Never Been a Time (40 page)

The population of East St. Louis hit its peak of eighty-two thousand in 1950, when the city was still predominantly white. The tipping point—when blacks began to outnumber whites—came in the very early 1960s, and the departure of whites became a panicked exodus. By 1970, the total population had fallen to seventy thousand, about 70 percent black.
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The dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham, who, like Josephine Baker, was at least as well known in Paris and Rome as she was in the United States, came to East St. Louis in 1964 as part of an extended visit to Southern Illinois University's Edwardsville (SIUE) campus. Dunham, who brought African tradition into modern dance, had grown up in the Chicago suburb of Joliet. She was seven years old when the riot ripped the heart out of East St. Louis, and, like Baker, she never forgot it.

When she saw the poverty and desolation of so much of East St. Louis almost five decades later, she typically became inspired to start a new project—to help save East St. Louis. She became artist in residence at SIUE. Periodically, she would leave—to choreograph a show in Rome for Marcello
Mastroianni, to direct dance troupes and to perform herself in Paris and New York, Senegal and Haiti. Haiti became her second home. But she kept coming back to southern Illinois. She bought a house in East St. Louis and established a performing arts center nearby to teach dance and martial arts to young people of the city.
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Katherine Dunham

In the summer of 1964, a white policeman shot an unarmed black fifteen-year-old in Harlem, and in response a black mob looted and burned white-owned stores in Harlem and in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Race riots hit other American cities that year, and in 1965, when the six-day Watts riot in Los Angeles resulted in the death of thirty-four people, twenty-five of them black. The riots continued in the late 1960s, an era of great social change, like the 1910s. But these riots—some blacks called them “uprisings”—were different in several significant ways from those of the World War I period. Perhaps most important, although whites were often attacked and sometimes killed in the course of the riots, and hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of white-owned property was destroyed, there was very little of the relentless racial stalking and slaughter that marked the riots in East St. Louis, Tulsa, and elsewhere earlier in the century. These were not racial massacres.
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In September of 1967, a race riot broke out in East St. Louis. It grew out of protest marches inspired by a visit from militant H. Rap Brown. A young black protester was shot to death when he ran from police, who were questioning him in a stockyards parking lot, and about thirty blacks marched on the East St. Louis police station. Shortly afterward, gangs began looting and burning white-owned businesses in the South End and attacking the cars of white motorists. After two days and about thirty-five arrests, the riot died down. The only fatality was the young black man shot by police.
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After the riot, Katherine Dunham intensified her work with young people in the city and in 1970 she took forty-three students from East St. Louis to Washington, where they performed African dance and karate at the White House. Over the years since then, students from the Katherine Dunham center in East St. Louis have performed across the country, and the center has worked with thousands of young people, bringing in teachers from around the world.
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In the 1970s, a black political machine took over the government of East St. Louis from the white political machine that had run the city for one hundred
years. The stockyards closed in the 1960s and early 1970s and some of the major industries left the area as well, leaving nationally prominent hazardous waste sites in their wake. By the 1980s, when author Jonathan Kozol visited East St. Louis for
Savage Inequalities
, his excoriating and anguished examination of the raw deal poor kids were getting in America's public schools, East St. Louis was 98 percent black, and poorer than it had ever been. In fact 75 percent of the city's population was on some form of welfare. The Department of Housing and Urban Development described East St. Louis as “the most distressed small city in America.” Chemical plants in nearby company towns so polluted the air that East St. Louis had one of the highest rates of child asthma in the United States. At the pitiful public housing projects in the city, raw sewage backed up into sinks and bathtubs, into shower rooms at a public school, and into a children's playground, forming what Kozol described as “an oozing lake … a lagoon” filled with billions of bacteria where more than one hundred children played every day. And the city could not afford the $5,000 needed to fix the old vacuum truck used to unclog sewers. Dozens of children were discovered to have frightening amounts of lead in their blood and brains. Dangerously high levels of arsenic, mercury, and lead, as well as steroids used by the stockyards to plump up cattle, were detected in the soil. The mayor of East St. Louis announced he might have to sell city hall and six fire stations to meet the budget, which didn't even have funds to heat city buildings or supply them with toilet paper.
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And yet the story of East St. Louis was not entirely a negative one.

Jacqueline Joyner and her older brother Al grew up poor in the 1960s in the South End of East St. Louis, in a tiny, badly heated house on Piggott Avenue between Fifteenth and Sixteenth streets. She later described her neighborhood as a “rough and tumble precinct”—and when children refer to their neighborhood as a “precinct,” you can be pretty sure it is known for crime.
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Jackie was an exceptionally athletic child. In 1969, when she turned seven, the city-supported Mary E. Brown Community Center opened near her house, and the gymnasium and basketball court became her second home. Eight years later, at Lincoln High School, she was beating all comers in track and field, her specialties being dashes, hurdles, and the long jump. In 1981, in her freshman year at UCLA, her mother collapsed from a bacterial
infection back home in East St. Louis. Mary Joyner was only thirty-seven years old. Jackie rushed home and found her mother on a respirator with irreversible brain damage. Jackie was the one who finally had to make the decision to discontinue life support.

Devastated by grief, she quietly left her childhood home, which was filled with mourners, and walked in the gray January cold to the Mary E. Brown Community Center, where she hoped to spend a few minutes shooting baskets to try and take her mind off the tragedy. She was stunned to discover that it was closed.

