Never Been a Time (35 page)

The committee specifically rebuked:

Mayor Fred Mollman, “personally honest, maybe, but so weak, so feeble and so easily influenced that the conspirators were able to dictate his policies, and in the shadow of his stupidity loot the municipality.”

Political boss-slum landlord Locke Tarlton, who controlled the mayor and whose “cunning mind … helped develop the schemes by which he and his associates were enriched” through a crooked partnership with the State Bank of Illinois, which helped him skim thousands of dollars a year from the levee board.

Tom Canavan, superintendent of public improvements, Tarlton's partner: “Their minds met in countless devious plans for personal gain and political advantage.”

Alexander Flannigen, “an attorney of some ability and no character [whose] speech to an excited crowd of workingmen … the night of May 28 practically advised them to kill and burn the houses of the Negroes… Flannigen has long been a menace to decency and order in East St. Louis.”

State's Attorney Hubert Schaumleffel, who “held in his hand the moral destiny of this city” but was “devoid of character … the boon companion of the low and the dissolute; the ready servant of scheming politicians; at heart, a sympathizer with criminals whom he should have prosecuted relentlessly … His love for liquor seems to have stripped him of all moral courage and manhood, and left him naked and unashamed.”

Colonel S. O. Tripp, a “hopeless incompetent”: “Responsibility for much that was done and left undone must rest on him … He was a hindrance instead of a help to the troops… He was ignorant of his duties, blind to his responsibilities, and deaf to every intelligent appeal that was made to him.”

The “great majority” of the police, who turned hundreds of rioters loose without bond and did nothing to stop savage attacks on blacks. “The police,” the committee charged, “shot into a crowd of Negroes who were huddled together [in a] particularly cowardly exhibition of savagery” and destroyed the cameras and film of newspaper photographers, threatening them with arrest
“if any attempt was made to photograph the rioters who were making the streets run red with innocent blood.”

A few came in for praise, including Lieutenant Colonel E. P. Clayton, for “his promptness and determination” in stopping the mob from committing “many more atrocities”; Paul Anderson, for reporting “what he saw without fear of consequences” and rendering “an invaluable public service by his exposures,” despite running “a daily risk of assassination,” and the Reverend George W. Allison “for “fighting with all his splendid power the organized forces of evil” despite “conspiracies against his character and threats against his life.”

But in the main the report was a shattering condemnation of greedy capitalists, crooked politicians and judges, dishonest and uncaring policemen, and the vicious criminals, black and white, they turned loose on the citizens of East St. Louis.
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In mid-October, Dr. Leroy N. Bundy was extradited from Ohio, brought to the St. Clair County jail in Belleville, and charged with inciting to riot. Dr. Bundy was in his mid-thirties, a handsome, charismatic, ambitious man who had grown up in Cleveland, where his father was a prominent minister and a trustee of Wilberforce University. A 1903 graduate of Case Western Reserve dental school, Bundy had lived in Detroit and Chicago before coming to East St. Louis about 1909. He and his wife, Vella, had no biological children but had adopted a small boy from Africa. In addition to practicing dentistry, he was an entrepreneur, setting up a service station, a garage, and a small car agency. He was also a skilled politician, serving a term on the St. Clair County Board of Supervisors. White politicians considered him to be the key to the black vote in East St. Louis, although many whites found Bundy to be too aggressive and outspoken. The
Post-Dispatch
remarked, “He was known as a vigorous advocate of ‘equal rights' and this had brought him into conflict with white people more than once.”
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After six weeks in jail, Bundy gave a sworn statement to Illinois attorney general Edward Brundage alleging massive fraud in the East St. Louis mayoralty elections of 1915 and 1917, won by Fred Mollman, and a levee district election in 1916 in which Locke Tarlton was reelected district president. Bundy implicated himself in the fraud, along with Mollman, Tarlton, Canavan,
and numerous other political figures, including a few Republicans among the many Democrats, telling the attorney general that he and other “pay off men” had been given thousands of dollars to buy black votes at between $1 and $5 a head. In response to the charges, both federal and state authorities announced they would launch major investigations into vote fraud in East St. Louis, but the investigations never materialized—perhaps because Bundy had cast such a wide net, naming prominent members of both major political parties, including St. Clair County's Republican state's attorney Hubert Schaumleffel.
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Mayor Mollman, whom Bundy had said was not “the real mayor” but a figurehead for Tarlton and Canavan, called Bundy's charges “a malicious lie.” Mollman also said, probably accurately, that the Republican Bundy was trying to influence the Republican attorney general to drop or lessen the murder charge against him. If so, Bundy failed, and at the same time he alienated his most powerful supporters.

