7 | THE SHAPE OF FEAR

Are we not coming more and more, day by day, to making the statement “I am white,” the one fundamental tenet of our practical morality?

—W.E.B. DU BOIS, “The Souls of White Folk”

ON THE FOURTH OF JULY IN 1917, THE SOCIOLOGIST, JOURNALIST, and activist Ida B. Wells disembarked in East St. Louis. The conductor and the Pullman porters on the train had advised her to stay on board. Fearful for their own safety, Black porters had been locking themselves into unoccupied berths on the sleeping cars as their trains approached the city. Over the past two days, more than a thousand white inhabitants of East St. Louis and several surrounding towns had turned on their Black neighbors, beating them, shooting them down, hanging them from lampposts, and burning their bodies in the street. Once again, the history of St. Louis forecast that of the nation. The 1917 East St. Louis Massacre was the first of several such enormities—most notably in Chicago and Washington, DC, in 1919 and Tulsa in 1921—and the deadliest.¹

The official death count of thirty-nine seemed low at the time, and it has been questioned by historians ever since. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, it was generally believed that hundreds had died, their bodies burned and thrown into the creeks surrounding the city. Over three hundred buildings had been burned down, many with their inhabitants inside. As many as five thousand of the twelve thousand or so African American inhabitants of the city had fled across the bridge to St. Louis during the violence, most of them never to return. In East St. Louis in the summer of 1917, the racism that had for so long served capital as a way of both separating and disciplining white workers—with the promise of a share in the spoils, the hollowed collegiality of shared skin, and the episodic threat of banishment and replacement with Black workers—slipped out of their control and ignited the city in a murderous, removalist frenzy of whiteness.²

The indomitable Wells walked from the Relay Depot across Cahokia Creek, where the bodies of the dead had been thrown during the massacre, and through the streets of East St. Louis alone, noting the absence of Black people, the burned-out buildings, and the soldiers in the streets. Along the way, she met a soldier, “a mere boy with a gun,” who had been deployed by the Illinois National Guard to suppress the violence. “The Negroes won’t let the whites alone,” he told her. “They killed seven yesterday and three already this morning.” If his account of the violence seems incongruous in light of what had actually happened—what anyone standing on the street where he stood could have immediately seen had happened—it was an accurate reflection of the approach to the violence taken by the Illinois National Guard. Rather than trying to end the violence, many had joined in the slaughter for several hours before finally taking control of the city. The first Blacks Wells encountered were inside the city hall, where hundreds had taken refuge two days before and where the National Guard had established a command post. Several women were preparing to return to their homes under military escort, and Wells went along with them, riding in the back of a truck that the Red Cross had “commandeered” from the nearby Swift Packing Plant.³

Around her lay the smoldering ruins of a city built not just in the shadow but in the image of capital. From the moment of its founding in 1861 by a referendum of railway workers paid a dollar apiece for their votes, the city of East St. Louis was a municipal shell for unbridled capitalist extraction and unchecked governmental corruption. Municipal government in East St. Louis was a convenient fiction. Where political theory would lead an earnest reader to believe that governments emerged from the shared interests of individuals who banded together to ensure their common welfare, East St. Louis took almost the opposite tack. Another city might try to diminish pollution and public nuisance by passing laws regulating which businesses might locate in which areas, as the city of St. Louis did in 1914, but East St. Louis existed to provide a haven from such regulations. Where another city might levy taxes on business in order to provide services for inhabitants—schools and parks and libraries—the low taxes collected in East St. Louis were generally kept by the tax collector. The city was sustained as a company bookkeeper’s fantasy overhung with a sulfurous cloud.⁴

The city emerging in what had once been called the American Bottom was admirably situated for industry: at a bottleneck in the flow of agricultural goods from the west to the emerging industrial cities in the east, and near coalfields in southern Illinois that could provide the fuel for heavy industry athwart the Mississippi. The peculiar situation of East St. Louis ensured that it would thrive in the rail era. The Mississippi River formed both a geographic and legal boundary, a point where, even after the opening of the Eads Bridge, rail lines on each side of the river had to converge to cross. That bottleneck provided an opportunity for extraction, and the robber barons of the “bridge arbitrary” responded to the opportunity by manipulating rates in ways that favored those who built their factories and produced their goods on the east side of the river. East St. Louis, Illinois, developed as a railway-rate-subsidized and lightly regulated alternative to St. Louis, Missouri—like Bayonne or Camden in New Jersey, or even Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. By the time of the First World War, twenty-six rail lines converged at East St. Louis, and the city had become a regional center of noxious industry and dangerous work. In East St. Louis, the city native and jazz innovator Miles Davis later wrote, “the smell of manure and cow shit mingled with [the] smell of death.”⁵

Indeed, in what became the common pattern, large national corporations simply founded their own municipalities on the margins of East St. Louis, where even the comparatively low taxes (and the occasional cost of buying a local election) could be reduced to something close to zero: Alorton (Illinois) for the Aluminum Ore Company (today’s Alcoa); Monsanto Town (now Sauget, Illinois) for Monsanto Chemicals; Wood River (Illinois) for Standard Oil and Roxana (Illinois) for Shell; and National City (Illinois), which was built out of the architectural remains of the 1904 World’s Fair, for the National Stock Yards. By the time of the First World War, virtually all of the first families of American capitalism had an arterial tube sucking wealth out of the polluted bottomlands of East St. Louis: J. P. Morgan had the Eads Bridge; Jay Gould had the railroads; Andrew W. Mellon had Aluminum Ore; John D. Rockefeller had Standard Oil; Philip Danforth Armour and Gustavus Swift had their eponymous packinghouses. “East St. Louis,” wrote W.E.B. Du Bois in the aftermath of the atrocity of 1917, “was a paradise for high and frequent dividends and the piling up of wealth to be spent in St. Louis and Chicago and New York.” The congressional investigation into the violence in 1917 concluded that the corporations with plants in and around East St. Louis cared nothing for the civic life of the cities they founded and oversaw; rather, their sole concern was to “get the men into the plant to work, get the work, and then [do it] all again.” It did not take a radical to recognize that East St. Louis was a capitalist wild zone where unbridled exploitation was twinned with formalized impunity.⁶

The city government of East St. Louis during the industrial era served mostly as a vehicle for funneling money into the pockets of the city governors, who made certain to stay out of the way of their corporate overlords. The 1917 investigation uncovered rampant corruption in the city government; indeed, terming it “corruption” seems to understate the issue, imagining as it does that the city government had any other purpose than lining the pockets of the local overseers of the out-of-town industrialists’ interests. The city collector, allowed by law to retain 2 percent of city revenue up to a cap of $1,500, was instead keeping 2 percent of all collections and thus multiplying his stipend by something close to a hundredfold. In response to a 1913 investigative report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the mayor, city attorney, and several aldermen were taking bribes from railroad companies, the city council simply recommended that the relevant city records be immediately destroyed. When a reformist mayor, who had run on the slogan “Make East St. Louis a little more like home, and a little less like Hell,” expressed a willingness to release the records to the grand jury, those records mysteriously disappeared from the city vault, never to be seen again. At a similar juncture in an 1884 investigation of municipal corruption, parties unknown had simply burned down city hall.⁷

