Never Been a Time (28 page)

In recording this, I do not forget that a policeman—by all accounts, a fine and estimable policeman—was killed by negroes the night before. I have not forgotten it in writing about the acts of the men in the street. Whether this crime excuses or palliates a massacre, which probably included none of the offenders, is something I will leave to apologists for last evening's occurrence, if there are any such, to explain.

The story was more than three thousand words long, exceptional for daily news reportage at any newspaper. O. K. Bovard, the tough but soft-spoken managing editor of the
Post-Dispatch
, so stressed brevity in news stories that he had a printed motto hanging on the walls of the city room: TERSENESS. ACCURACY. TERSENESS. But he trusted and respected Hurd. Bovard's first important act after becoming a top editor at the paper in 1900 had been to hire the reporter away from the
St. Louis Star
. Given the importance of the terrible events on the other side of the river, he let Hurd write the story the way he wanted to, even giving him permission to put his account in the first person, which Bovard
normally would have considered a great sin against journalistic standards of integrity and objectivity. “Reporters are not news” was a byword at Bovard's paper. But putting the story in the first person helped humanize the account, and endowed it with a deep and palpable sense of righteous rage at the almost unbelievable acts of senseless cruelty and injustice men are capable of.
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The headline read:

 

POST-DISPATCH MAN, AN EYEWITNESS, DESCRIBES
MASSACRE OF NEGROES

 

Carlos Hurd, before he left the office, also would have written the bird line—a short phrase or quip accompanying the drawing of the
Post-Dispatch
mascot, the Weatherbird. Half bird, half man, dressed like a dandy and always in the latest fashions, the pop-eyed bird was drawn anew every day by staff artist Carlisle Martin to reflect the main news of the day. The bird and his comment on the news accompanied the front-page weather forecast. Hurd had a poetic touch, and almost always it was he who wrote the bird lines, and earned a dollar for each one, enough to buy a round or two for his colleagues at one of the newspaper bars nearby.

When Hurd was finished, since his wife was out of town on vacation, he went to the Maryland Hotel near the paper and collapsed into bed. He slept deeply for five hours, and then his eyes popped open. It was a little after seven. There was no chance he would be able to go back to sleep.
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On the front page of the July 3
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, a grim Weather-bird in a seasonally appropriate polka dot shirt frowned beneath the prediction that the weather was going to be partly cloudy and warm for the Fourth of July. Carlisle Martin's Weatherbird looked simultaneously enraged and deeply sad. In the set of the Weatherbird's jaw and the sternness of his visage, he called to mind photographs of the sixteenth president of the United States in moments of angry despair over a war he hated but that he had thrown the nation's young men into, a war over America's treatment of blacks. The Weatherbird was perched next to Hurd's extraordinary three-thousand-word moral diatribe, and Hurd's bird line read:

 

AND LINCOLN CAME FROM ILLINOIS

Adjutant General Frank S. Dickson, the veteran commander of the Illinois National Guard, reached East St. Louis shortly after midnight on July 3. In full uniform, he went straight to city hall through crowds milling around almost aimlessly. He heard occasional shouts, but no shots, and the crowds, he was told, were much smaller than they had been at the height of the riot. There was a sense of lassitude, even of exhaustion, among those who remained. But Dickson, who had commanded troops in riots before, knew the violence could erupt again, particularly if control of the streets was not clamped down by uniformed men carrying guns, men who were willing—reluctant but willing—to shoot rioters.

At city hall, after threading his way down corridors packed with hundreds of black refugees lying exhausted on the floor or lined up for one of the few toilets in the building, Dickson discovered that Mayor Mollman had gone home to bed. He strode into the mayor's empty office, picked up the telephone, and called him. When Mollman had cleared the sleep from his voice, he told the general, with great relief, “I'm very glad you are here. Take charge of the situation and restore order in East St. Louis.” The mayor said he would “be down in the morning,” hung up, and went back to bed.
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Dickson took a quick automobile tour of the devastated riot area. Fires still smoldered in the remains of gutted buildings across fifteen or twenty square blocks of downtown East St. Louis. Bodies lay in ditches and deep gutters and shadowed alleys, in the high weeds of vacant lots, and in the stagnant water of Cahokia Creek. And the smell of rotting and burned flesh was
unmistakable in the acrid smoke that still hung stubbornly over the bottomlands of East St. Louis.

Adjutant General Frank S. Dickson

The general found it worrisome that the fires and mayhem had been spread over such a wide area, an area that was almost impossible to patrol effectively with a few hundred troops. At that point, he had about seventeen officers and two hundred seventy men under his command. However, troops were arriving at the East St. Louis railroad station every hour or two. By sunup, which officially came at four forty A.M., his troops would number about five hundred, although most of them were green as new hay.
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Dozens of somewhat more experienced soldiers, federalized members of the Illinois National Guard who had come in response to the May riot, were still camped just outside of town, on a field near the slaughterhouse village of National City, with vague orders to “protect assets vital to national security in a time of war.” They had never joined the main body of militia under the command of Tripp, Clayton, and now Dickson. Instead, they continued to guard
bridges and keep rioters away from industrial plants. Declaring martial law might have brought them into the fold, but Governor Frank Lowden could never quite bring himself to do that, in part perhaps because the two men supposedly in charge at the height of the riot—the mayor and Colonel Tripp—had so vehemently disagreed on whether it was necessary. Dickson, however, inspired confidence that he could control the situation without martial law.

