Never Been a Time (23 page)

Tripp found an open drugstore that had a telephone and called city hall and the police station and asked that “all available men” be sent to Collinsville Avenue. Tripp also called the mayor's office from the drugstore and asked that the saloons be closed. Mollman told him the order had already gone out.

In a report that was alarming, false, and probably malicious, a policeman told Tripp over the phone that there was bad trouble up on St. Clair Avenue near the stockyards—that black vigilantes were on the march. Tripp rushed to the scene. The few blacks who remained in the area were running for their lives. By the time Tripp had returned downtown after chasing those phantom vigilantes, another black man had been killed, bringing the death toll for the day to more than half a dozen.
³⁰

The official order to close the saloons had come from the mayor at about noon, but it took an hour or two to shut them down and empty all of them out. Ironically, closing the saloons—a reasonable, perhaps inevitable step, and one of the few decisive acts the mayor took that day—may have backfired. According to Robert Boylan of the
Globe-Democrat
, the drunks and “floaters” and petty criminals who spent their days in nickel-a-shot barrelhouses, “men who would do something, legal or illegal, to get a little money and then drink… men who didn't want to work,” some of them drawn from St. Louis by the cheap liquor and lax law enforcement of East St. Louis, were forced out onto the street in the heat of the early afternoon. He estimated that ten rough saloons within a couple of blocks of Fourth and Broadway contributed about a hundred people to the melee. Boylan called the area “the storm center.”
³¹

As the afternoon wore on and the temperature rose into the middle eighties, four soldiers came at a kind of ragged march down Main Street toward the city hall complex, half-guarding, half-escorting two black men, one of them with a bloody head. Following close behind them were dozens of white women wearing garish blood-red lipstick and slathered-on makeup and mascara. They were dressed in kimonos or short dresses or cheap oriental pajamas or filmy slips, shouting and gesturing obscenely at men on the sidewalk. Some of them were chanting “Left, right, left, right,” like drill sergeants leading a march.
³²

By then, dozens of blacks had been pulled off of streetcars on Collinsville Avenue and beaten, hit with bricks and paving stones, and shot. Sparks flew as rioters yanked the overhead trolleys loose from charged wires so the streetcar could not move as they attacked the passengers. From time to time some of the rioters would step aside and rest while others took their place. The men taking a break stood next to soldiers, and the two groups chatted and joked. The soldiers did nothing to stop the mayhem.

The only time Paul Anderson saw a soldier do something halfway decent came later in the day, after a black man had been beaten to the ground and was lying unconscious on his side, curled up like a baby. Several men stood over him, one of them with a pistol. A young soldier held his hands out, in an imploring gesture, and said “Now, boys, you've done enough to this man. Leave him alone. He's all in now.” One of the rioters then knelt on the pavement and shot the black man in the back of the head.
³³

To at least one observer in the middle of the East St. Louis massacre, many of the rioters seemed in an odd way almost calm as they did the most horrible things. It was “not a wild riot,” not an emotional catalyst, said James Kirk, editor of the
East St. Louis Daily Journal
, who watched the brutality for hours from his window above Collinsville Avenue. He recalled that men and, shockingly to him, women “stood around there and you wouldn't know they were agitated at all, and that's what made it even more heinous” as they attacked black men and women and children, knocked them down and hit them, shot them and left them dead in the street. Kirk said, “As quick as a Negro would show up, maybe a young man or a boy, they would say, ‘there's a nigger,' and immediately they would all start for him, to perform their execution, let him lie there, and then go and stand on the corner again and hobnob with the police and militiamen.”
³⁴