In the aftermath of the conviction in early October of ten black men for the murder of Coppedge, men whose defense had been supported in part by the St. Louis branch of the NAACP, the association's national office arranged for prominent lawyers, white and black, to work in Bundy's defense, including Charles Nagel, former secretary of commerce and labor in the Taft administration. Bundy quickly became a cause célèbre among blacks and white liberals. One black newspaper called his case “not just the trial of an individual” but “the trial of the Race.” W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “Here we understood was a successful professional man, a leader of his local group in East St. Louis, who, when riot was threatened, advised the colored people to arm themselves and … because of this he was arrested, thrown into jail and accused of murder and inciting to riot. This seemed to us an ideal case. We were determined to leave no stone unturned to secure vindication for Dr. Bundy and, with this, the great and sacred right of self-defense for American Negroes in the face of the mob.”
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But after Bundy confessed that he had been the spigot through which thousands of dollars in election bribes had flowed to black voters, the “ideal case” seemed less so to the NAACP. Du Bois wrote:

It was an outrageous action and it put his attorneys and especially the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
in a most difficult position … We were making a hero of Bundy. We were holding him up as a brave and persecuted man, who in the midst of crime and lawlessness, had told the people to arm in self defense. In the midst of all this Mr. Bundy comes out and confesses that he is hand and glove with the men and is part of the system which made East St. Louis a city of corruption and made it possible for such a horrible riot to go on without interference by the authorities.

In April of 1918, with the matter still up in the air, the St. Louis branch of the NAACP reported that Bundy was out on bond and wanted to go on a lecture tour and raise $50,000 for himself in addition to the money the NAACP was supplying. Bundy, the branch reported, was “intolerant of the financial plan of this branch, which was devised to forestall money scandals.” Bundy also refused to go back to work and, the St. Louis branch charged, wanted the NAACP to support him and his wife and pay $2,000 in back bills. The branch recommended dropping support of Bundy. Three months later, in an angry meeting in New York with the directors of the NAACP, Bundy refused to agree to any financial accounting of the money he was receiving from the NAACP, or from any other source. Afterward, the NAACP announced it was “no longer connected in any way with the further defense of Dr. Leroy N. Bundy.” The
Chicago Defender
and other black papers were sharply critical of the NAACP for deserting Bundy, and the
Cleveland Gazette
advised its readers to resign from the “white-man controlled” organization.
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Bundy, who had continued to raise money on his own and was represented by three white lawyers and four black ones, finally went on trial for the murder of Coppedge and inciting to riot in March of 1919. The venue had been shifted to the rural town of Waterloo, Illinois, twenty miles from East St. Louis, on arguments by the defense that the jury pool in East St. Louis had been irrevocably polluted by numerous front-page stories that had described Bundy as the leader of the men who shot detectives Coppedge and Wodley.
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At the trial, which attracted national attention, a number of white witnesses testified that they had seen a crowd of blacks, some of them armed, gathering near Bundy's house and the garage and gasoline station that adjoined it on the evening of July 1. And several white men said that, in the months before the July riot, guns had been stored in Bundy's house and
garage, and Bundy's yard, porch, and living room became the place for blacks to hang out and argue about race and politics. Most of the witnesses admitted on cross-examination that they had not seen Bundy himself in the crowd near his house, at Seventeenth and Bond, nor anywhere else in East St. Louis on the night the policemen were shot. They had seen a red touring car driving around with armed black men in it, and Bundy owned a red touring car, a Hupmobile.

