Never Been a Time (20 page)

Albertson's call came into the police station at about twelve twenty-five A.M. He reported to Con Hickey that Coppedge was almost certainly dead, and Wodley was gut-shot and dying. And he said a mob of black men, “armed with everything in the way of portable firearms,” was heading for downtown. The general feeling around the police station, Boylan recalled, was that the mob had already killed a couple of policemen, and they were heading for the station to kill some more. Instead of rushing out to confront the mob, the handful of police on duty at that hour on a Monday morning stayed at the station to protect it and the adjoining city hall. Hickey called Mayor Fred Mollman, who was already awake. A machinist named Fred Peleate had called him about twelve thirty to report that a policeman had been shot on Bond Avenue near his house. The mayor got dressed and headed downtown.
²⁶

Meanwhile, on Missouri Avenue about a block from the police station, at the YMCA, director W. A. Miller was awakened by the sound of a car skidding to a stop in front of the Commercial Hotel across the street. The hotel, saloon, brothel, and boardinghouse for hoodlums was managed for New York absentee landlords by political moguls Thomas Canavan and Locke Tarlton, and its denizens enjoyed a considerable amount of official protection.

Miller got up and went to the window in time to see four white men get out of the car. Two of them stood on the street, pacing back and forth, apparently looking for someone. One of them was walking strangely, as if he had a hurt leg. The other two ran quickly into the hotel. In a moment, another car drove up, with bullet holes in the radiator and the rear. The driver and passengers, Miller recalled later, “looked like a bunch of outlaws. I gathered [from their conversation] that they had been driving through that section of town where the policeman had been shot, and they were fired on by Negroes.”
²⁷

Mayor Mollman arrived at the police station between one and one thirty A.M. Boylan was standing out front, between the police station and the downtown fire station, nervously scanning Main Street for the black mob he had heard
was coming. Mollman got out of his car and walked up. He said, “Looks awful bad, don't it?”

“Yes, it does,” said Boylan.

“Do you think we're going to have trouble?”

“Yes, but you better talk to Roy. Albertson was in the machine and got first-hand information and he can tell you better than I can, but it looks bad to me.”
²⁸

By then, Albertson had arrived back at the police station, and he joined Mollman and Boylan on the sidewalk. He gave the mayor a quick summary of what he had seen and said, “As soon as these morning papers get on the streets in East St. Louis you're going to have trouble. As quick as people find Coppedge has been killed and Wodley is dying … there's going to be trouble around here. You had better get the troops. You had 600 or 700 soldiers down here on May 28 for that riot. It will take double that number to even try to handle what is going to turn loose today.”

Albertson may have been trying to goad the mayor into saying something interesting, something quotable. The reporter had a two A.M. deadline to get his stories into the
St. Louis Republic
, a morning paper that was due to hit the streets by five A.M. But Mollman did not say a word. Albertson ran inside the police station and called the
Republic
, dictating his first-person account to a rewrite man. It would, of course, be the main front-page turn story that morning.
²⁹

Boylan had a similar deadline for the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
, and his main morning competitor knew a lot more about what had just happened than Boylan did, so he tried another tack. “All right, Mr. Mayor,” he said, “come on over to my office where you can be quiet and we'll work the telephones.” That way he could listen to the mayor's calls.

“Well,” Mollman replied, after a moment of thought, “I might as well go to my own office.” Boylan nodded. The mayor left to make some calls. Mollman tried several numbers in Springfield and got no answer before he reached Dick Shinn, an assistant to the adjutant general of the Illinois National Guard. Shinn had been in East St. Louis during the May riot, and he had kept in touch with the situation, although he had been assured by Mayor Mollman that things had settled down. Shinn began calling National Guard officers in towns all over southern Illinois, telling them to assemble troops and head for East St. Louis. By then, off-duty policemen had been called in,
and there were about a dozen uniformed patrolmen and several plainclothes detectives—all white—waiting inside the station for police chief Ransom Payne to tell them what to do. More were on the way.