“I didn't realize the center was boarded up,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘Where do the kids go?' … At the place that I had grown up and gotten used to, the doors were no longer open and I thought about the other kids in the neighborhood.”

At UCLA, Joyner married another young track star, Bob Kersee, who became her coach. By the time she graduated with a degree in history in 1986, she had become the greatest female athlete in the world. She tried several times to get the Mary E. Brown center reopened, but there was no money, and she was far from rich. Frustrated, she raised enough money to fly a group of children from East St. Louis to New York for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

In 1988, Jackie Joyner-Kersee set new records in the heptathlon and the long jump, and she would continue her dominance in international competition for much of the next decade. The same year, she and her husband established the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Youth Center Foundation to raise funds for a recreational center for young East St. Louisans. The foundation raised twelve million dollars, and in 1999 and 2000, on a thirty-seven-acre site in East St. Louis, built the forty-one-thousand-square-foot Jackie Joyner-Kersee Youth Center, affiliated with the national Boys and Girls Club. The Joyner-Kersee Center has its own stop on St. Louis's MetroLink light rail system.
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In early July of 1997, St. Louisan Gary Kennedy, whose grandmother Katherine and father Samuel had escaped from the 1917 riot on a raft, led a ceremony in downtown East St. Louis to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the tragedy. Several hundred people from St. Louis and East St. Louis, including survivors of the riot and their descendants, joined the
commemoration. Gary Kennedy said he wanted “to honor the people of both races who perished in the riot and to encourage unity and healing.” He also spoke of his father, who, after a long struggle with poverty—at one point, he made his living boxing on the streets of St. Louis—became the president of a local textile workers union and, in 1962, a St. Louis alderman. He served until his death in 1988. The following year, his son Terry, Gary's twin brother, was elected to succeed him.
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By the 2000 census, eight out of ten East St. Louis families were headed by single mothers. And eight out of ten children at a representative middle school in the city received government assistance. The population of East St. Louis had shrunk to 31,450, and one fifth of those people lived in public housing. East St. Louis was one of the most segregated cities in America, and one of the poorest.
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Poverty, mismanagement, and corruption in the city had by then resulted in the establishment of the East St. Louis Financial Advisory Authority, a state board with wide-ranging powers over the city, including control over its budget and finances.
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In 2004, the young black cartoonist Aaron McGruder (
The Boondocks
) collaborated with East St. Louis–raised filmmaker Reginald Hudlin to create a satirical graphic novel called
Birth of a Nation
. In the book, the mayor of East St. Louis—”the inner city without an outer city”—secedes from a racist nation after a radical right-wing junta headed by a dim-witted Texas governor steals the presidency by denying 1,023 perfectly honest black citizens of East St. Louis their legal right to vote on the grounds that they are felons. The Supreme Court, by a 5 to 4 vote, refuses to overturn the election.

So East St. Louis becomes Blackland, with a national anthem sung to the tune of the theme from
Good Times
and Ike Turner's face slated to adorn the $5 bill. Back in Washington, the bellicose new president and his eager-to-please African American secretary of state decide to send in the troops to effect a regime change. East St. Louis stands its ground in the face of attack. Finally, the president backs down, and East St. Louis—Blackland—is on its own, an independent nation.

On July 2, 2004, Anne Walker, a Dunham dancer and teacher who founded a black history organization called Freedom Trails, Legacies of Hope, organized a downtown commemoration of the eighty-seventh anniversary of the 1917 riot that had so horrified Katherine Dunham as a young girl. The commemoration has become an annual event, with a procession from
downtown to the Eads Bridge to drop a wreath on the Mississippi. The procession is silent save for the beat of drums in conscious emulation of the original Silent Parade.

In 2005, in part inspired by recent intensive investigations into riots in Tulsa, Wilmington, N.C., and the demolished black town of Rosewood, Florida, investigations that led to calls for compensation to the descendants of riot victims, the Illinois General Assembly approved a joint resolution to create the Illinois Riot and Reparations Commission. It was charged with re-examining race riots in the state, including the one in East St. Louis in 1917, and making a report by January 7, 2009.
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In May of 2006, one month shy of her ninety-seventh birthday, which she had hoped to celebrate in East St. Louis, Katherine Dunham died at her home in New York. Her birthday and her passing were celebrated in East St. Louis by four generations of her students with dance and music and poetry and African drums.
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About the same time, the chief of police of East St. Louis was sent to prison for taking a gun out of evidence and selling it back to the criminal suspect it had been confiscated from.
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The following spring, Alvin L. Parks, a former councilman and city manager who had the backing of the city's Democratic central committee, was elected mayor of East St. Louis. Like many mayors-elect before him, Park vowed to clean up the city's streets and riverfront, get rid of drug dealers, promote economic development, and strengthen the police department. The citizens of East St. Louis, he said, wanted and deserved “a life more abundant.”

“I know you've heard a thousand people say this,” he told a visitor. “I truly believe in the future of East St. Louis.”
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First of all, I would like to express my deep gratitude to Andrew Theising for teaching me about East St. Louis and to Eugene Redmond for showing me its soul. Writing
Never Been a Time
would have been much more difficult, and much less enjoyable, without their help. Andy, author of
Made in USA: East St. Louis
, was also kind enough to read my manuscript and share with me and my publisher the extensive file of photos and illustrations from his book. Eugene, poet and educator, was always eager to help and his wisdom and enthusiasm were an inspiration.