A former Illinois congressman, Dickson had been a professional soldier for twenty-one years, fighting in the Spanish American War as an enlisted man and working his way up to the top ranks. Dickson had been in command in the brutal riot a few years earlier in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, and in two smaller flare-ups in the deeply Southern river town of Cairo at the tip of Illinois. Unfortunately, when the riot broke out in East St. Louis, he had been on a train returning to Springfield from official business in Washington.

“In all riot situations, there are one or more particular danger points,” Dickson would explain later. “In order to handle more effectively a mob situation, your troops should be unified as much as possible.” Soldiers should never be scattered throughout a riot area, he said, but should be concentrated at a few trouble spots. And if there was a shortage of troops, sometimes the best thing was to keep them all together and attack the riot at its core.

“In my experience,” Dickson said, “in almost all activities the difficulty is with officers and not with individual men.” The average soldier, he believed, would carry out his orders “if he has clearly in his mind exactly what the instructions are. Much of the haziness comes from haziness on the part of the officers.”

After tours of East St. Louis, Dickson met at city hall with top subordinates and went over a detailed map of downtown. He showed the officers where he wanted troops to be concentrated, and told them to begin by forming a “flying squad” of a dozen or so trusted men to go immediately up to Broadway and Collinsville and disperse the crowds Dickson had seen there. The general ordered that the remainder of the troops be broken up into five or six groups, and sent to other points where people were congregated and fires still burned.

“No one man starts a riot,” Dickson stressed. “It is only when two or three or four get together that things begin … to snowball.” Soldiers were to be ordered to keep their rifles loaded and their bayonets bared.

As the light of the rising sun came dimly through the lingering smoke and the haze of morning, black policeman Otto Nelson and his wife cautiously
rose from their hiding place in the tall weeds near Broadway. Well over two hundred buildings—homes, stores, cafés, barber shops, schools—had been destroyed. Most of them were in black neighborhoods downtown and in the South End, but rioters also attacked and looted areas where many whites lived. The Nelsons' old tenement flat was smoldering rubble now. They stretched aching muscles and brushed themselves off and looked around at a scene that, for several blocks in several directions, looked like the aftermath of house-to-house fighting in the Great War. The Nelsons didn't see any white people around, and no soldiers, and so they began walking slowly to the east, away from downtown East St. Louis. They hoped to pick up a ride a few blocks along at the home of a friend with an automobile, but when they got there the car was gone, and so was the house. Soon they found themselves part of a stream of black refugees leaving East St. Louis. The Nelsons walked nine miles that day and did not return to East St. Louis for two weeks.
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The last lethal outburst of the East St. Louis riot took place in broad daylight on the morning of July 3 in a rough and remote part of town that had once been part of Bloody Island and was still called the Island.

Black workmen from a railroad freight house near the Mississippi levee regularly gathered in the rear of a saloon to drink beer for breakfast. About seven thirty on the morning of July 3, several men were gathered in the usual spot. They felt safe, half a mile or more from the fringes of the riot, which seemed in any event to be over. They were boisterous, as usual. Someone reported to police that blacks were creating a disturbance in the area, and that the saloon was open contrary to the mayor's order of the previous day. Three policemen went down to check the report out, two patrolmen and a sergeant named Cornelius Meehan. They were accompanied by seven or eight national guardsmen. When the black men saw the approaching soldiers and police they jumped up from their stools and wooden boxes and started to run away. Meehan, according to two of the soldiers, ordered the soldiers to fire.

The soldiers fired, killing one of the workmen, wounding another, and blowing off at the elbow the right arm of a black girl named Mineola Magee who was just emerging from an outhouse. A black porter heard the shots, ran inside the saloon, and tried to hide in the walk-in icebox, but a soldier tracked him down, dragged him out, and beat him badly.

Paul Y. Anderson remarked of the killing of the unarmed workman,
who was shot in the back, “It was entirely murder.” Meehan, who was later indicted for murder, denied that he had given any orders at all.
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Most city police, including several black policemen, reported to duty at their usual times on Monday, July 3. Two teams of detectives—one white, one black—were sent on to the area of Tenth and Bond, where Coppedge and Wodley had been shot fatally, to look for evidence and talk to potential witnesses. The white policemen, who had been told to look for evidence while the black policemen interviewed black residents, found several used shotgun shells mingled with a considerable amount of trash in the gutter. The waxed paper shells were slit by a sharp blade—apparently altered to deliver a more deadly blow.

Meanwhile, a black policeman, John Eubanks, discovered that no blacks remained near Tenth and Bond. Walking farther afield, he finally found a man willing to talk if his name was never revealed. Eubanks promised to keep his identity secret, and subsequently refused to reveal the name or the race of his informant, even under oath.

To the policeman's surprise and sad dismay, the informant told Eubanks that a young man named Nathaniel Peebles had been in the crowd of shooters on July 2. Eubanks had known Nathaniel Peebles “since he was a boy in knee pants,” he said later, and had never known him to make trouble. Eu-banks and another black policeman went to the young man's house and searched it. They found a shotgun and a half-empty box of shells. The shells were identical in make and gauge to the shells found at Tenth and Bond, and the sides had been slit to deliver a more deadly blow. Eubanks arrested Peebles. Investigations by Eubanks and other black policemen led to the arrest of several other young black men, including George Roberts, whom Eubanks had also known for most of the boy's life. “I never knew him to commit a crime of any kind before,” Eubanks said later. “That boy worked continuously. I never knew him to loaf a week in years.” Neither Peebles nor Roberts had criminal records. Eventually twenty-one blacks were indicted for murder in the deaths of the policemen, many of them young men with no criminal records. Some of the indictments were later dropped.
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