One witness who said he
had
seen Bundy near the scene of the shooting that night was Gus Masserang, the hoodlum and jitney driver who, according to a witness, drove a car that ended up parked in front of the Commercial Hotel riddled with holes on July 2. Masserang, it was established, had been treated at a hospital for superficial shotgun wounds early the morning of July 2. The defense fought its way through strenuous prosecution objections to suggest for the record that Masserang had been wounded while driving men firing guns through black neighborhoods and that he had made a deal to avoid prosecution and was finally holding up his end of it. It was even suggested that the men firing from Masserang's car were policemen, which would certainly help to explain why blacks would shoot at the police car holding Wodley and Coppedge.
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Bundy's legal septet shredded Masserang's testimony and put on a detailed defense that attacked alleged sightings of Bundy and of his expensive red car in East St. Louis on the night of the shootings. Witnesses testified that neither Bundy's red Hupmobile nor Bundy himself was anywhere near Tenth and Bond when the shootings occurred.
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But Edward Wilson, the black iceman whose testimony had been crucial to the ten convictions in the first trial for the murder of Coppedge, appeared again and said Bundy had been in the mob that had shot the policemen. In rebuttal, two defense witnesses testified that Wilson had told them that he had been beaten by police while in jail until he agreed to testify against Bundy and the other defendants. They said Wilson had confided to them that Bundy had not been in the mob. Still, the all-white jury found Bundy guilty, and sentenced him to life in prison. His lawyers appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court, which eventually overturned the conviction on the grounds that the prosecution had not proven its case. Wilson's key testimony was completely discredited by the court. Bundy was freed after having served about a year in the state prison at Menard, where he worked as the prison dentist.
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Bundy moved back to Cleveland and got a law degree from Western Reserve. For a time, he headed up the large Cleveland chapter of Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association. The flamboyant black nationalist had gone to Bundy's support after the NAACP dropped him and, in a so-called court ceremony held in Harlem, Garvey anointed him “Sir Leroy Bundy.” The two headstrong men split in an argument over finances and Bundy entered local politics. He served as a city councilman from 1929 to 1937. In the pivotal year of 1936, with black allegiance shifting from the Republican to the Democratic Party in national politics, he helped lead the partly successful fight at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland to block the seating of delegations from Southern states that excluded blacks.
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In 1918, as the Great War ground into its final grueling year—with tens of thousands of American doughboys shipping out for Europe every week—the Great Migration of African Americans from South to North continued, although few came to East St. Louis. Indeed, thousands of blacks who fled the city in July of 1917 never returned, and by the census of 1920 the black population of East St. Louis was just under seventy-five hundred—roughly the same as it had been in 1914, before the migration had begun. An uneasy racial peace, if not harmony, prevailed in the slowly rebuilding river city, perhaps in some part because violence-prone residents of the area had a new outlet for their prejudices—jingoism.
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In early April of 1918, in Collinsville, Illinois, a small town about ten miles east of East St. Louis, a German-born Socialist miner named Robert Prager made a speech critical of Woodrow Wilson and American participation in the Great War. He was accused of “disloyalty,” assaulted, rescued by police, dragged from police protection by a mob of three hundred men, paraded through town wrapped in an American flag, and hanged from a tree. According to the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
, the lynching was “the first killing for disloyalty to the United States.” Several weeks earlier, four men, including a Catholic priest of Polish descent, had been tarred and feathered in a nearby mining town as part of a widespread campaign, as the
Globe-Democrat
put it, “to drive disloyal persons from southern Illinois.” Similar attacks were becoming increasingly common in towns and cities across the country.
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