Never Been a Time (29 page)

Eubanks also looked into the charge that blacks had rallied to the ringing of a church bell. The dearth of willing black witnesses, Eubanks said, made it difficult for him to say for sure whether or not a church bell had rung shortly before the police were shot. His impression, however, was that a bell rang at a church in the South End to signal the end to Sunday evening services,
not as a rallying call. But he also conceded that blacks believed so strongly that an invasion by an armed white mob was imminent that the bell could have served as an alert whether it was intended that way or not.

When asked his opinion on why a mob of blacks with guns were standing at Tenth and Bond around midnight, Eubanks said, “Well, my opinion is that they got together for the purpose of protecting their neighborhood.”
⁶

City police also arrested and jailed several black leaders on riot charges, although the man who was widely accused of being the leader of the blacks who had shot Coppedge and Wodley, Leroy Bundy, was nowhere to be found. Among those arrested (although he was later released) was Dr. Lyman Bluitt, who, along with Bundy, repeatedly had warned city officials that the wave of attacks on blacks could well lead to racial violence, and who had worked through the night of the riot at St. Mary's hospital to save the lives of both whites and blacks. According to the
East St. Louis Daily Journal
, federal agents were questioning black leaders like Bluitt about suspicions that the “uprising” by blacks had been part of “a well-organized plot” by German agents, working with a “clique” of the radical Industrial Workers of the World, “to bring about a revolution … which would materially affect East St. Louis industries manufacturing war supplies.” In fact, the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation—later known as the FBI—did look into suspicions that enemy agents or nationally organized political radicals had played a role in the riot, and found no evidence to support the allegations.
⁷

The death of Wodley, who never regained consciousness, would bring the toll of the dead to at least forty-eight, including thirty-nine black men, women, and children. But that figure was widely considered to be absurdly low. There had been many reports of blacks being chased onto the Free Bridge and forced over the side into the swift and deep and muddy waters of the Mississippi. There were also reports of black corpses being thrown off the bridge. No bodies were recovered from the river, which means little. Not just drowning victims and suicides but horses, steamships, automobiles, and, in modern times, even helicopters and their occupants have been known to disappear after plunging into the treacherous Mississippi at St. Louis.
⁸

Because thousands of blacks had arrived in the city in the past three years, many of them undocumented, and thousands had fled during the riot, many of them never to return, it would have been virtually impossible to determine who was missing and presumed dead. The NAACP and the
Chicago Defender
, both
of which had investigators on the scene interviewing survivors shortly after the riot, estimated the death toll at between one and two hundred. Reporters for the black weekly, the
St. Louis Argus
, and several reporters for white dailies agreed that the death toll exceeded one hundred. The St. Clair County grand jury that would later convene would set the death toll at close to one hundred.
⁹

On the morning of July 3, as John Eubanks was rounding up and arresting the sons of his friends and neighbors, the smoldering riot would, from time to time, burst again into flame. Reverend George Allison had been called to city hall to help with the roughly twelve hundred refugees camped in and around it, and occasionally he heard reports of another attack on blacks, or another building torched. “They were burning property as late as three o'clock in the afternoon of the Third,” he said later.
¹⁰

The Red Cross was trying to help the displaced blacks, providing emergency food and medicine and taking as many as practicable to larger emergency centers across the river in St. Louis. Husbands were separated from wives and mothers from children and didn't know whether they were dead or alive. Allison kept track of some of these cases of missing relatives, and decided a few weeks after the riot that the death toll was one hundred at the absolute lowest, and could have been as high as three hundred. After many tours of the riot areas, he decided that many black bodies, particularly those of small children who were still missing, simply had been cremated. Allison bemoaned the fact that there had been no systematic checking of missing people with police reports from other cities and states. (After some study, the state fire marshal remained unconvinced that any bodies, no matter how tiny, had completely gone up in smoke.)
¹¹

On July 3, the East St. Louis chamber of commerce met and formed, basically from its own membership, the Committee of One Hundred to help the city recover from the riot. There were only two members from labor groups, and no blacks. There were, however, plenty of men with close ties to the Aluminum Ore Company and to Swift and Armour, as well as to railroads that later admitted luring blacks North with false promises. There were many with ties to the thoroughly corrupt bipartisan political machine and its farcical legal system as well. The membership of the group included lawyers who would represent accused killers and policemen in trials growing out of the riots.
¹²

Early that afternoon, in response to prodding from an editor, reporter Roy Albertson of the
St. Louis Republic
drove out to Tenth and Market, near where the two policemen had been shot fatally, and asked about numerous reports of carloads of white men joyriding through the neighborhood shooting into homes. Albertson called his editor and told him he had checked out the rumor, which had been reported in other papers, and it was untrue. No one he talked to said they had heard or seen anything like that. It was later revealed that he had only interviewed white people.
¹³

Three hundred miles to the north of East St. Louis, the Chicago morning papers on July 3 were full of news about the riot. The Negro Fellowship League met in a packed library on State Street at nine thirty A.M. and passed a resolution condemning the rioters and calling for a biracial conference to try and breach the terrible gulf that had opened up between the races. At the end of the meeting, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, who had presided, said the participants could sing “America” or “The Star Spangled Banner” if they wished. No one sang a note. A total of $8.65 was collected to send Wells-Barnett to East St. Louis as an investigator. She left the next day.
¹⁴

On the afternoon of July 3, Governor Frank Lowden arrived in East St. Louis and toured the city. The next day, he said, “I have been weighted down since I visited those hospitals last night, since I saw those charred ruins of homes, since I saw the havoc this riot wrought… A stain rests upon Illinois—a stain that will remain … We in the North have been in the habit of frequently criticizing our Southern friends for their treatment of the Negro … I tell you that I know of no outrages that have been perpetrated in the South that surpass the conditions I found in East St. Louis, in our beloved state.”
¹⁵

More than one thousand troops were in place by the evening of July 3, enough to insure that rioters and arsonists were dealt with swiftly and decisively, and, except for very minor incidents, the riot was over. A stunned peace came over the city, and for the next week or so there was very little crime.

