who set Black against White workers
- Ida B. Wells who tells multiple narratives of the sacking and pillaging of Black families, but in objective journalistic style.
He concludes that Wells is the most eloquent to report the facts of the devastation in personal detail. As he summarizes: “A mere boy with a gun. A lie. A desecrated home. A child’s new shoe. The world left behind by those who had come north in search of a better life as they pushed on into the terrifying unknown of the night, crossing the bridge to St. Louis” (249).