Locke Tarlton was the Democratic Party boss of surrounding St. Clair County in the years before the massacre, and he provides a convenient emblem of the cavernous greed and boundless cynicism of the political class in East St. Louis and St. Clair County, Illinois, more generally. Tarlton had become wealthy by using information he gained from serving on the county levee board to speculate in land—in one documented case, he made a 400 percent profit off of a swampy river bottom that he held for less than three weeks. In the years before the massacre, he controlled local politics by attempting to mobilize Black voters and then turning right around and creating panic among East St. Louis whites that their city was being “colonized” by immigrant Blacks. By 1920, according to one standard measure, East St. Louis had the second-poorest city government in the nation, and much of the revenue that actually made it past all of the outstretched hands and into the coffers of city hall was quickly paid out in the form of essential city services like fire and police donated by the city of East St. Louis to the surrounding tax-haven municipalities.⁸

For the out-of-town industrialists, however, the only parts of the local government that really mattered were the assessors and the boards of adjustment, and they got what they paid for: National City’s gargantuan packing plants were assessed at cents on the dollar, as were the plants of Aluminum Ore, American Steel, and all the rest. The total assessed value of property in East St. Louis—a city in which all of the aluminum ore in the United States was processed, and which vied with Kansas City and Omaha for the distinction of being the nation’s second-largest abattoir—was $13 million, a figure that might have been more accurately applied to just one of the larger plants. The novelist Sherwood Anderson wrote of East St. Louis that “nobody’s home,” and he termed it “the most perfect example, at least in America, of what happens under absentee ownership.”⁹

In a pattern that would once again become notorious a century later, much of the revenue of the city government derived from fees and fines—as much as 50 percent from the licensing of saloons, and an additional increment from unlicensed saloons that were allowed to stay open but paid annual fines for their ongoing violation of the license law. Because there were no blue laws in East St. Louis, the city had long served as a Sunday getaway for the St. Louis sporting set. And by every contemporary account, East St. Louis was a “sporting” town: the saloons, storefront casinos, and brothels that surrounded city hall were the bedrock of the local economy. Their names suggest the tone of the city’s civic life, among them: the Bucket of Blood, the Yellow Dog, the Monkey Cage, Aunt Kate’s Honkytonk (“Something Doing Every Hour”), and Uncle John’s Pleasure Palace (“Come In and Be Suited”).¹⁰

Much of this activity was nominally illegal, but what passed for a city government was controlled by the vice lords’ landlords, who were controlled in turn by the summer residents of Newport and Watch Hill—all of whom were happy to allow the city to sink ever further into iniquity and corruption as the bottom line stayed dry. The saloons provided what policemen the city could afford to employ with free food as they walked their beats. The brothels, too, reached a set of accommodations with the local government: in the pre–World War I years, a joke made the rounds about a local judge who had received a new desk in return for going lightly on a prostitute in his court, the joke being that he walked around town saying he wished he had held out for an automobile. East St. Louis in 1917 was a rotten, dirty town; “there was no veil of hypocrisy here,” wrote Du Bois, “but a wickedness frank, ungilded, and open.” And into this cauldron of meat and steel, along with the greed and the sinfulness, along with the exploitation and the misery and the violence, “some unjust God leaned, laughing, over the ramparts of the heavens and dropped a Black man into the midst.”¹¹

From its beginnings as a railroad town in the 1860s, East St. Louis had a small, if slowly increasing, Black population. Numbering around one hundred, just 2 percent of the population, in 1870, it grew to about seven hundred (5 percent of the population) by 1890 and to almost six thousand (10 percent of the population) by 1910. Like the wartime migrants who followed them, the Black inhabitants of prewar East St. Louis were mostly migrants from the South who had come north on the Illinois Central seeking relief from the demeaning social rituals, economic exploitation, and relentless racial violence of the Jim Crow South. These were pioneers in the first wave of what came to be called “the Great Migration,” and among the first of the million and a half migrants to the North between the beginning of the First World War and the end of World War II, who were themselves at the leading edge of a history that would see almost seven million Blacks move from the rural South to the cities of the North and West by the 1970s. In 1910, almost 90 percent of the nation’s Black population lived in the South; by 1970, the figure had fallen to 50 percent.¹²

Most immediately, they sought work, but East St. Louis was a hard landing place. “We give the white preference when hiring our labor—always have,” the manager of the Armour processing plant testified in 1917. Before the war, Black workers were generally held “in reserve” by the city’s leading employers—employed casually or seasonally, if at all. And even as Blacks increasingly found work in the plants during the war, they were almost always employed in unskilled positions: collecting manure in the stinking fertilizer division of the meatpacking plants; driving bolts into the brains of terrified animals on the killing floors; going unpaid during the “broken time” spent herding new animals into the factory; tending the molten metal and carrying the castings and hot slag in among the furnaces in the metal plants, where the temperatures reached 120 degrees.¹³

The racial order of production was mirrored in the racial order of organized labor in East St. Louis. In spite of the official color-blindness of the American Federation of Labor, Blacks were not welcome in the AFL locals in East St. Louis, which were generally limited, in any case, to skilled workers. In spite of the efforts of unskilled Black workers to band together in several of the plants, Black workers in East St. Louis were generally non-union. The white supremacist hiring practices at the factory gate, the racial organization of production inside the plants, and the whites-only unions combined to send an unmistakable message about the “wages of whiteness,” the skin privilege and ready sense of social entitlement, to anyone seeking a job in East St. Louis: that, in the words of the white workingmen of East St. Louis, jobs “belonged to the white man”; “it don’t require as much for a Negro to exist as it does for a white man”; and a white man needed to provide his family with “an American standard of living” and “raise his kids right and decent.”¹⁴

The racial order of production was exemplary of the racial capitalism of the industrial era, which relied on a dual labor market and a segregated shop floor, Black workers being held in reserve as a counterweight to white organized labor, and white laborers besotted with skin privilege playing along. But threaded through this characteristically northern, industrial strain of white supremacy was an older tradition, one reminiscent of the 1850s and even earlier, of the Indian wars and colonization and the free Negro laws and Dred Scott, of removal and annihilation—the idea that East St. Louis was “a white man’s town.” In spite of the fact that virtually everything about the actual city—the violence, the corruption, the inequality, the pollution—represented a repudiation of the promise of shared spoils and imperial inclusion epitomized by the 1904 World’s Fair, the white workers of East St. Louis kept on somehow believing that the city belonged to them rather than their corporate overlords. They believed it with such force and passion, such a sense of beleaguered entitlement, that when the time came, they would prove more than willing to kill for it.¹⁵

