Never Been a Time (17 page)

Flannigen told a few jokes, and he laughed as he told the crowd that his friends and neighbors had paid pretty good money for their houses, and they certainly didn't want any “colored” moving in next door. But, he said, they couldn't figure out any way to keep blacks from moving into their neighborhoods. He rambled on, remarking that these blacks never seemed to get completely moved in. A lot of their furniture remained in the front yard or maybe eventually made it as far as the porch. His florid face spread in a wide grin. The crowd “began getting itchy,” one man recalled.
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Then Flannigen said something serious. There are several versions of his exact words, but what he said in effect was that blacks couldn't move their furniture into the house they had just bought if they couldn't get to the front door. And then he said clearly, “As far as I know, there is no law against mob
violence.” Even if there were such a law, he said (as there assuredly was), the police could hardly arrest an entire mob. Much of the crowd rose to its feet in cheers. The mayor began pacing up and down the aisles, trying to calm people down, joined by some of the labor leaders. Slowly, most of the people in the auditorium quieted down and took their seats, waiting for the meeting to continue, but fifty or a hundred men and women stayed standing and kept loudly cheering Flannigen's speech. Then, as if on cue, they turned and pushed their way down the crowded aisles and stormed down the stairs and out the front door toward Collinsville Avenue.

Collinsville Avenue

Another crowd of men and women stood outside, waiting for the meeting to end. They had news. A block from city hall, a black holdup man had shot a white man, wounding him superficially, and had been arrested. By the time the report had been passed on to the newcomers and had made the rounds, the story was that the victim was dead. Just then, several policeman walked by with a young black man in handcuffs. The crowd surged toward them. Shouts rose from the mob. “Get a rope!” “Lynch him!” The mayor and several city officials and union leaders had come outside by then, and they tried to calm the mob down as the accused robber was led into the police station and put in a cell.
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Earl Jimmerson climbed onto the high steps of the police station next to city hall and shouted, “If there is any men in this crowd that carry union cards, if you think anything of that card, if you think anything of organized labor, for God's sake go home. Don't let the public press come out in big headlines in the morning and say this meeting was called by organized labor and caused a riot.”
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Half a block away, fifty or sixty men stood across the street from the pawnshop with the guns in the window on Collinsville Avenue, trying to work up the nerve to attack it in full view of the police station. “That's where they're getting those guns,” one man shouted. A few policemen and uniformed soldiers stood nearby, and the mob hesitated and lost the moment. But as more and more people left the meeting and came down the stairs to Main Street the angry crowd grew until, in less than an hour, it numbered about three hundred, mostly men. The rumors about blacks running amok had spread and been further amplified, and now it was said that white women had been attacked by blacks, and two white women and a young white girl had been shot.
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One common factor in virtually every race and ethnic riot are rumors of horrible acts on the part of the despised race. Often, the rumors involve sexual
atrocities. Another common factor is that the rioters generally go through a period of indecision, when the mob seems to be in motion but without focus, as if waiting for an event that will give direction to their actions, a spark to ignite an explosion.
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That cool May evening in East St. Louis, the white mob stood milling around in front of the police station, anger rising in a gathering storm, when a paddy wagon pulled up and police emerged with another young black man in handcuffs.

Someone shouted, “That nigger shot somebody.” The mob roared in fury, and the riot began. A gang of white men broke off from the mob and rushed down Collinsville Avenue, the main north-south thoroughfare in East St. Louis, and attacked black men and women. “Every time you would hear them hit a nigger or knock down a nigger, they would yell like a rabbit hound,” recalled Earl Jimmerson. The union leader grabbed people around him and tried to get them to go home before someone was badly hurt. “I talked to one fellow there,” he said, “and I said, ‘you ought not to be doing that' and he slapped me in the face.”
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Near the police station, someone yelled, “Let's go get those guns in that nigger pawnshop,” and a gang of men rushed across the street, intent on grabbing the pistols. By then, policemen were nowhere to be seen, and the handful of soldiers just stood and watched. But the pawnbroker, Frank Marks, appeared in the doorway with a shotgun held in one hand, the butt pushed back against his shoulder.

Marks had been in a bad accident and had been in a hospital in St. Louis with a cast on his arm when he read in the morning
Republic
about the meeting that night. “There's going to be trouble,” he said to a friend. He fretted until he couldn't stand it anymore, checked himself out of the hospital, called a cab, and went to his pawnshop. He could barely stand, but he held his ground and chased the mob away, and he stayed on guard until the riot was over.
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Philip Wolf, head of the aluminum workers union, was having a quick beer in a saloon across the street from city hall, hoping the trouble would die down, when he heard shouting and the pounding of feet just outside. He went to the door and saw a gang of men heading toward the South End. Another union man—John Simon, a veteran employee whose firing had helped provoke the aluminum strike—said to Wolf, “I sure hope none of our boys is in that gang.” The two men began walking south on Main, deciding they would grab anyone they knew and pull him out of the mob. But the gang broke up
into small bunches that swarmed out from the center of downtown in every direction, beating and kicking blacks until they lay bloody in the streets.

