Never Been a Time (18 page)

“During these six or eight weeks of the strike,” the
Argus
opined, “the Negroes were getting a firmer hold on the industrial situation; and strikers
were getting weaker and hungrier each day… the Negro labor, honest and conscientious, was fast winning the hearts of the managers of the firm.”
⁵⁰

The
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
also called the events of May 28 and 29 a “race riot,” and its report led off with two blacks being shot and nine others severely beaten in the first hours of the riot. The
Post-Dispatch
noted that “five negroes had been arrested for carrying concealed weapons and one white man was arrested for throwing a brick.” The
Post-Dispatch
warned that further trouble could be expected since “the negroes, in anticipation of another attack were preparing to resist [and] it was expected that a large number of additional negroes will arrive on evening trains from the South.”
⁵¹

The predicted trainloads of blacks never showed up. It seems likely that blacks in the South read and heard about what had been going on in East St. Louis—word spread fast through the underground telegraph of black railroad porters—and decided to stay home or head somewhere else, thus taking some of the pressure off the city by temporarily lessening the illusion that blacks were arriving in East St. Louis by the trainloads. It would take several more weeks for racial anger in East St. Louis to build up to a second and much more devastating explosion.

The topic of Reverend George W. Allison's sermon at the First Baptist Church in East St. Louis for the first Sunday in June was “The Race Problem.”

“God has no pets,” Allison proclaimed in a plea for racial tolerance. But the tough, crusading preacher also suggested that the races, at least for the time being, should live and work and study and marry and worship apart. He intoned, “The black man never had a chance until he was set out on his own initiative. It was separate schools that produced Booker T. Washington … The attempt to equalize the races is a sin against both the black and white man.” The sermon, coming from a rare voice of moderation and tolerance in East St. Louis, suggests what small steps even the supposed racial liberals of the time were willing to take to gain racial peace.
¹

Meanwhile, East St. Louis labor leaders had sent a telegram to the Illinois Council of Defense, the state's civil defense overseer, arguing that the racial situation in East St. Louis threatened war industries and should be investigated. Two members of the council's labor committee and a staff counsel came to East St. Louis for hearings on June 7 and 8. They interviewed dozens of witnesses, including city officials, policemen, black leaders, white industrialists, and several unemployed black men who had recently come to East St. Louis because they had been told there were jobs to be had.
²

In its report, the committee attributed the riot on May 28 to “the excessive and abnormal number of negroes” in East St. Louis. “There was resentment that the colored people, having overcrowded their quarters, were spreading out into sections of the city regarded as exclusively the precincts of
the white people. The colored men, large numbers of whom had been induced there and who could find no jobs, in their desperate need were … threatening the existing standards of labor.”

The committee charged that there had been “an extensive campaign to induce negroes to come to East St. Louis … a campaign [that] required considerable financing,” including “extensive advertising” in Southern newspapers “setting forth the allurements in East St. Louis in the way of abundant work, short hours, and high wages, good conditions and treatment.” Labor agents, the committee reported, “were also shown to have been very active in the South,” sending black men North by rail. “At convenient points these agents would leave the car with the remark that they had telegrams to send, or would get lunch. They never came back, and the train pulled out without them. The negroes were thus left to shift for themselves upon their arrival at East St. Louis, to find work as they could and quarters as they might.”

Although the committee stopped just short of definitively stating who was behind this anonymous campaign to import blacks to East St. Louis, it observed that “during the previous year there had been industrial troubles in several of the plants of the city,” and took note of allegations by witnesses “that employers had brought about the extraordinary influx of colored men to have a surplus of labor and thus defeat the contentions of their employees.”
³

The attacks on blacks in the streets of East St. Louis that had intensified into a small riot on May 28 continued in June. Police stopped one such assault, let the whites go, and arrested three African Americans for carrying concealed weapons. An old black man was beaten almost to the point of death by a gang of young whites after he allegedly refused to give up his seat on a streetcar to a white woman. He staggered to a nearby firehouse, where police had to rescue him from a mob of several hundred whites. Black strikebreakers were beaten outside the aluminum plant so regularly that, toward the end of June, national guardsmen were ordered to escort black workers on the night shift back and forth between work and home.
⁴