The First World War intensified the conflict between capital and labor in East St. Louis. Among the city’s industries were several that were essential to the Allied war effort: most of the shell casings used by the Allied forces in the war were produced at the Western Cartridge (today’s Olin) plant in East St. Louis; all of the aluminum produced in the United States (upon which all of the aircraft produced in the United States depended) was produced at Aluminum Ore; and an appreciable portion of the canned meats that were exported to the allies were likewise produced in Armour’s and Swift’s plants in East St. Louis. During the war, the plants ran around the clock, adding shifts and increasing the pace of work, doubling or tripling their production, and their owners made money hand over fist. Monsanto, which began during World War I as a producer of the compounded precursors for high explosives, increased its profits a hundredfold before the war ended.¹⁶

War work meant jobs, and African Americans from the South began to move to East St. Louis in increasing numbers in the early years of the war. Because the number of migrants to the city became a central point of contention in the immediate aftermath of the violence in 1917, and because both the migration and the expulsion of many of those who lived and worked in wartime East St. Louis occurred in between the census years of 1910 and 1920, historians have found it difficult to settle on an exact number of migrants to East St. Louis during this period. The best estimates put the number at somewhere between two thousand and five thousand—a consequential, but not overwhelming, number of migrants to a city with a population of over sixty thousand, but more than enough to make many of their white neighbors paranoid about their ability to maintain their admittedly limited privilege.¹⁷

In a “white man’s town,” every Black face looked out of place. Blacks were not, of course, out of place there: East St. Louis had a Black community of long standing, and even the recent migrants had a right to go to any town they pleased, seeking work or a better life or whatever caught their fancy. As one of the migrants explained in the aftermath of the massacre, he had just “taken a notion” to move to East St. Louis, but that should have been enough to justify his presence in the city. Nevertheless, the idea of the white man’s town was so totalizing, so absolute, that it swept all nuance and all notion of right up in a fury of purification—one did not even have to believe in it to start to see the world anew, to become accustomed to a notion of race and space that was, at the root, removalist, even genocidal. Stories emerged to explain the presence of Blacks in a “white” town, based on the harebrained magical thinking that has so often been the hallmark of white supremacy in the United States. These stories would have been laughable but for their murderous results: that persons unknown had hired entire trains to carry Black workers north; that two thousand Blacks a week were arriving in the city; that there were plans afoot to use the votes of migrant Blacks to “colonize” East St. Louis. Political bosses were rumored to be standing outside polling stations passing out $5 bills to Black voters. Soon Mayor Fred Mollman—who had courted Black voters with promises of municipal jobs, schools, and parks in 1915, only to turn right around and denounce them as fraudulent interlopers in 1916—was providing the newspaper with frequent, shifting updates of how many “Negroes” he thought were arriving from the South—two thousand a week, six thousand a month, five thousand in eight months, three to six thousand total. The Central Trades and Labor Union, the East St. Louis local organization of the American Federation of Labor, hired observers to sit at the train station and count the number of Blacks arriving on northbound trains. “N—r after n—r came in—kept coming in. I have stood on the depot and seen them coming in, 200 at a time, barefooted… carrying some kind of bundle with some of their few n—r belongings that they owned.… They was thick here just like bees… six or seven or eight in a house… every evening if you was downtown you could see ten or fifteen of them coming along with their suitcases from the Relay depot, and they continued to arrive all the time,” unrepentantly insisted a white labor leader in the aftermath of the massacre.¹⁸

Labor leaders began to float the idea of purging the voting rolls to make certain that their (completely sold-out and corrupt) city government was not “colonized” by Black voters. The outcry—repeated in several other midwestern cities that experienced “colonization” panics in 1916 and amplified by race-baiting newspapers, for which racial drama meant dollars—was loud enough to reach Washington, DC. President Woodrow Wilson responded by endorsing the connection between Black migration and voter fraud and ordering the US Justice Department to open a criminal investigation of Negro “colonization” and voter fraud in East St. Louis, Chicago, and several smaller Illinois cities. By the summer of 1917, the impulse toward ethnic cleansing that lies latent at the heart of our democracy—the weaponization by whites of the “we” in “we the people” over the course of American history along a spectrum running from gerrymandering and voter suppression to white-capping, cross-burning, and driving out—had been fanned into a full-on racial panic.¹⁹

The routines of city life became increasingly menacing to triggered whites. Black people walking down the street “almost shove all the white folks off the [side]walk,” according to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Black people were taking over the streetcars, sitting in the breezy seats by the window or “jump[ing] in to get a seat beside a white woman,” according to local Democratic Party boss Thomas Canavan. “You wouldn’t think you were in the home town” anymore, testified one aggrieved white when asked to explain the violence of the summer of 1917. The oscillation of entitlement and fragility so characteristic of white supremacy reverberated through unsubstantiated stories about Black criminals. “Negroes” had murdered a white man “every other night or so” for six months running, wrote one newspaper man; white women were afraid to go out in the streets at night, reported another. According to a report commissioned by white labor leaders, Blacks were responsible for eight hundred holdups, twenty-seven murders, and seven rapes between the fall of 1916 and the summer of 1917. “There was just a reign of terror in the city of East St. Louis for eleven or twelve months. Our women couldn’t go out on the streets, sisters, sweethearts, mothers or children wouldn’t be seen on the streets after dark at nighttime, after it became dark. The women refused to go out on the streets. They wouldn’t go,” insisted AFL organizer Harry Kerr.²⁰

As they had been at the time of the Dred Scott decision, African American citizens of the United States were characterized in industrial East St. Louis not simply as inferior but as outsiders—as people who needed not so much to be kept down as to be kept out. The interest of politicians in exploiting Blacks’ votes and capitalists in extracting their labor was met by an insistent extraterritorializing response from labor leaders and those who spoke in the name of the white working class: these Black people were out of place and they needed to be driven out. Or exterminated. Thus began the dialectic of segregation and removal that would define twentieth-century Black life in the United States—a shifting set of alliances between industrialists, real estate rentiers, and white labor to control the Black population and settlement, to take advantage of Blacks when they could, and to drive them out when they could not.

In a 1926 essay entitled “The Shape of Fear,” Du Bois explained the economic roots of these fantasies of persecution and their savage telos.