On the evening of July 4, Ida B. Wells-Barnett took an overnight train from Chicago to East St. Louis. She arrived early the next morning and quickly was in the streets, despite a warning by a black conductor in her Pullman car that she might be killed. A short, matronly looking woman in her mid-fifties with four children, Wells-Barnett was a fearless veteran of the fight for federal antilynching legislation who had documented the murder of blacks in some of the most virulently racist regions of the South. Refusing to
be intimidated because of her gender or race, she had withdrawn in anger from the NAACP after it became clear that she and other outspoken blacks were considered too radical for leadership positions by the white men and women who dominated the organization in its early years.

In the three-block walk up Missouri Avenue from the rail station to city hall through what was once a lively black urban neighborhood and now was a burnt-out wasteland, she did not see a single black person. She asked a young white soldier standing on a corner how things were. “Bad,” he replied. What, she asked, was the trouble? “The Negroes won't let the whites alone,” he said bitterly. “They killed seven yesterday and three already this morning.”

Wells-Barnett met dozens of black female refugees at city hall, and helped them with their few belongings as the Red Cross and other relief agencies carried them across the river in St. Louis, where thousands of black men, women, and children stood and sat and lay in and around the Municipal Lodging House, where food and medical treatment were available.
¹⁶
Many of the stories she heard were devastatingly similar. The victims were ordinary black housewives and mothers whose husbands had low-paying jobs, or were looking for work. Many of the women took in laundry or worked as maids. Wives and children had been separated from their husbands on July 2, and they had survived by hiding in basements and garages and sheds and open fields, sometimes—but rarely—helped by white neighbors. Most of them had scrimped for years to be able to afford such necessities as a bedstead or a dining room table, and now everything was gone.

“Every which way we turned there were women and children and men, dazed over the thing that had come to them and unable to tell what it was all about,” Wells-Barnett wrote later. “They lined the streets or were standing out on the grassy banks of the lawns that surrounded the city hall or stood in groups discussing their experiences… these people who had suddenly been robbed of everything except what they stood in.”
¹⁷

At the end of a long, exhausting, and embittering day going back and forth between the two cities, Wells-Barnett discovered there was no place in East St. Louis for her to stay. She picked up her suitcase and took a streetcar to St. Louis, where, despite her protests, she was swept up in a group of East St. Louis blacks who were taken in a police wagon to the Municipal Lodging House for mandatory vaccination against smallpox. A teacher from Chicago who was working as a volunteer at the vaccination center recognized her,
believed her when she said she had already been vaccinated for smallpox in considerably more sanitary conditions, and helped her get out of the lodging house and to a home in a black neighborhood where she could spend the night.

In her riot report, Wells-Barnett quoted extensively from Carlos Hurd's first-person account of the hanging in the middle of downtown to illustrate the horror of the events of July 2. She returned to Chicago on July 8, and she and a number of black and liberal leaders in that city and across the country joined in a plea to the president of the United States to initiate a federal investigation of the riot in East St. Louis. The White House and the office of the attorney general were inundated with telegrams and letters calling for a federal investigation and federal action, at long last, on antilynching legislation.

The East St. Louis race riot also triggered a national debate about race and the labor movement after it came up on July 6 at Carnegie Hall, where former president Theodore Roosevelt got into a ferocious argument with Samuel Gompers, the head of the American Federation of Labor. The occasion was an official greeting of a delegation from the revolutionary Provisional Government of Russia.

“Before we speak of justice for others,” said Roosevelt, “it behooves us to do justice within our own household. Within a week there has been an
appalling outbreak of savagery in a race riot at East St. Louis, a race riot for which, as far as we can see, there was no real provocation.” Gompers reacted to Roosevelt's remarks by insisting that there had been plenty of provocation. He blamed the violence on “reactionary” employers who had imported black strikebreakers from the South. “The luring of these colored men to East St. Louis is on a par with the behavior of the brutal, reactionary and tyrannous forces that existed in Old Russia,” he declared.

Samuel Gompers

Roosevelt stirred restlessly in his chair as Gompers spoke, and when the labor leader was through the former president jumped up and shook his fist in Gompers's face and condemned him for trying to justify the riot. He thundered, “I am not willing that a meeting called to commemorate the birth of democracy in Russia shall even seem to have expressed or to have accepted apologies for the brutal infamies imposed on colored people.”

Much of the large crowd, which had initially cheered the popular expresident, booed and hissed as his fist came so close to Gompers that it appeared to many that he had punched him in the mouth. But then another part of the audience began cheering, and the call and response of boos and cheers went back and forth as if the event was a college football game.