Most of the rioters were young men, but a girl of sixteen or seventeen wearing a boy's cap and a long spring coat was leading one gang. She would spot a black coming around a corner, and she would yell, “There's one. Let's go get him.” In the mob of whites that followed her were two young men in soldier uniforms—they were, it turned out, on leave before being shipped overseas and were just looking for thrills, beating up blacks. Another group of rioters grabbed a black man and laid him across a trolley track and began chanting for the driver to run the car over him. “Come on, come on, cut off his head. Cut off his feet.” The driver did not budge.
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Police arrested several blacks for carrying concealed weapons on the outskirts of the riot, but they did little or nothing to stop the rioters, who began setting fire to black homes and businesses. There was one notable exception to the laissez-faire attitude of the police. Two plainclothes detectives, Samuel Coppedge and Frank Wodley, drew their guns and stopped white rioters from burning down a row of houses in a black enclave at Third Street and Missouri Avenue.
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After seeing the chaos in the streets, Mayor Mollman ran back inside city hall and called Major Ralph W. Cavanaugh, who was in charge of the national guardsmen at National City and at the Aluminum Ore Company plant. Cavanaugh said there was nothing he could do without authority from above. So Mollman called Illinois National Guard headquarters in Springfield, and was bounced from office to office, trying to find someone who could order two hundred troops a mile away to come rescue the city and its black citizens.
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Southeast of downtown, Dr. Lyman Bluitt, a black physician, got a call about nine P.M. to go down to the police station and care for people who had been injured. He was headed north on Tenth Street when he was met by a crowd of black people trotting south. “Don't go that way,” they warned. “There's trouble that way.” He cut over to Seventh Street, where he was stopped by another group of a dozen blacks. “Don't go that way. They're pulling men off the street and they'll tear you to pieces.” So he made a U-turn and drove back to his office and called the police station. He told the desk sergeant what had happened, and said, “maybe I better not come down there.” The sergeant allowed as how that might be best. “We'll send the ambulance for you.”

Bluitt had barely hung up the phone when it rang again. The sergeant told him not to wait for the ambulance but to go to a small hospital well east of downtown. Bluitt drove there, and treated two black men who had been beaten. Before he was through, another dozen or more injured black men were brought in. He worked through the night and well into the next morning as new patients kept coming in every few minutes until about midnight, when admissions slowed. Two of the men he treated were shot, but most of the patients had head wounds from being beaten and kicked, and broken arms or legs.
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The mob downtown apparently wearied of bloodshed by midnight, and perhaps ran out of easily caught victims. “Come on fellows, let's go home,” a leader of the riot shouted. “Tomorrow we'll be ready for them. Tomorrow we'll have guns. We'll burn them out. We'll run them out of town.” Most of the men left. A few stragglers went to the downtown railroad station looking for more trouble. A trainload of Southern blacks was rumored to be scheduled to arrive any time. The rumor was false. Blacks were leaving town, not coming into it. Hundreds of black men, women, and children were heading through downtown toward the Free Bridge carrying bundles or suitcases. The whites let them pass and cheered them on their way.

By the next morning, tempers had cooled. Mollman called in the entire police force of about seventy men, and announced that groups of men larger than five would be thrown in jail. Saloons, theaters, and schools were closed, and Mollman said anyone who sold guns to blacks in East St. Louis would be arrested. After a report appeared in the afternoon
Post-Dispatch
that pawnshops in the St. Louis black neighborhood known as the Chestnut Valley were doing a brisk business in firearms, Mollman called the mayor of St. Louis and asked that the sale of firearms to blacks be stopped there, too. That was done. East St. Louis detectives were stationed at the Illinois approach to bridges and ordered to search all blacks coming in and confiscate weapons. Police arrested dozens of black men carrying guns. As they were brought into the police station, the handcuffed men were jeered and threatened by crowds of whites milling around in front of the police station.
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That morning, Mollman was finally able to reach Governor Frank Lowden, who agreed to call out the Illinois National Guard. Lowden also freed Major Cavanaugh to send his men into the central city, if needed. National guardsmen began arriving that afternoon. By then, the riot had sputtered back
to life. Shacks were burning in black neighborhoods, and whites were throwing bricks and paving stones through windows in black neighborhoods and at blacks in the streets. Black and white gangs were taking shots at one another just north of downtown. But, as the number of guardsmen grew to a couple of hundred, armed platoons were sent to trouble spots and ordered to disperse crowds, show no racial favoritism, and be ready to fire their rifles or use their unsheathed bayonets to protect life or property. As midnight approached on May 29, soldiers were rushed by truck out to the Aluminum Ore Company, where they broke up a workers' demonstration, and the riot fizzled out. By the next day, several hundred Illinois national guardsmen under the control of Colonel E. P. Clayton had the situation in hand. Major Cavanaugh and his troops remained camped on the edge of town, guarding against saboteurs.

No one was killed in the May riot. A number of people were arrested, most of them black. The
Journal
railed against a “foreign and lawless negro element” in a front-page editorial that continued:

The lamentable transpiracies here within the past 24 hours are being attributed to an antagonism of the white against the negroes, culminating in a race riot. This is not the real case. The trouble arose over the large influx here of penal and shiftless negroes from the south who upon arriving here and finding no employment are thrown about the streets in idleness to shift for themselves. Amongst them are many lawless and violent characters who have resorted to assault upon white people … There is none of this feeling against the older, law-abiding and long resident portion of our negro population who are in no sense responsible for the criminality of the late negro emigration here and, hence, the trouble is not really a race one.

The black-owned
St. Louis Argus
, on other hand, knew race trouble when it saw it, and knew whom to blame. UNION LEADERS START RACE RIOTS, the
Argus
proclaimed in a front-page banner headline on June 1, and the story traced the trouble back to when the aluminum workers struck and “were displaced by Negroes.”