Before the wide eyes of the mob is ever the Shape of Fear. Back of the writhing, yelling, cruel-eyed demons who break, destroy, maim and lynch, and burn at the stake, is a knot, large or small, of normal human beings, and these human beings at heart are desperately afraid of something. Of what? Of many things, but usually of losing their jobs, being declassed or degraded, or actually disgraced; of losing their hopes, their savings, their plans for their children; of the actual pangs of hunger, of dirt, of crime. And of all this, the most ubiquitous in modern industrial society is that fear of unemployment.

The increasingly national and bureaucratic organization of the labor movement had created a class of labor bureaucrat instigators: people with both the interest and the capacity to get half the working class to turn on the other half. And once they began to fan the flames, there was ample frustrated entitlement and bottled-up rage to burn down the entire city. There was no necessary reason to see Black people as a threat to white aspirations (indeed, they might have been seen as allies against the bosses)—no reason at all except for American history and the toxic legacy of the “white man’s country.”²¹

The war could have changed all that, at least in East St. Louis. High employment, with the plants producing products essential to the Allied war effort running around the clock, gave labor leverage. The white working people of East St. Louis saw the opportunity to renegotiate virtually every aspect of the terms of their employment—as long as they could credibly threaten to shut down production by going on strike. It was at this critical conjuncture that the fear and resentment of Black workers—workers conventionally excluded from the plants who could now be mobilized by capital—began to reach the temperature necessary for ignition. Although there were unquestionably Black workers hired in East St. Louis during the war, there were never as many as the unions claimed (or the managers threatened); indeed, scarcely enough Blacks were hired to cover the loss of immigrant workers who had returned to Europe to fight in the war. But the fear of being replaced by Black workers had no necessary relationship to what was actually happening in the plants. In a full-employment (for whites) economy, the fear of replacement by Black workers became a tool for both capitalists and labor leaders trying to discipline working-class whites (who might otherwise make demands they had been unable to achieve in slack times, when there were more unemployed workers available to replace them). The managers threatened to replace them with Blacks if they did not behave, and the organizers of the American Federation of Labor (the umbrella organization to which most of the East St. Louis locals were pledged) used the threat of Black workers to motivate and discipline the rank and file.²²

As the war continued, and as the unions continued to try to use the strategic position of East St. Louis industry to force their employers to address long-standing grievances, the specter of Black replacement workers came increasingly to dominate organized labor’s efforts to explain what was wrong in East St. Louis. Rather than organizing the migrants feared by white workers, or, still less, staying focused on the already exploitative terms of workers’ employment—for instance, packing plant workers were required to clock out before they cleaned up their stations and their tools at the end of their shifts—labor leaders focused on the threat of Black migrants. No less a figure than AFL president Samuel Gompers sent a letter to union locals warning of the “importation” of Black workers and urging them to “find out what they were being used for.” Contemplating the similar racial stipulation of the labor movement at the moment of Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois mordantly observed that “the laborers did not recognize that the exclusion of four million workers from the labor program was a fatal omission.”²³

Wild rumors circulated throughout the city in 1916: that the mayor had traveled to the South to recruit Black workers for the city’s plants, that the Chamber of Commerce had taken out advertisements in southern papers recruiting Black migrants, that the industrialists had arranged for “fifteen hundred Negroes to be shipped to East St. Louis” to break strikes. For the industrialists, who were accustomed to using race to segment their workforces and manage their employees, the terms of engagement were familiar: when they were forced by strikes to make concessions, they responded by firing union organizers and workers and replacing them with Blacks. Thus could white workers—blinded by their own whiteness to the larger dynamics of the racial organization of labor in the plants and to the self-defeating racism of their own union locals—enter 1917 believing, in the words of one, that their employers were “encouraging the Blacks by discriminating against the whites.” “It was here that they entered the Shadow of Hell,” Du Bois later wrote of the white working class, “where suddenly from a fight for wage and protection against industrial oppression, East St. Louis became the center of the oldest and nastiest form of human oppression—race hatred.”²⁴

It could have been another strike, another plant, or even another city. Instead, it was at Aluminum Ore in East St. Louis in July 1917 that the white supremacist spoils of racial capitalism—the satisfaction of the segregated saloon; the catharsis of The Birth of a Nation, which had shown in the city that spring to large audiences eager to see hometown superstar Lillian Gish on screen; the lived entitlement of the segregated streets and schools and parks—gave way to the rage that burned at the heart of whiteness. After a threatened union walkout in the winter of 1916, management at Aluminum Ore, following what had become the industrial protocol in East St. Louis, dismissed over two hundred unionized whites and replaced them with Blacks. True to form, union leaders responded not by redoubling their efforts to organize Black workers, but by ending an ongoing effort to organize Black workers in the plant, asserting that Blacks were “taking work that belonged to the white man.”²⁵

In April 1917, as many as two thousand of the workers at Aluminum Ore went out on strike. They were soon joined by workers in other plants throughout the city. Then management began to grind them down. The United States had just entered the war, and the strategic importance of Aluminum Ore, upon which the strikers had rested their hopes for a quick resolution, was quickly mobilized by management to call the workers’ patriotism into question. The manager of the plant was quoted in the local papers as saying that the strike was “pro-German in origin” and “using Kaiser money… in order to cripple or shut down” the strategically essential plant. If the threat was for any reason hard to interpret in a city where a large portion of the white working class had grown up in German-speaking households, it was made plain when the Illinois National Guard formed a fixed-bayonet picket around the plant in response to “reports of pro-German utterances.”²⁶

Among the replacement workers brought into the plant every morning under federal protection were a number of African Americans. The tacit prewar bargain between capital and labor in East St. Louis had been based upon a shared understanding of the importance of whiteness: plant managers freely admitted that they discriminated in favor of white workers, jobs were allocated by race in the production process, and trade union organization reflected the racist order of the shop floor and framed its demand in the language of racial entitlement. Outside the gates of Aluminum Ore in the summer of 1917, things looked different: it was the striking white workers who were being labeled as outsiders and Black workers who had taken up protected positions inside the plant.

