Never Been a Time (16 page)

On the evening of April 17, several hundred members of the aluminum workers union met at the Labor Temple, a downtown auditorium that was privately owned but used for meetings by workers' groups. They voted to strike the Aluminum Ore Company over a myriad of unresolved issues, including the mass firings of men friendly to the union. A large and rowdy picket line went up at the plant early the following morning.

Federalized national guardsmen were already camped nearby to help keep the plant open, and management supplemented them with professional strikebreakers from Chicago. They wielded pickaxes and shovels to protect replacement workers, black and white, as they were led through lines of union men screaming “Scab!” The company announced that the strikers were German sympathizers disrupting essential work on war materiel. The
Journal
seemed to agree, remarking on its editorial page, “When strikes are called now, there is good reason to suspect something other than the interests of workers is at the bottom of them.”
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Other industries were in turmoil, too. The streetcar workers were also going through bitter negotiations, and they were told by management to go ahead and strike if they wanted to. The streetcars would be driven by soldiers, who wouldn't have to be paid by the company at all. And the meatpackers, who could look through the fences around their plants and see soldiers dawdling in front of their tents, simply gave up trying to organize and hoped they could hang on to their jobs. The aluminum workers' strike lasted two
months, but for all practical purposes it was over a week or two after it began. Superintendent C. B. Fox refused to meet with the union's executive committee, and announced before the end of April that all strikers who didn't immediately leave the Employees Protective Association would be barred from the plant for life. He took out a full-page ad in the
Journal
, stating that the company had hundreds of openings. Strikers who quit the union and wanted to come back to work could apply for jobs, but there was no guarantee they would be hired.
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But hundreds of men continued to picket, sustained as much by anger and bitterness as any real hope of winning the strike, and by the opportunity to vent their anger on the replacement workers who entered the plant every day under armed guard. The aluminum plant had been stockpiling guns, and strikers were sometimes fired upon. In the most serious incident, late on the evening of May 10, a powerful searchlight suddenly blazed from a tower in the plant, blinding the seven hunderd picketers near the gate, and security guards inside the plant compound fired into the dazed crowd. Five men were seriously wounded, including a unformed policeman who had been trying to maintain order.
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After a rash of violent crimes that spring, including the killing of two white men by blacks, Mollman announced on May 15 that police patrols were being beefed up downtown and that acting city attorney Thomas L. Fekete had been instructed to prosecute strongly anyone caught violating the ordinance against carrying loaded guns inside the city limits. At the same time, a sign went up in the window of a pawnshop on Collinsville Avenue about half a block from city hall and the police station. It was propped up in the middle of a pile of several dozen cheap used pistols, and it recommended, BUY A GUN FOR PROTECTION.
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That spring, Mollman visited New Orleans to speak to the city's Board of Trade and do a little fishing. On April 26, in an interview published the next day in the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
, he said that thousands of blacks from the South had come to East St. Louis recently, and the number had grown so large it was beginning to create a problem for city officials “in regard to housing and segregation.” He tied the large number of arrivals to the need for workers by companies with union troubles, including the Aluminum Ore Company. “Conditions are very bad in East St. Louis because many plants are suffering for the want of labor.”
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The interview managed simultaneously to suggest that far more blacks were arriving in East St. Louis than the city could comfortably handle and that there were plenty of job openings in East St. Louis. The visit to New Orleans would come back to haunt Mollman. Although businessmen tended to recall that the mayor had discouraged blacks from coming, labor leaders remembered the mayor saying there were still plenty of jobs for blacks in East St. Louis.
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By mid-May, with the
Chicago Defender
's Great Northern Drive officially under way, more than two thousand blacks were arriving in Chicago every two days, according to a daily newspaper, and trainload after trainload of blacks arrived in other Northern cities as well, including East St. Louis. As the trains crossed into Illinois and other Northern states, the blacks would ceremoniously move from their segregated cars and spread throughout the train and fill it with the rich harmony of joyous spirituals of exodus:

 

Going into Canaan, the promise has come;
Testing time is over, the victory is won.
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Downtown East St. Louis, it seemed to many whites, was simply overrun with blacks, most of them young men. Some of them seemed to lose their Southern inhibitions about how to behave around white people, perhaps under the illusion that they had left racist attitudes behind. Southern Illinois whites, even those whose instincts were not implacably racist, were not used to being treated in a “familiar” manner by blacks. There were reports of black men rubbing suggestively against white women on the streetcars, or sitting so close to them they were “practically in their laps.” Finally, at an industrialists' meeting at the Aluminum Ore Company late in April or early in May, one large employer admitted, “Negroes are coming in here in such quantities that it is a menace to the community.” It was charged at the meeting that ten thousand blacks had moved to East St. Louis in the past year. (In fact, by the most reliable estimates, no more than five thousand blacks immigrated to East St. Louis between the beginning of 1916 and the late spring of 1917.)
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As for the crime rate, police arrest figures and most court records from that period in East St. Louis have long been missing, but there is little question that crime went up. Blacks—who were in the main much poorer than whites and shut out of most jobs—may well have contributed more than their statistical
share to the rising crime rate. But criminals and hustlers and flimflam men of all hues were coming to wide-open East St. Louis from all over the country.

