Nearly 10,000 African Americans marched in silence down Fifth Avenue in New York City on July 28, 1917, to protest the violence in East St. Louis. Another response came from Jessie Fauset, a teacher at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. Denied entrance to Bryn Mawr College because of her color, Fauset had graduated from Cornell University and began contributing articles, stories, and poems to The Crisis in 1912.
TO THE EDITOR: It was not labor masquerading under race prejudice, or even prejudice using the labor troubles as a pretence that caused the riots in East St. Louis; it was the absolute conviction on the part of the labor leaders that no Negro has a right to any position or privilege which the white man wants. Mr. Gompers, it may be remembered, in his reply to Colonel Roosevelt, complained that capitalists in East St. Louis had been “luring colored men” to that city. And a few days before the riots the secretary of the Central Trades and Labor Unions in East St. Louis had sent out a letter to this effect: “The southern Negro is being used to the detriment of our white citizens. The entire body of delegates to the central trades and labor unions will call upon the mayor and city council . . . and devise a way to get rid of a certain portion of those (Negroes) who are already here.” The emphasis in both quotations is on color. Labor leaders are psychologists. They know that in this country the chances are more than even that any group of whites can attack a group of blacks, and not only get away with it, but probably have the protection of the laws. It was the connivance of the police and the militia which enabled the East St. Louis mob to expel from their homes 6,000 working men, burn down the dwellings of several thousands, and butcher and burn upwards of 200 helpless men, women and children.
How do we black Americans feel about all this? I asked an unlettered southern “emigrant” the other day if he would be willing to go back South. “Miss,” he told me, “if I had the money I would go South and dig up my father’s and my mother’s bones and bring them up to this country [Philadelphia]. I am forty-nine years old, and these six weeks I have spent here are the first weeks in my life of peace and comfort. And if I can’t get along here I mean to keep on goin’, but, no matter what happens, I’ll never go back.” Of course since then East St. Louis, Chester and Youngstown have shown him what he may expect—he is damned if he stays South and he is damned if he doesn’t. But at least he has known a little respite, he has not died yearning vainly to see Carcassonne. Thus much for our untrained class.
As for the rest of us, being true democrats, we acknowledge only two classes, the trained and the untrained. We are becoming fatalists; we no longer expect any miraculous intervention of Providence. We are perfectly well aware that the outlook for us is not encouraging, but we know this, too, it is senseless to suppose that anarchy and autocracy can be confined to only one quarter of a nation. A people whose members would snatch a baby because it was black from its mother’s arms, as was done in East St. Louis, and fling it into a blazing house while white furies held the mother until the men shot her to death—such a people is definitely approaching moral disintegration. Turkey has slaughtered its Armenians, Russia has held its pogroms, Belgium has tortured and maimed in the Congo, and today Turkey, Russia, Belgium are synonyms for anathema, demoralization and pauperdom. We, the American Negroes, are the acid test for occidental civilization. If we perish, we perish. But when we fall, we shall fall like Samson, dragging inevitably with us the pillars of a nation’s democracy.
The Survey, August 18, 1917