With both the material and ideological aspects of their privileged position threatened, the white workers of East St. Louis began to lash out and to reassert their sole title to every job on the line—indeed, to the city itself. “The common talk around the town,” remembered the manager of the Armour packing plant, was that the strikers were going to “drive the n—s out.” Over the course of the summer, young men—both Black and white—began to carry guns whenever they went out in East St. Louis. In the city’s African American neighborhood, in the shadow of Aluminum Ore, where the plant lights burned around the clock, a company of Black men began to drill under the supervision of a veteran of the imperial war of 1898. In case of an attack, they planned to muster in response to the pealing bell of a church at the corner of Sixteenth and Tudor.²⁷

At a meeting on May 28, the Central Trades and Labor Union demanded a meeting with Mayor Mollman and the city council. “Negro and cheap foreign labor is being imported by the Aluminum Ore Company to tear down the standard of living of our citizens.… Come and hear the truth that the press will not publish,” read a broadside published in advance of the meeting. The ensuing meeting began with a long discussion of the use of Black workers as strikebreakers, followed by the testimony of a number of white women that they had been robbed, grabbed, hit, and/or knocked down by recently arrived Blacks; the meeting ended with the union leaders calling upon the mayor to end Black migration to East St. Louis. Mollman responded that he had written to southern governors asking them to keep Blacks from boarding northbound trains, and he promised that the city council would consider taking additional measures, but the crowd remained restive. A local lawyer shouted out that there would be no way for the next Black family to settle in East St. Louis “if the house burns down” around them. Whites at the meeting began to shout that “East St. Louis must remain a white man’s town.”²⁸

As the overheated whites began to leave the hall, rumors began to circulate among them: that a Black burglar had shot a white man; that a Black man had insulted a white woman; that two white girls had been shot; that a white woman had been shot. The crowd became a mob. As many as three thousand whites took to the streets, dragging Black men off of streetcars and beating those whom they found on the street. They looted a restaurant downtown, a barbershop, and several saloons. The East St. Louis police, all but a handful of whom were white, stood around and watched the violence before finally mounting an effort to disarm the city’s Black inhabitants. The mayor’s request that the National Guard units outside of the Aluminum Ore Plant be moved downtown was ignored by their commander, making clear that the soldiers were there to protect the plant, not the people who worked in it. By the early hours of the morning of May 29, the fury of the crowd had burned itself out, and the marauding whites returned to their homes. “Tomorrow night we’ll be ready for them,” one was overheard saying. “We are not armed now, but tomorrow we’ll all have guns. We’ll burn the Negroes out and run them out of town.” While no one had died on the night of the twenty-eighth, the mob left a trail of Black men bloodied in the downtown streets. That night, hundreds of Blacks left the city, walking across the bridge to St. Louis, Missouri. At the request of Mayor Mollman, six companies of Guardsmen were deployed to East St. Louis overnight. Over the course of the day of May 29, they stood down mobs of brick-throwing whites, and a tense ceasefire settled over the city.²⁹

Even before the violence was concluded, events in the city were being reframed according to the storyboard presented by the unions at the city hall meeting: embattled whites attacked by armed Blacks. By the middle of the day on the twenty-eighth, Mayor Mollman had requested that the St. Louis Police Department prevent Blacks from coming across the river to purchase guns in Missouri. The East St. Louis police set up roadblocks on the bridges, stopped Black motorists, and searched their cars. Over the next several days, the Illinois National Guard conducted searches of the houses of Black residents of the city, and what the East St. Louis Daily Journal reported as “scores” of armed Blacks were pulled in by the police. Beneath the hypertrophic panic about armed Blacks lay a simple but nevertheless significant fact: confronted by armed whites who were trying to burn their houses down, some Blacks shot back. Rumors began to spread among whites that Blacks were planning to rise up and drive them from the town, the most common rumor specifying July 4 as the intended date.³⁰

Through most of June, many of the union workers at Aluminum Ore stayed out on strike, but the plant stayed open around the clock. Replacement workers made their way through the gates under the protection of soldiers with bayonets fixed to the ends of their rifles as workers on the picket lines—baited, enraged, and increasingly desperate—shouted at them. For all intents and purposes, the strike at Aluminum Ore collapsed on June 21; a few strikers kept up the picket outside the plant over the following week, but most of the plant’s striking workforce returned to the line. That week management at the plant culled the union leaders from the workforce and replaced them, one by one, with Black workers. It is hard not to wonder what the bosses thought would happen next; when later asked, the manager at Aluminum Ore said simply, “My principal business was running the Aluminum Company. That is what I make my bread and butter at.”³¹

On the night of July 1, a carload of white terrorists whom history has somehow remembered as “joyriders” (such is the enduring power of whiteness to euphemize violence) drove a Ford Model T through the Black neighborhood on the Southside, shooting into houses. Someone rang the church bell to signal the attack that Blacks had been training to defend against. Officers from the East St. Louis Police Department were called on duty—not to rush to the aid of the Blacks being terrorized by nighttime drive-by shootings, but rather to determine if the pealing bell was the signal for the rumored Black uprising. Driving in an unmarked Ford Model T, several police officers headed toward the church, accompanied by a reporter from the St. Louis Republic, who rode outside the car, on the sideboard. Rounding the corner of Tenth and Bond, they encountered, according to the reporter, “more than 200 rioting Negroes,” who began shooting at the car. The officers in the front seat of the car were hit. By the morning, both had died. Their bullet-riddled and blood-stained car was parked in the street in front of the police station—there for the white working people of East St. Louis to see as they made their way to their shifts in the plants.³²

The violence began downtown around ten on the morning of July 2, when Black workers who had worked overnight at the plants began to make their way home. “I saw a Negro coming north on Collinsville, and about the same time a large number of men, perhaps thirty or forty went south on Collinsville Avenue… when they met this Negro down there, somebody kicked him off the sidewalk, and he was knocked down, and two or three of the men in the crowd stepped out and kicked him in the face a few times, and some man walked up and shot him—stood over him and shot him three or five times,” remembered Paul Anderson, a reporter for the Post-Dispatch. Black men were pulled off streetcars and beaten in the streets. The crowd downtown soon numbered over a thousand: white workingmen, still identifiable in the blue coveralls they wore to work, joined by the tough-guy denizens of the downtown saloons and any number of what appear in the photos to be ordinary white men wearing jackets and ties, smile and laugh as they stand behind a small fire built in the middle of the street on which is burning the body of one of their Black neighbors. The violence was obscene, spectacular, wanton, and joyous: white men, egged on by the crowd, taking turns throwing paving stones at a Black man sitting stunned in the middle of the street, the contents of the lunch pail he had packed that morning spilled out on the pavement beside him; two men who had been shot dead with their hands raised above their head, lying that way on the ground, arms outstretched; the crowd shouting out support as a rope was thrown over a lamppost to hoist the body of a man killed by the mob, laughing as the rope broke and the body fell to the ground with a sickening thud, calling out for more, like they were at a boat race or playing tug-of-war: “pull for East St. Louis”; white women shooting at the feet of a Black woman whose blouse they had torn from her shoulders, forcing her to run terrified back and forth between them until she collapsed in the middle of the road; a Black woman trying to shield the baby she was carrying from a mob of whites wielding broomsticks and a two-by-four, the woman staggering and falling, and then stumbling on up the street.³³

Several groups of armed Black men fought back, holding a line at Thirteenth Street as the mob tried to press down Bond into the heart of their neighborhood, fighting house to house downtown around the corner of Sixth and Broadway and, again, around Eleventh and Broadway. The most careful historian of Black self-defense in East St. Louis credits the organized defense of the Black neighborhood on the Southside with saving many lives over the course of the night of July 2. “The Negroes fought. They grappled with the mobs like beasts at bay. They drove them back from the thickest cluster of their homes and piled the white dead on the street,” wrote W.E.B. Du Bois.³⁴

The East St. Louis police either stood by and watched or took part in the violence. By the afternoon, several companies of the Illinois National Guard requested by the mayor had reached the city; they set up a checkpoint on the bridge into the city from predominantly Black Brooklyn, Illinois, where they searched Black workers coming off their shifts in the plant, confiscating any weapons, and then they too joined in the murder. An exchange between Charles Roger, the president of the J. C. Grant Chemical Company, and a congressional investigator in the fall of 1917 sums up the role of the soldiers in East St. Louis on the night of July 2:

Q: Were there any soldiers around?