A call came in that a mob of whites had assembled in front of a chili parlor a block or so away, on Collinsville Avenue. Some of the men had been drinking, working up the nerve to storm a nearby building and wreck the dental office of Dr. Leroy Bundy. There was a light on in the window of what they thought was his office, and finally the mob surged across the street, led by a couple of army enlistees who were waiting to be sent to basic training. One of them had a rifle, and he led the crowd up to the second floor and smashed the butt through the opaque glass door to Bundy's office. There was no one there, but an electric fan was running and a light was on, so they decided the dentist must be nearby and began searching the building. They found no one. A few policemen walked over and broke up the crowd, but some of the men were reluctant to go home. So a small gang milled around in front of the police station for hours, waiting for something to happen.
³⁰

At about two in the morning, a neighbor with a telephone knocked on the door of John Eubanks, a black policeman who lived on St. Louis Avenue just north of downtown East St. Louis. She told Eubanks that a policeman had called and asked that he come to the station at once. The woman was unclear about what the trouble was. Eubanks quickly dressed and headed on foot for the police station, just a few minutes away. When he got there and saw a surly crowd of whites milling around in front of the station, he pulled out his badge and pushed his way through, ignoring the curses and threats and racial epithets.

There were about seventy policemen on the East St. Louis force, six of them black. The blacks all worked in plainclothes, perhaps on the theory that a black man in a uniform would offend or outrage the white majority. Inside the station, Eubanks noticed that most of the white policemen were there, but none of the other blacks. A lieutenant told him, with great agitation, “John, Coppedge was killed a short time ago, Sergeant Coppedge. Down in the South End, at Eleventh and Bond.” Eubanks was shocked and saddened. Coppedge was married with a couple of children, one of them now a young soldier training in Florida to fight in the Great War.

“How did it happen?” asked Eubanks.

“He was killed by an armed crowd of Negroes,” was the reply.

“Well, we better get on down in there, hadn't we?” said Eubanks.

“No, no,” said the lieutenant. “Wait until your boss comes in. I have sent a machine [an automobile] out for the chief of detectives, and he will be here in a few minutes.” Chief of police Ransom Payne was there, too, but he said nothing to Eubanks.

Chief of detectives Anthony Stocker arrived a few minutes later. Eu-banks went up to him but was waved away, and Stocker and Payne went into the chief's office. The two men spoke heatedly about something, and Eu-banks sensed through the office window that he was among the topics of conversation. At one point, the mayor walked in and joined the discussion. Finally, the chief came out of his office.

“What are we going to do?” Eubanks asked impatiently.

Chief Payne spoke very carefully, watching for Eubanks's reaction. “Owing to the circumstances,” he said, “it is not safe to attempt to go down in there now with the little handful of men we have. It seems there is a very large body of Negroes armed in there, and it isn't safe for us to go in.” And that, it seemed, was that. Eubanks was dismayed, but he stopped himself from asking why they had called him in the first place. He walked back home to try and catch a few hours of sleep. He figured he would be busy later that day.
³¹

At about three in the morning, in Springfield, Illinois, Dick Shinn of the Illinois adjutant general's office phoned National Guard colonel Stephen Orville Tripp. He asked Tripp to come over to his office immediately. Tripp put on a summer suit rather than his colonel's uniform and hurried to the adjutant general's office. Tripp was the assistant quartermaster general for the Illinois National Guard, a slight man of late middle age who had been a deputy United States marshal, a policeman, and a deputy sheriff—as well as a lumberyard foreman. One man in the state capital who had seen him in action said sarcastically, “Tripp is an excellent man as an office clerk.”
³²

Shinn told him that a policeman was dead in East St. Louis and the situation had the makings of a riot. Several National Guard units had been contacted and would be arriving in the city in a few hours. Tripp would be in command of them. Less than two hours later—still in his business suit and carrying only a briefcase—Tripp was on the train to East St. Louis with orders
to meet with the mayor and cooperate with him “in the matter of enforcing the law.”
³³