By refusing to intervene in the slaughter of blacks, the militiamen, supposed authority figures even if beneath the uniforms they were frightened farm boys, along with the police, became part of the complex synergism of mass violence. In effect, their inaction gave the rioters permission to do their worst. The crowd of whites was turning into a mob, a group willing and even eager to commit atrocities that most of them as individuals would shy away from. Sociologists describe what happens in violent mobs as an “emergent norm” situation. As a new norm of behavior emerged in East St. Louis, the mob became, in a sense, a radical ad-hoc community with its own rules and rituals and uniformed guardians of order. As the terrible day wore on, the guardians became more permissive, the rules less restrictive, and the rituals increasingly brutal.
³⁵

About two P.M. , rioters began torching flimsy railroad shacks on the Mississippi River bottomland west of the South End, near the Free Bridge. The scattered fires, fanned by a light wind from the west, slowly licked eastward into rickety, overcrowded rows of flats and small industrial buildings and warehouses.

Charles Roger looked to the west from the chemical plant he ran at Sixth Street and Walnut Avenue south of downtown, and he could hardly believe his eyes. The fires were about two blocks away, and the smoke was dark with creosote from railroad ties. As he looked down Walnut toward the railroad yards and sandy bottomland along the river he saw half a dozen white men emerge through the smoke. The men were jeering and throwing bottles and stones at the blacks who ran out of the buildings to escape the fires. For the moment, the whites seemed content to see the homes destroyed and let the blacks escape with their lives. Roger saw no guns, although he could hear sporadic gunfire from other parts of the city. An hour or two later, he saw the first soldiers, not that their arrival did anything to stop the rioters.

Roger had been born and raised in Scotland but he had spent half of his forty-nine years in the United States, the past seven managing a chemical plant and freight company in East St. Louis. He thought he knew the place well, but he had never expected to see anything like this, and it shocked and frightened him.
¹

In front of his building, three or four black men huddled on the sidewalk along Walnut and watched the jeering whites. Suddenly, another black man came running toward them from the east, gripping a pistol in his right
hand. He yelled something as he approached and waved with the pistol toward a small gang of white men who were chasing him. They were less than a block behind him, shouting racial curses.

The black men all began running south toward the Free Bridge. Roger figured they could escape across the river, if they could fight their way through the whites who, Roger had heard, were massed at the bridge, beating blacks and forcing them at gunpoint to jump into the deep, churning Mississippi. It was a plunge few could expect to survive,

Roger turned away for a moment, horrified at what he had seen that day, fearful of what would happen to the businesses he had been put in charge of—$300,000 worth of plant and warehouses—and worried about the lives and homes of the people who worked for him. The plant had its own hauling company that delivered freight by horse-drawn wagons, and one of his teamsters was black. Understandably, that man had not reported to work that morning, and Roger could only hope that he was safe.

An old African American pensioner who did odd jobs around the company's horse yards and stables had come in early, as usual, but as soon as Roger learned that blacks were being yanked off of streetcars, beaten, and shot just a few blocks to the north, he managed to get a cab to come to the plant and take the terrified old man to St. Louis. Then the taxis stopped running.

Most of his other employees had gone home, or never came in. A half dozen remained. They had blankets and fire extinguishers and hoses and their main task was to protect the plant, wooden sheds, outbuildings, and equipment. Roger was thankful that he had gotten the horses out of the stable and headed across the river with the teamsters first thing that morning, after he had driven to work from his house north of downtown and seen the angry men in the streets. He had expected trouble, but the chaos in East St. Louis was worse than anything he could have imagined. It was like war.
²

A few blocks north, in the heart of downtown, Colonel Tripp received a report that blacks, some of them armed, had holed up in a nearby two-story brick house after a black man had been shot in the street. The house was surrounded by a small mob of whites, who were gearing up for an assault. Tripp turned to Fekete, the young assistant city attorney, and said “The thing to do is to go to that building and get the colored people out.” Tripp and half a dozen troops walked down to the brick house. The soldiers held the whites at rifle point until they surrendered their guns. The blacks were finally coaxed
out of the building and Tripp confiscated their revolvers. There were no policemen in sight.
³