A: One.

Q: What was he doing?

A: He was shooting n—rs.

Q: What?

A: Shooting n—rs.

Q: The soldier?

A: Sure.

With no effective protection from the police or the military, the plants locked their Black workers inside to protect them. The fortified walls of the plants marked the line between (and the contradiction between) the white supremacy of exploitation favored by the bosses, who used racism to pit workers against one another, and that of elimination latent within the false promise of the “white man’s country” since the time of Thomas Hart Benton.³⁵

The East St. Louis Massacre was the first of several concerted efforts to drive Black people out of midwestern cities in the years around the First World War; other notable examples occurred in Chicago in 1919 and Tulsa in 1921. Thousands of African Americans fled across the river to St. Louis during the violence on July 2, 1917, never to return. (St. Louis Globe-Democrat)

As the sun declined in the sky, the Black residents of East St. Louis fled the downtown. Under the cover of darkness now, the mob splintered into marauding bands and headed toward the Southside and the other islands of Black settlement in the city. The violence downtown was bravely chronicled by Carlos Hurd, a reporter for the Post-Dispatch, and his published accounts of the violence have provided the template for subsequent historians. But even counting the number of buildings burned, or how many Black families made their way through the dark and across the Free Bridge to St. Louis, or how many days the thunderhead smoke plume overhung the city as the fires set that night smoldered out, fails to fully measure the savagery of that night. It is another type of violence that haunts the edges of accounts such as Hurd’s. For many of the Black residents of East St. Louis, and particularly for Black women, it was the overnight violence that formed the basis of their recollection of the events of July 2. This violence was overlooked in Hurd’s printed accounts but was central to the account of Ida B. Wells and that of W.E.B. Du Bois and Martha Gruening, who traveled to East St. Louis from New York to investigate on behalf of the NAACP.³⁶

Wells heard a different story about the violence from the women she met at city hall on the morning of the fourth, and from others with whom she traveled back and forth across the river in the following days as they returned to their homes to see what could be salvaged from the remains and then made their way to a shelter in St. Louis to stay for the night. Emma Ballard had been in East St. Louis for seven years in the summer of 1917; she lived with her husband of twenty-four years and her four children in a “nicely furnished six-room house” with a piano. At around midnight on July 2, she heard a crowd of white men going up and down the street outside, calling “Come out, n—s!” She had her children gather their feather beds and pillows and dress in their best clothes, and they fled across the alley behind her house to the basement of a white neighbor, where they stayed until the morning. The mob outside was working its way along the blocks, one group setting fire to the houses from alleys behind while another waited in front to shoot at the Black families as they fled their burning houses.³⁷

Some of those who escaped their burning houses hid in the high grass of abandoned lots overnight or in warehouses near the train tracks, while others tried to make it across the pedestrian bridge to St. Louis; a group of whites had taken up positions on the east side to shoot them as they crossed west. Some tried to take refuge with white neighbors, some of whom they had known for years. Clarissa Lockhart ran from her burning house carrying only a dog and a pistol to a nearby saloon, where the saloon-keeper and his wife took her in for the night, hiding her behind a piano in the barroom. After they went to bed, the barkeeper and another man tried to rape her, but she “drew her pistol and drove them off.” She stayed there all day on the third, and then left for St. Louis on July 4. Under the cover of darkness, Lulu Suggs took her children to beg the white lady next door to let them hide under her house, but the woman said she had chickens in her side yard that she thought they would steal. She sent her mortally terrified neighbors back into the street, their lives apparently of less value to her than the comfort of a minstrel show jape about chicken-stealing Negroes. Mrs. Douglas Howard watched from her window as a child whom she had hired to go to the butcher was set upon by the mob. He had been riding a bicycle, and the mob knocked him off it and threw it over a fence. He ran into the house of some white people who lived on the street, but the mob threatened to burn the house down if they did not send the child out. “The tenants picked him up and threw him out in the street to the mob [w]here he was kicked and stamped on and beaten until they knocked out his teeth from his head and killed him.”³⁸

When they came upon empty houses, members of the mob took what they wanted and destroyed the rest. “When these cottages were found to be empty,” Wells later wrote, “the mob went into them, threw the mattresses, quilts, blankets and wearing apparel that was not new, on the floor and then cut, tore and trampled these things under foot and set fire to them. Pictures, bric-a-brac, everything that they could destroy, they did.” One Black woman returning later to see what she could salvage “found a few of her records, but her Victrola and most of the records had been taken away.” Riding in a Red Cross truck with Wells on the fourth of July was Mrs. Lulu Thomas, who had been in East St. Louis for six years, and whose husband worked on the Illinois-Central. She returned to her home to find her mattresses smoldering in the middle of the street, “her pictures and bed clothes, wearing clothes, and furniture all broken and thrown about,” and her white neighbor wearing her best dress.³⁹

The oral histories recorded by Wells (as well as those of Du Bois and Gruening) go on for page after unrelenting page. In them the representative victims of the mob are women and children, and they have names and stories—a young girl whose photo has been reproduced in several of the standard histories of East St. Louis above a caption noting simply that she lost her arm to a gunshot wound is identified as Mineola McGee, who was shot by soldiers as she ran back into her house after trying to escape; an old woman with thickly scarred arms, unidentified beneath her photo in most published accounts, is identified by Du Bois and Gruening as seventy-one-year-old Narcis Gurley, who had lived in East St. Louis for thirty years, and who was trapped with her elderly sister inside their burning house with the mob waiting outside to shoot them when they ran. “When the house began falling in, we ran out, terribly burned, and one white man said, ‘Let those old women alone,’” and so she lived.⁴⁰

Historians have generally followed the usage established by the US Congress, which labeled the violence in East St. Louis a “riot” in the hearings it conducted later that summer. But “massacre,” the term used by Du Bois and Gruening and Wells and drawn from the history of Indian killing and imperial violence, makes more sense. Consciously or not, the murderous white men of East St. Louis employed the tactics of their military forebears in the West—of Nathaniel Lyon on Bloody Island and, even more pointedly, William Harney at Ash Hollow in the Nebraska Territory. They burned their victims out and shot them as they ran. They drove them out of their houses and off their land. When these white men encountered resistance, they moved on in search of softer targets. This was an attack not just on Black voters or Black workers or Black migrants or Black “gun-toters”: it was an attack on Black families, on women and children, on the fabric of Black domestic life, on Black houses and bedsteads and photographs and pianos and phonographs and bric-a-brac, on Black wealth as much as Black labor. It was an attack on the possibility that Black people might have a future in East St. Louis, might have families and leave a legacy for another generation.