Strife between labor and management intensified across the city. Both the streetcar workers and the retail workers went out on strike. But street crime was down, at least for a few weeks. With hundreds of troops in town and the police on alert and under orders to brook no nonsense, criminals,
black and white, were laying low. On June 15, the
Journal
gave big play to the story of a black robber who had held up a white man, noting that this was the first such occurrence in the two and a half weeks since the May riot. But rumors continued to spread through the white population that blacks were buying guns and were preparing to storm white neighborhoods and slaughter whites to exact revenge for the assaults of May 28.

Some blacks
were
buying guns, despite the mayor's ban on East St. Louis gun and pawnshops from selling weapons to African Americans. Policemen and national guardsmen stationed at the bridges from St. Louis would regularly stop blacks coming into East St. Louis and confiscate any weapons they found. Whites were waved on through, and a few very light-skinned blacks supplemented their income by buying several guns a week in St. Louis and passing for white as they toted them across the Free Bridge. Black funeral homes with hearses traveling between the two cities sometimes stashed a few guns in coffins. Still, despite a public statement by Mayor Mollman that “colored people … had made no individual retaliations to defend themselves,” the rumors of black aggression against whites persisted. Blacks tried to avoid giving the impression that they were plotting aggressive action. For example, since 1909 the local black chapter of the Odd Fellows lodge had held weekend parades in military formation on Bond Avenue, wearing lodge uniforms and carrying ceremonial swords, but without guns. The rumor spread that Dr. Leroy Bundy, who lived on Bond Avenue, was drilling the Odd Fellows for battle in the streets. After the May 28 riot, the parades ceased.
⁵

Still, Thomas G. Hunter, a black surgeon, recalled, “Things grew worse and worse. The colored people were greatly terrified. We sent committees to … the governor, to the mayor. Some of us went down to see the mayor, and the mayor's secretary, Mr. [Maurice] Ahearn, stopped us and asked us what we wanted.” Hunter told Ahearn that he and assistant county supervisor Dan White, a black man, recently had been stopped at the Free Bridge by soldiers armed with rifles and told to put their hands in the air. While the soldiers were searching them and poking through the tool box in Dr. Hunter's car, an automobile passed by carrying two large trunks. The car, driven by a white man, was waved through the check point.

“Why don't you search that?” Hunter had asked, lowering one hand to gesture at the passing automobile. “It looks more suspicious than I do.”

A soldier poked him with a rifle and snarled, “If you don't shut up your
beefing, I'll fill you full of lead.” Hunter thrust his hands high and kept his mouth shut.
⁶

Early in June, a committee headed by Bundy and Dr. Lyman B. Bluitt responded to telephone calls from the Central Trades Labor Union and met with the regional labor organization. The union leaders, including Earl Jimmerson of the meat cutters, wanted to talk about organizing blacks. A biracial committee was appointed to look into the matter, but nothing was done beyond that. Bundy and Bluitt also warned Mayor Mollman, whom they had supported for reelection, that eventually some black man would get mad enough to retaliate against white attackers, and perhaps trigger a riot, unless the police stopped standing by while whites assaulted blacks. The mayor said he was surprised to hear their concern—he thought relations between the races had improved considerably since the end of May. But he told Bundy and Bluitt that their complaints would be thoroughly studied. He called in police chief Ransom Payne, who furiously denied that his officers were practicing any favoritism and insisted the police were doing a fine job of enforcing the law with an even hand.
⁷

