The East St. Louis race riot was touched off by an influx of Southern blacks into what was already an industrial slum, short of housing, transit, and recreation facilities. But the pivotal issue was jobs. Many blacks had been imported by employers eager to drive down labor costs and to break strikes. A strike was called in April at an aluminum plant when union whites were fired and blacks hired in their places. Although the strike was crushed by a combination of militia, injunctions, and both black and white strikebreakers, the union blamed its defeat on the blacks. A union meeting in May demanded that “East St. Louis must remain a white man’s town.” A riot followed during which buildings were demolished and solitary blacks were attacked and beaten. Harassments and beatings continued through June.
On July 1, in the late evening, a group of whites in a Ford drove through the black district, shooting into homes. When the car made a second foray, the blacks fired back. The police sent a squad car, unfortunately also a Ford, to investigate. Thinking it was the same car, some Negroes fired on it again, killing two policemen. The next day, as reports of the shooting spread, a new riot began. Streetcars were stopped, blacks were pulled off, stoned, clubbed, kicked, and shot. Mobs thousands strong roamed the streets chanting: “Get a Nigger, get another.” Most blacks were terrified into passivity, though at one point about a hundred armed men barricaded themselves in a building and defended themselves. In this instance, when the whites demanded that the militia protect them, the militia refused, instead gave safe-conduct out of the city to the embattled blacks. The official casualty figures were 9 whites and 39 blacks killed, hundreds wounded, but police estimated black deaths at 100. Over 300 buildings were destroyed. Four whites and eleven blacks were charged with homicide. All charges against the police (some of whom had abetted the riot) were dropped on condition that three policemen plead guilty to rioting. The officers drew lots to decide who would make the pleas, and the others paid the fines, a total of $150.
The account below was written by W. E. B. DuBois and Martha Gruening, who were commissioned by the NAACP to investigate. “Massacre at East St. Louis,” Crisis, XIV (1917), 222–38. Many of the incidents they reported, and others as well, are included in the testimony taken by a Congressional Committee which investigated the riot: Report of the Special Committee authorized by Congress to Investigate the East St. Louis Riots, H. R. Doc. No. 1231, 65th Congress, 2nd Session (July 15, 1918). See Elliot M. Rudwick: Race Riot at East St. Louis, July 2, 1917 (1964).
A Negro, his head laid open by a great stone-cut, had been dragged to the mouth of the alley on Fourth Street and a small rope was being put about his neck. There was joking comment on the weakness of the rope, and everyone was prepared for what happened when it was pulled over a projecting cable box, a short distance up the pole. It broke, letting the Negro tumble back to his knees, and causing one of the men who was pulling on it to sprawl on the pavement.
An old man, with a cap like those worn by street car conductors, but showing no badge of car service, came out of his house to protest. “Don’t you hang that man on this street,” he shouted. “I dare you to.” He was pushed angrily away, and a rope, obviously strong enough for its purpose, was brought.
Right here I saw the most sickening incident of the evening. To put the rope around the Negro’s neck, one of the lynchers stuck his fingers inside the gaping scalp and lifted the Negro’s head by it, literally bathing his hand in the man’s blood.
“Get hold, and pull for East St. Louis!” called a man with a black coat and a new straw hat, as he seized the other end of the rope. The rope was long, but not too long for the number of hands that grasped it, and this time the Negro was lifted to a height of about seven feet from the ground. The body was left hanging there.…
A Negro weighing 300 pounds came out of the burning line of dwellings just north and east of the Southern freight house. His hands were elevated and his yellow face was speckled with the awful fear of death.
“Get him!” they cried. Here was a chance to see suffering, something that bullets didn’t always make.
So a man in the crowd clubbed his revolver and struck the Negro in the face with it. Another dashed an iron bolt between the Negro’s eyes. Still another stood near and battered him with a rock.
Then the giant Negro toppled to the ground. “This is the way,” cried one. He ran back a few paces, then ran at the prostrate black at full speed and made a flying leap.
His heels struck right in the middle of the battered face. A girl stepped up and struck the bleeding man with her foot. The blood spurted onto her stockings and men laughed and grunted.