A careful reading of the
East St. Louis Daily Journal
—both large and small stories, not just the front-page headlines—for the second half of 1916 and the first half of 1917 shows that whites were committing most of the crimes.
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The two murders that had led to Mollman's crackdown on “gun toters,” as the
Journal
put it, were the only reported killings of whites by blacks in a three-month period ending July 1. And some of the black crime reported so luridly in the
Journal
did not turn out to be black crime at all. For example, on May 25, the
Journal
announced at the top of the front page that a white policeman had been shot. The story was headlined:

 

“LEFTY” NEVILLE SHOT
BY NEGRO HIGHWAYMAN

 

According to the
Journal
, James “Lefty” Neville, a veteran uniformed policeman, was shot in the left arm while trying to arrest a black man who had been pulling stickups near Second Street and Missouri Avenue, a couple of blocks from the police station. Whites, according to the story, began muttering about lynching the robber, if they could find him. The Reverend George W. Allison and W. A. Miller of the YMCA looked into the matter and came to the conclusion that Neville had been shot by a white man, probably a pimp, in an argument over kickbacks from prostitution. In any event, Neville was soon promoted to chief of detectives, bad arm and all.
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By then the
Journal
had used the term “race riot” in a headline, over a May 24 report of blacks and whites brawling in a neighborhood southeast of downtown that blacks were moving into. Gangs of white and black teenagers were throwing rocks at each other until the police arrived and stopped the fight by shooting a young black man. He was in critical condition.

That same week, the umbrella Central Trades Union of East St. Louis, which represented about fifty separate labor organizations, sent out a news release informing the press of a resolution approved by the organization's directors at their May 23 meeting. The fateful resolution began, “Gentlemen. The immigration of the southern negro into our city for the past eight months has reached the point where drastic action must be taken if we intend to work and live peaceably in this community.” It continued in that vein, mentioning “the influx of
undesirable negroes” and alleging that ten thousand blacks had arrived in the last year or two. The
Journal
reported on the resolution, noting that the labor organization's directors planned on attending the next regular meeting of the city council, on the evening of Monday, May 28, to discuss the influx of blacks with council members and the mayor. The union also placed an advertisement for the meeting in the
Journal
. Hundreds of East St. Louisans who were not associated with the Central Trades Union decided they wanted to attend that city council meeting and confront the mayor about the masses of blacks moving in.
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On the day of the city council meeting, East St. Louis residents were greeted at lunchtime by the first edition of the
Journal
displaying at the top of the front page a story headlined:

 

POLICE WATCH MANY THREATENING NEGROES

 

Police had been kept busy over the weekend answering frequent calls to deal with crime in neighborhoods that blacks had recently moved into, the paper reported, and many blacks were found carrying revolvers. A white man from Detroit was shot in the leg and foot when he didn't respond quickly enough to a black holdup man, and “worse trouble,” the
Journal
reported, came from whites and blacks fighting at Tenth Street and Piggott Avenue southeast of downtown, where the arrival of police and the firing of a few shots “narrowly averted a riot.” Below that story, beneath a small one-column headline, was a brief report that the bodies of two black boys had been found in an East St. Louis canal. It was speculated that they had drowned while fishing.
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The evening of May 28 was pleasant and mild. By six thirty, the temperature was in the lower sixties, and East St. Louisans had already begun arriving downtown for the meeting. The most direct route from the main downtown streetcar stop to city hall went right by the Collinsville Avenue pawnshop with the guns in the window. The shop, which had a mostly black clientele, was closed, but the window was lit.

By seven P.M. the council chamber was packed to overflowing and the meeting was moved upstairs to the auditorium, which seated about twelve hundred. Just before the meeting began, a large group of women from the waitress and laundry workers union and the retail clerks union, dressed for a night on the dance floor, arrived with a flourish. They waved and swirled their long skirts as they walked into the crowded auditorium and were
cheered loudly. A labor leader explained later that the dramatic entrance was intended to make an impression on the mayor, putting a human face and figure on the dangers posed to pretty white women by the black immigrants from the cotton and cane fields of the Deep South.
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Outside, two white men, George Fisher and Arch Dodge, were heading up Main Street toward city hall when they ran into a couple of friends from the police department. One of the policemen warned the two not to go to the meeting. There was going to be trouble, he said, because a lot of men were going to the meeting just to stir up an attack on black people. The policemen did not seem inclined to intervene except to keep their friends away from city hall.
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By the time the meeting was called to order, all the seats were filled and dozens of men and women stood in the back or sat in the aisles. Mayor Mollman made a brief speech, warning against “hotheadedness” and announcing that the city council was prepared to stop the northward migration, although he was vague on exactly how that would be accomplished. He said he had recently spoken with his counterparts in large Southern cities, asking them to do what they could to stem the tide.

He stood down and the debate went back and forth, with all speakers agreeing that something must be done to prevent so many blacks from coming to East St. Louis. One repeated allegation was that much of the trouble was caused by a relatively few black holdup men who had influential lawyers and were able to get off scot-free with small fines and bribes paid to the corrupt justices of the peace. There were several reports of whites being held up twice or even three times by the same black man. People complained that black men, because they were willing to work for much less than the going wage, were stealing jobs that once had gone to white men, not just at the aluminum plant and the packing houses but all over town. Men who once were able to support their families “were now at the back door of the poorhouse,” one man said.
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Earl Jimmerson of the meat-cutters union cautioned against indiscriminate attacks on blacks. Several other labor leaders also warned against violence, and for a time, the voices of moderation seemed to prevail. Then a garrulous, jowly sixty-three-year-old lawyer named Alexander Flannigen rose to speak. He had an office right across the street from city hall, where he dabbled in both law and real estate, and had walked over early so he could get a place up near the front. No one had invited him, labor leaders insisted later,
but no one had invited most of the people in the room. Flannigen was a former city treasurer who, while in office, had made full use of his access to public funds. When he left office, the joke went, “The only thing left was a postage stamp. And that was because he didn't know it was there.” Flannigen didn't seem embarrassed by such reports; indeed, he regularly referred to city hall as “the steal mill.”
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