About four thirty A.M., Earl Jimmerson, the East St. Louis labor leader who was also a member of the county board of supervisors, was awakened by a phone call. It was a white woman he knew in the South End, and she told Jimmerson that Coppedge was dead. Coppedge had been a friend, and Jimmerson was stunned. He went downstairs and opened the front door and was a little surprised to see that the
St. Louis Republic
had already been delivered.
³⁴
It was as if it had been rushed into print, and he would later realize that the paper's error-ridden stories reflected that haste. He picked up the paper, went back inside, and turned on a lamp. The story was spread across the front page:

 

POLICEMAN KILLED, 5 SHOT IN E. ST. LOUIS RIOT

 

NEGROES, CALLED OUT BY RINGING OF CHURCH BELL, FIRE WHEN POLICE APPEAR

 

OUTBREAK FOLLOWS BEATING OF WATCHMAN BY BLACK SATURDAY NIGHT

 

Roy Albertson's first-person account of the fatal shooting of Coppedge reported that the “pre-arranged signal” for the armed blacks to gather was the ringing of a church bell at an African American Methodist Church at Sixteenth and Boismenue Avenue, deep in the South End and six blocks south of Bond Avenue. There was no mention of a carload of whites, much less two carloads, speeding through black neighborhoods firing out the windows. The story said, “What caused this latest break on the part of the blacks cannot be told now. There was no trouble of a serious nature in the black belt today. The only trouble came early Saturday night, when a railroad watchman was man-handled by a negro, who escaped.”

At the top of the story, in bold type, was a list of five men wounded the night before. Among the wounded, identified as a patrolman, was a man named Gus Masserang. The story said Masserang was shot in the leg, which
was true—he was hit many times in the legs, the back, and the neck with shotgun pellets—although the wounds were superficial. However, he was not a policeman but a petty crook who was known to hang out at the Commercial Hotel in downtown East St. Louis.

There were numerous other mistakes in the story, many of them tending to cast a favorable light on the police, who were credited with a whirlwind of activity in the South End when in reality they had stayed close to the station after the shootings of Coppedge and Wodley.
³⁵

Although Albertson's story reported that Coppedge had identified himself and his companions as police officers, the
St. Louis Argus
—after interviews with African Americans in the South End following the riot—contended that there had been no exchange of words at all before the shooting. The black weekly reported that the policemen in the unmarked police car were “mistaken for rioters” making another attack on the neighborhood, and “the Negroes immediately fired upon” the black Ford, “thinking this was another machine with lawless occupants whose purpose was to repeat the act of the preceding one.”
³⁶

On the morning of July 2, a black Model T Ford shot full of holes sat next to the Commercial Hotel. Very few East St. Louisans took notice of that particular machine. Most of the interest focused on another black Model T Ford riddled with bullet holes, all four of its tires flat and shredded, that was parked a block or so away, across the street from the police station.

When Paul Y. Anderson of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
arrived in downtown East St. Louis at eight A.M. July 2, seventy-five or a hundred white men were standing on the street and sidewalks in front of city hall and the police station, loudly cursing blacks and vowing revenge for the attack on the police. Their attention was focused on the black Model T Ford with flat tires and smashed headlights that sat across Main Street from the station. Anderson pushed through the mob to get a closer look. Blood was splashed across the front seat and bullets had punched holes all along the body of the car.
¹

Anderson, who was twenty-four, had been assigned to the East St. Louis beat about three years before. He moved to the small city to get to know it better, and the corruption he discovered astounded and infuriated him. A superb and tenacious reporter, the feisty son of a tough Tennessee marble quarryman, Anderson was not afraid to write about what he knew, nor, like some of his older colleagues, had he surrendered to the fatalistic view that nothing he wrote would make a bit of difference. Banned from the city hall-police station complex on Main Street because of his muckraking stories, Anderson now worked out of the
Post-Dispatch
offices in a building nearby. But he was not afraid to walk into city hall or the police station and pin down a public servant until someone made him leave. He was stubborn and bold, but not a fool. In the spring of 1917, after persistent threats on his life, he moved back to St. Louis. He continued to cover East St. Louis.