No amount of suffering awakened pity in the hearts of the rioters. Mr. Wood tells us that … A few Negroes, caught on the street, were kicked and shot to death. As flies settled on their terrible wounds, the gaping-mouthed mobsmen forbade the dying blacks to brush them off. Girls with blood on their stockings helped to kick in what had been black faces of the corpses on the street.
The first houses were fired shortly after 5 o’clock. These were back of Main Street, between Broadway and Railroad Avenue. Negroes were “flushed” from the burning houses, and ran for their lives, screaming and begging for mercy. A Negro crawled into a shed and fired on the white men. Guardsmen started after him, but when they saw he was armed, turned to the mob and said:
“He’s armed, boys. You can have him. A white man’s life is worth the lives of a thousand Negroes.”
A few minutes later matches were applied to hastily gathered debris piled about the corner of one of three small houses 100 feet from the first fired. These were back of the International Harvester Company’s plant. Eight Negroes fled into the last of the houses and hid in the basement. When roof and walls were about to fall in, an aged Negro woman came out. She was permitted to walk to safety. Three Negro women followed and were not fired upon. Then came four Negro men, and 100 shots were fired at them. They fell. No one ventured out to see if they were dead, as the place had come to resemble No Man’s Land, with bullets flying back and forth and sparks from the fires falling everywhere.
A Negro who crawled on hands and knees through the weeds was a target for a volley. The mob then burned back to Main Street and another Negro was spied on a Main Street car. He was dragged to the street and a rioter stood over him, shooting.
The crowd then turned to Black Valley. Here the greatest fire damage was caused. Flames soon were raging and the shrieking rioters stood about in the streets, made lurid by the flames, and shot and beat Negroes as they fled from their burning homes.
They pursued the women who were driven out of the burning homes, with the idea, not of extinguishing their burning clothing, but of inflicting added pain, if possible. They stood around in groups, laughing and jeering, while they witnessed the final writhings of the terror and pain wracked wretches who crawled to the streets to die after their flesh had been cooked in their own homes.
Mrs. Cox saw a Negro beheaded with a butcher’s knife by someone in a crowd standing near the Free Bridge. The crowd had to have its jest. So its members laughingly threw the head over one side of the bridge and the body over the other.
A trolley-car came along. The crowd forced its inmates to put their hands out the window. Colored people thus recognized were hauled out of the car to be beaten, trampled on, shot. A little twelve-year-old colored girl fainted—her mother knelt beside her. The crowd surged in on her. When its ranks opened up again Mrs. Cox saw the mother prostrate with a hole as large as one’s fist in her head.…
It was Mrs. Cox, too, who saw the baby snatched from its mother’s arms and thrown into the flames, to be followed afterwards by the mother. This last act was the only merciful one on the part of the crowd.
Lulu Suggs is twenty-four years old, and has lived in East St. Louis since April. She tells of seeing children thrown into the fire. She says: “My house was burned and all the contents. My husband was at Swift’s the night of the riot. I, with about one hundred women and children, stayed in a cellar all night, Monday night. The School for Negroes on Winstanly Avenue was burned to the ground. When there was a big fire the rioters would stop to amuse themselves, and at such time I would peep out and actually saw children thrown into the fire. Tuesday came and with that the protection of the soldiers. We escaped to St. Louis.”
Testimony of Beatrice Deshong, age 26 years:
“I saw the mob robbing the homes of Negroes and then set fire to them. The soldiers stood with folded arms and looked on as the houses burned. I saw a Negro man killed instantly by a member of the mob, men, small boys, and women and little girls all were trying to do something to injure the Negroes. I saw a colored woman stripped of all of her clothes except her waist. I don’t know what became of her. The police and the soldiers were assisting the mob to kill Negroes and to destroy their homes. I saw the mob hang a colored man to a telegraph pole and riddle him with bullets. I saw the mob chasing a colored man who had a baby in his arms. The mob was shooting at him all of the time as long as I saw him. I ran for my life. I was nearly exhausted when a white man in the block opened the door of his warehouse and told me to go in there and hide. I went in and stayed there all night. The mob bombarded the house during the night, but I was not discovered nor hurt. The mob stole the jewelry of Negroes and used axes and hatchets to chop up pianos and furniture that belonged to them. The mob was seemingly well arranged to do their desperate work. I recognized some of the wealthy people’s sons and some of the bank officials in the mob. They were as vile as they could be.”