The soldiers escorted the blacks to city hall. A few said they would not stay in East St. Louis for any amount of money, and Fekete drove a carload of them across the river to St. Louis, which, at the request of the St. Louis chapter of the NAACP, had opened its Municipal Lodging House, a shelter for the poor and homeless, to refugees from East St. Louis. Hundreds of NAACP members and other volunteers took refugees into their homes.
⁴

By midafternoon, more than one hundred soldiers had arrived in East St. Louis, and Tripp had spread most of them across downtown with vague orders to “maintain order.” Despite the smoke rising from the South End, there seemed to be a lull in the rioting downtown and Tripp and Fekete had reason to believe, at least for a while, that their limited show of force and the mere presence of scattered troops had begun to calm the riot down without any further killing. It turned out they were merely in the eye of the storm. The colonel went to another meeting with city officials and businessmen at the downtown offices of the chamber of commerce. The meeting lasted for almost three hours as Colonel Tripp and Mayor Mollman once again went back and forth about the wisdom of declaring martial law. As the arguments rolled on, fires set by men carrying torches made from oily rags spread to the south and east of downtown, and the beatings at the streetcar stops along Collinsville Avenue resumed after rioters saw that the soldiers who had recently arrived were standing around with their rifles slung on their backs doing nothing. A block from city hall, a black man who had been yanked off a streetcar tried to run away and a mob of about five hundred whites surrounded him and fought each other to get close enough to beat and kick the man and hit him with cobblestones and pipes and anything they could get their hands on. He was knocked to the ground and unable to get up. The crowd closed in, and he was kicked unconscious, and then kicked some more, even after it appeared that he was dead.
⁵

About three o'clock, a white mob downtown began chanting, “Get the mayor! Get the mayor!” The chant would rise and then die down and then rise again, sometimes with a variation, “March to city hall! March to city hall.” Several thousand men now were surging through the downtown streets, some of them
haranguing the others, urging them to take the city back from the “nigger-loving politicians.” Many just watched. Reporter G. E. Popkess couldn't find anyone preaching tolerance and sanity. At this point, the peacemakers and the fearful had gone home. Popkess heard a rumor that someone had been beheaded. He was not able to confirm that, but he knew that at least a dozen blacks were dead by late afternoon, including at least one woman.
⁶

Paul Y. Anderson called the
Post-Dispatch
office around three P.M. and told rewrite man Carlos Hurd what he had seen. When he had finished with the horrifying details, he left the drugstore where he had used the phone and waded back into the riot. He saw a pawnshop with a broken window and a kicked-in door. Inside, white men were grabbing guns off the shelves and running out with them. One man had a satchel full of cheap pistols and was handing them out. Anderson heard a national guardsman cheering on a white rioter who was holding a revolver. He didn't like black people either, the guardsman said.
⁷

Across the river in downtown St. Louis, in the creaky old
Post-Dispatch
building on North Broadway, Carlos Hurd hung up the phone and looked out the window to the east in dismay. The Free Bridge was jammed with people fleeing East St. Louis on foot and by car, and clouds of black smoke rose above the city.

Hurd, who was the top rewrite man on the evening shift, had been in the office for a couple of hours. He had seen the smoke above the river from his house forty-odd blocks to the west in the comfortable residential area called the Central West End. Hurd's wife was out of town, and he was eager to get the news, so he came in early. Already one of the best-known reporters in America at a time when print journalists could be stars on a national level, Hurd had scooped them all five years earlier when his first interviews from sea with the survivors of the
Titanic
shipwreck appeared in Joseph Pulitzer's two major dailies—the
New York World
and the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
. The survivors had terrible tales to tell, and Hurd interviewed them in secret aboard the rescue ship, the
Carpathia
, defying the ban on interviews by the Cunard steamship company. His wife hid the notes in her corset, and he wrote the story in his cabin, wrapped it in oilcloth, and, in New York harbor as the
Carpathia
was hooking up to tow boats, he tossed it to Pulitzer employees in a speedboat.