As spring crept toward summer, tension between the races in East St. Louis tightened even more, like a powerful spring under increasing pressure. At Fifteenth Street and Boismenue Avenue in Denverside, a neighborhood blacks had been moving into in recent years, three white national guardsmen in their summer dress khakis overpowered a city detective, stole his service revolver, and went on a rampage. They already were carrying Army 45s, and with their impressive arsenal they robbed three black men at gunpoint and wrecked a saloon in a black neighborhood after drinking a considerable amount of the whiskey on hand. Outside the saloon, they were subdued by police and national guardsmen before, as the
Journal
put it, “They started a race riot.” The three young men were said to be from wealthy Springfield, Illinois, families.
⁸

At the beginning of the last week in June, attorney Maurice V. Joyce introduced a resolution to the chamber of commerce urging companies to stop importing blacks to East St. Louis and calling on city officials to “employ every legitimate means to prevent the influx of negroes into East St. Louis, and thereby take every precaution against crime, riot and disorder.” The resolution was tabled.
⁹

As attacks on blacks increased, a committee of blacks headed by Dr. Leroy
Bundy went to the mayor again asking for help. Once again, the mayor tried to calm them, saying things were not as bad as they thought. On June 28, the aluminum workers' strike whimpered to an end. The number of pickets had dwindled, at times, to a handful. A union spokesman said the strike was being called off for “patriotic” reasons. Very few of the strikers were ever rehired.
¹⁰

Meanwhile, as the
Post-Dispatch's
relentless Paul Y. Anderson reported, East St. Louis had once again stopped enforcing Sunday closing laws as well as the ordinances against prostitution and gambling. After the Reverend George W. Allison, a source for Anderson's stories, complained to Mayor Mollman about growing lawlessness, the minister was summoned to a meeting with Mollman and political baron Locke Tarlton at city hall. Mollman shut the door to his office and the three men talked for three quarters of an hour. Allison said he felt that he had been betrayed after working hard to get Mollman elected, and, his anger building, mentioned by name a bar owner who was illegally open on Sunday, selling drinks and, it appeared, the services of prostitutes. Allison said he had confronted the man and told him he was going to report his activities to the mayor, and the man had laughed and said the mayor already knew all about it and had no intention of honoring his campaign promise to enforce Sunday closing laws.

Tarlton sighed deeply and said, “Reverend, the trouble about it is, the damn city is just like it has always been.” The mayor heaved himself out of his well-cushioned desk chair and said, “Locke, you don't mean that?”

Tarlton replied, “Yes, mayor, it is just like it has always been.”

“Why Locke,” said the mayor, “didn't I run those penitentiary birds out from the rear of the police station here?”

Tarlton laughed and said, “Yes, mayor, you ran them out of
here
, but they are still in town. Your old friends are all here, mayor, they are all here.”

And Mollman, his long, thin face and balding scalp turning red from barely stifled laughter, sat back down and said, “Well, I'll be damned if I don't believe I'll join the Third Artillery and go to France.” Tarlton and Mollman shared a long, hearty laugh.

Allison, a tough, righteous Texan who had seen a lot of sin in his life, ended the meeting by telling Tarlton he had five days to close down one particularly notorious “hotel” or Allison and his supporters would shut the place down themselves and nail the door shut so no business of any kind could be conducted there for a year. “If you don't clean this town and get rid of this
idle thug crowd you've got here,” he said, “you will have a riot here one of these days and that little thing you had in May will not be a patching.”
¹¹

As summer arrived, East St. Louisans stayed in the streets later and later. Even without daylight savings time, darkness didn't fall until about eight o'clock, and by then the temperature had usually gone down to the low eighties. Holdups increased, and so did assaults on blacks. But blacks in East St. Louis had not retaliated for the frequent attacks on them.

On Sunday, July 1, the temperature hit ninety-one degrees at ten in the morning, and hovered around ninety until late afternoon, typical of a summer day in East St. Louis. The air was blanketed with moisture, as usual. The coming together of the Mississippi and the Missouri, the two largest river systems in America, cranks up the humidity that hangs palpably in the miasmic summer air of St. Louis and East St. Louis.