The journalists who traveled to the city following the massacre searched for a way to describe the mood on the streets in the stories they would publish on the morning of July 4. Hundreds of buildings were still smoldering, and the streets were strewn with paving stones that the mob had used to stone fleeing Blacks. Cahokia Creek was clogged with half-submerged bodies, the unenumerated dead. Those who had been hanged from the lampposts downtown had been cut down, but the bodies of some of those who had been shot down as they fled the mob, their hands up above their heads in death, were still in the street. A Guardsman stood guard near the charred remains of a man who had burned to death. No one was really certain how many had died in the burned-out neighborhoods. There were some soldiers on patrol in the streets, and white people began to come out of their houses in the morning and walk around and look at the damage. The plants were closed. It felt “like Mardi Gras,” the correspondent from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat finally concluded. A “roman holiday,” the pan-Africanist organizer Marcus Garvey termed it. The white people out in the streets seemed relaxed, unburdened, happy. Meanwhile, a constant stream of their Black neighbors were making their way across the bridge to St. Louis, on foot, dragging carts, or riding in wagons and trucks, carrying everything they could, bound for the shelters on the other side of the river, where they would stay and try to find family members from whom they had been separated by the mayhem, as well as a place to start over.⁴¹

Justice in the aftermath of the massacre was neither swift nor certain. Guard units from across the state of Illinois had been deployed on the streets of East St. Louis throughout the night of July 2 and finally, under the threat of court-martial, had begun to restore order. As they spent the third escorting Black refugees to the base of the pedestrian bridge, an observer might have been forgiven for thinking it was a state-sponsored removal. The St. Clair County prosecutor’s initial presentation to the grand jury was framed by the dry exasperation that pusillanimous men use to show they are in on the joke. His investigators had not found a single person, he told the court, who would admit to having recognized any of the participants in the massacre. Under pressure from the industrialists, who could scarcely conceal their fear that Black workers might stop coming to their plants from the South, the governor of Illinois appointed a special prosecutor. Eighty-two whites and twenty-three Blacks were originally indicted; in the end, nine whites and twelve Blacks served significant time in the Missouri State Penitentiary. Most of the whites were eventually charged with simple misdemeanors and simply fined; fourteen served short stretches in the county jail. Seven of the implicated policemen were allowed to draw lots to determine which three of them would take a misdemeanor charge and pay a fine. All in all, it was the kind of “justice” that reflected the vision of the young soldier Wells had encountered on the street when she first arrived in town, the one who told her that the Blacks were armed and killing innocent whites: righteous, vengeful, fearful, implacable, murderous, unrepentant whiteness.⁴²

Thanks mostly to the efforts of Illinois congressman William Rodenberg, the child of German immigrants who had been educated in St. Louis, and Missouri congressman Leonidas Dyer, who had represented the Twelfth District, including much of Black St. Louis, for almost twenty years and who would soon lead a long and bitter failed struggle to pass a federal anti-lynching bill, a congressional investigation chipped away a good deal of the surface of the “bad people on both sides” whitewash offered up in much of the press coverage of the massacre and the criminal trials. In keeping with the concerns of an era when progressive (“Progressive”) politicians focused on poor municipal governance and corporate excess, the congressional investigation emphasized the corruption of the East St. Louis city government and the avarice of the absentee industrialists in explaining the root causes of the violence. The wide-ranging and substantive congressional investigation has provided the primary basis for many subsequent accounts, including mine here. But it stopped short of contemplating the nature of the violence to which it continually referred. Both the perpetrators and the victims of the massacre go largely undiscussed—the perpetrators because their actions were assumed, according to the stimulus-response economism of Progressive social theory, to be predictable results of municipal vice and corporate greed, and the victims because, with a few notable exceptions, the committee did not ask them to tell their stories.⁴³

Writing in The Crisis in March 1918, W.E.B. Du Bois argued against the implication of the congressional report and a good deal of allied commentary that “the laborers of East St. Louis are innocent victims of the aggregation of capital.” Du Bois noted that he had repeatedly “inveighed against color discrimination by employers and the rich and well-to-do,” while knowing, as did every one of his “Negro readers,” that the union label on the cover “was an advertisement that No Negro’s hand is engaged in the printing of this magazine.” There was nothing indirect about Du Bois’s account of the origins of the violence: Black workers were not organized and included in collective bargaining, but instead, “by the deliberate advice and conspiracy of the labor leaders in East St. Louis, race prejudice was invoked as a weapon to secure labor shortage and monopoly.” Further: “Labor Unions in East St. Louis and neighboring towns sent 5000 men and women into the town and… they caught the crowd of Black workingmen between their places of employment and their homes and beat shot and burned them to death.” And further still: “We know perfectly well that what happened in East St. Louis may happen in a dozen other cities.” East St. Louis was a harbinger of the Red Summer of 1919 and the coming identification of calls for civil rights as a stalking horse for bolshevism—of the blurring together of industrial, political, and racial contagions.⁴⁴

Traced from East St. Louis, the problem of the white supremacy of the white working class runs like a red thread through some of Du Bois’s most important subsequent writing, which, to this day, is some of the most searching and insightful writing about the history and practice of racial capitalism we have. In his 1926 collection Darkwater, Du Bois published a pair of interlocked essays on racial capitalism and whiteness. The first, “The Souls of White Folk,” treats racial capitalism in light of the history of imperialism and the catastrophe of the First World War. The second, “Of Work and Wealth,” treats the history of the massacre in East St. Louis.

“Of them I am singularly clairvoyant,” Du Bois wrote of the subjects of “The Souls of White Folk.” “I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the workings of their entrails. I know their thought and they know that I know.… And yet they preach and strut and shout and threaten, crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped—ugly, human.” That’s only the first paragraph. The body of the essay focuses on “the discovery of personal whiteness” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the idea that certain people are white and that their whiteness entitles them to the “ownership of the earth,” and the idea, drawn from the Dred Scott decision and the history of St. Louis, “that a White Man is always right and a Black Man has no rights which a white man is bound to respect.” For Du Bois, “the Negro”—essentialized, stigmatized, instrumentalized—arose in response to the predicament of whiteness. “It is plain to modern white civilization that the subjection of the white working classes cannot much longer be maintained,” he wrote, “but there is a loophole. There is a chance for exploitation on an immense scale for inordinate profit, not simply to the very rich, but to the middle class and to the laborers. This chance lies in the exploitation of darker peoples.… In these dark lands ‘industrial development’ may repeat in exaggerated form every horror of the industrial history of Europe, from slavery and rape to disease and maiming, with only one test of success—dividends!”⁴⁵

“There are no races,” Du Bois wrote, as he turned his attention to East St. Louis, “in the sense of great, separate, pure breeds of men, differing in attainment, development, and capacity.” Rather, he continued, there were great groups with common histories, common cultures, and, yes, common ancestry. But more and more, these groups were organized by their place in the imperial order: the whites who claimed ownership, the middle classes who did their bidding, and the darker peoples of the world, who worked at the bottom. Capitalism and Negrofication were mutually—dialectically—constitutive of the modern world. And for Du Bois, just as the First World War represented a crisis within the imperial history of racial capitalism—“the jealous and avaricious struggle for the largest share in exploiting darker races”—the massacre in East St. Louis represented a crisis within the emergent mode of industrial organization. “Westward, dear God, the fire of Thy Mad World crimsons our Heaven,” he wrote of the war in Europe. “Our answering Hell rolls eastward from St. Louis.”⁴⁶

Both “The Souls of White Folk” and “Of Work and Wealth” are full of metaphors of whiteness as a form of ownership. Whiteness is “the ownership of the earth” and “title to the universe,” it is a “bequest” and a form of “wealth.” In treating whiteness as a form of property, Du Bois was able to understand how it was that people who were in no danger of starving themselves could lash out with such violence at those who actually were. “What they feared,” he wrote, “was not deprivation of the things they were used to and the shadow of poverty, but rather the definite death of their rising dreams.” For them, whiteness was a form of capital, and with capital came the promise of endless augmentation. For Du Bois, there was no sense in a critique of capitalism and class (or even what the pundits have come to call “economic anxiety” in our own feelings-first age) that was not also a critique of imperialism and white supremacy. In contrast to Du Bois’s more familiar formulation, “the wages of whiteness,” these essays put forward a notion of racial privilege that is built up over time and that emphasizes the historical and structural dimensions as well as the psychic and performative ones, what Du Bois terms “personal whiteness.”⁴⁷

Du Bois’s essay on the East St. Louis massacre, “Of Work and Wealth,” like the accompanying essay “The Souls of White Folk,” is a brilliant exposition of a crisis of racial capitalism: of the ways in which white solidarity and entitlement (the broadly classless “imperial ownership” promised at the 1904 World’s Fair) were threatened by the insistent demands of Black freedom (or, failing that, simply Black jobs). Like his essay on the First World War, it concludes with a pointed threat. Either the imperialists and the industrialists and their racially obsessed adjutants could reorganize the extraction, production, and distribution of the bounty of the earth in a manner more just, or they could face the uprising of those whose entitlement had been stolen by them. “This is not the end of world war—it is but the beginning,” he wrote of East St. Louis. On July 28, 1917, as many as fifteen thousand Blacks marched silently down Fifth Avenue in New York to protest the violence in East St. Louis, in a protest organized by the NAACP. Among those at the head of the column was W.E.B. Du Bois.⁴⁸

And yet these dark and lyrical essays seem somehow to miss the point. The essays as a whole are like the sentences I have quoted from them, but more so: oracular, symbolic, portentous, written from on high: “the black man… born in a house of fear… slipping stealthily northward to escape hunger and insult, the hand of oppression, and the shadow death.” Du Bois seems to search in them (and in the poetry and allegory interleaved with the essays throughout Darkwater) for the words to convey the fury of the mob and the terror of its victims. Perhaps Du Bois had little choice but to try to sound the depth of the catastrophe by stretching language and image to its limit. “Everywhere are brick kennels—tall, black, and red chimneys, tongues of flame. The ground is littered with cars and iron, tracks and trucks, boxes and crates, metals and coal and rubber. Nature-defying cranes, grim elevators rise above pile on pile of black and grimy lumber. And ever below is the water—wide and silent, gray-brown, and yellow… here then was staged every element for human tragedy, every element of the modern economic paradox.”⁴⁹

And yet, compare that to the plainspoken account of Ida B. Wells with which we began.

I accosted the lone individual in soldier’s uniform at the depot, a mere boy with a gun, and asked him if the governor was in town. When he said no, he had gone to Washington the night before, I asked how the situation was and he said, “bad.” I asked what was the trouble and he said, “The Negroes won’t let the whites alone. They killed seven yesterday and three already this morning.” It was only 7 o’clock in the morning and I decided he was lying, so said nothing more on that score.

Or to this, also from Ida B. Wells:

Mrs. Flake is a widow with three children, 11, 8 and 6 years old. She is a laundress who came to East St. Louis four year ago from Jackson, Tenn. She took care of her little family by taking in washing, and she worked from Monday morning until Saturday night at the ironing board. She too had three rooms full of nice furniture. Both of the two front rooms having nice rugs on the floor, a brass bedstead and other furniture to correspond. She had about a hundred dollars-worth of furniture ruined, fifty dollars-worth of clothing and about fifty dollars more of bedding, mattresses, etc. The mob had taken a phonograph for which she had paid $15.00 and twenty-five records for which she had paid 75 cents and $1.00 each. She got away with her children before the mob reached her house and she too came back that morning to get some clothes for herself and children. The mob hadn’t left much, but out of the debris, she was able to pack one trunk with some clothing and quilts for herself and children. It was in this house that I picked up one child’s new shoe and although we looked the house over, we couldn’t find the other. In its spasm of wanton destruction, the mob had doubtless carried it away. Mrs. Flake also had life insurance policies for herself and children, but she couldn’t find any of the books. She too had already found a flat in St. Louis and was only too anxious to get away from the town where such awful things were transpiring, and where not even widows and children were safe from the fury of the mob bent on killing everything with black skins.

In the end, violence like that in East St. Louis in 1917, like that of US history, exceeds analysis, even the analysis of as brilliant a thinker and prodigiously talented a writer as Du Bois. The violence and the loss reside instead in Wells’s straightforward recounting of the scene she found in the city: A mere boy with a gun. A lie. A desecrated home. A child’s new shoe. The world left behind by those who had come north in search of a better life as they pushed on into the terrifying unknown of the night, crossing the bridge to St. Louis.⁵⁰