Race riots by Jean Buchanan

100th ANNIVERSARY

EAST ST. LOUIS RIOTS OF 1917

t no point in its nearly 140 years of publication has the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had to tell its readers of more savage events within the region than those that played out on July 2, 1917, in East St. Louis. With a barbaric and even bloodthirsty rage, white mobs killed dozens of African-Americans. The victims were pulled from streetcars, burned out of their homes, stoned in the streets and hanged in broad daylight. Dozens, and perhaps more than 100, were slain. “Men were killed simply because they were black, and the only limit on the slaughter was the ability of the crowd to find Negroes,” the Post-Dispatch reported at the time. Scores of homes were destroyed. Hundreds fled the city, crossing the Eads Bridge to St. Louis under military protection, never to return.

The riots erupted following months of labor-related tension. Blacks from the South had been lured to the region by the promise of jobs, only to learn later that management had likely recruited them to take the jobs of white union members. The killing of two white police officers by men who were black was the final spark. The text contained in this special section — save for a map that documents key sites related to the events — are the words as they appeared in the afternoon edition on July 3, 1917, and in subsequent editions that month. Only minor changes have been made to correct typographical errors and syntax. The stories include the first-person reporting of famed reporter Carlos Hurd, who stepped off a streetcar and into a massacre “where black skin was a death warrant.”

The accounts hold back nothing in terms of graphic detail and gore. Even today, this reporting must run with a disclaimer cautioning readers to the violence contained herein. So too, must readers be warned of ugly racial terminology of the era, including the use of a racial epithet. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is republishing this reporting, in its uncensored entirety, so that the region may remember. In doing so, it joins the East St. Louis community, where a committee of civic leaders is working to ensure that this often overlooked episode is not forgotten. It is said that newspapers are a first draft of history. Historians take it from there. But on this day, the first and rawest words may speak the most powerfully of those bloody events precisely a century ago.

POST-DISPATCH ARCHIVES

July 3, 1917 • An image of the full front page from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, including an image of people fleeing East St. Louis after the race riot.

Mob’s utter brutality a striking feature of the rioting S2-S3

Chart the path of the violence with our timeline and map S4-S5

Post-Dispatch reporter gives his account of the massacre S6-S7

Editorial board sounds off S8

Find more coverage of the riots including video, podcast STLTODAY.COM

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EDITOR’S NOTE The uncensored headlines and text on this page are as they appeared in the Post-Dispatch’s coverage 100 years ago, altered only to fix typographical errors and syntax. They include graphic descriptions of violence as well as racial terminology of the times, including racial epithets.

24 NEGROES KILLED IN EAST ST. LOUIS Twelve companies of militia gain control of situation after all-night rioting and man-hunting — three white men lose lives. Guardsmen patrolling the city, and adjutant-general believes military force is ample. Blacks shot in their burning homes or as they fled from them; others killed in the street.

BOWEN ARCHIVES • Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

A victim of rioting by whites in East St. Louis on July 2, 1917. Few photographs of the savage rampage exist, partly because rioters attacked news photographers and smashed their cameras. City police officers also harassed journalists who were covering the riot.

welve companies of the Illinois National Guard patrolled East St. Louis downtown streets today, in the effort to prevent assemblages anywhere which might lead to a renewal of the indiscriminate slaughter of Negro men which was carried on yesterday afternoon and last evening by lawless crowds in the streets. At 11:30 a.m., white rioters set fire to deserted Negro homes on Bond Avenue and Trendley Avenue, near Fourth Street. Four houses were destroyed and three others partly burned. All were still furnished, though the owners had abandoned them. A riot call was sent in from 15th and Broadway at about the same time as the fire alarms, and policemen who went there arrested 17 men, whites and Negroes, but the disturbance was considered less serious than previous ones.

27 BODIES ACCOUNTED FOR

The bodies of 21 Negroes, beaten, shot, clubbed and stoned to death, one of them a 2-year-old girl, were in two undertaking establishments, while three other Negroes’ bodies, partly burned, were still in the streets. Three white men were killed during the evening, James Moore of 423 South Fourth Street, Charles Boyle of 442 North Fifth Street and Joseph Coleman of 1613 John Street. It seemed that additional bodies of Negroes might be found in the burned homes in two districts where incendiary fires were set to drive the Negroes out. Last evening’s atrocities were the culmination of race disturbances in East St. Louis which date from complaints, made in May, of an influx of Negro laborers from the South, taking jobs in industrial plants. There was rioting May 28 and 29, but fatalities were prevented by the calling of militiamen. Talk against the Negroes continued, and Sunday night, after several minor racial encounters, a group of armed Negroes fired on an automobile load of policemen, killing Detective Sgt. Coppedge and wounding two policemen. In another place, on the same night, a policeman and two other white men were shot by Negroes.

STARTED BY DETECTIVE’S MURDER The Coppedge murder was the occasion of yesterday afternoon’s savage outbreak, which became more acute toward sundown, and which

was checked, shortly before dark, when militiamen arrested a large group of white men who were about to lynch a Negro on Broadway. This arrest was the first adequate attempt of the State troops to deal with the situation. Before this they were passive spectators of several atrocious killings. The police, who seemingly sympathized with the street crowds, were a negligible factor first and last. Shortly before noon, it was announced that more troops would probably not be asked for today. Adjutant General Dickson, who arrived from Springfield at daylight, hoped the number on hand would suffice. Of the twelve companies, six were on duty last evening — about 400 men in all. The companies who arrived later were fuller, numerically than those arriving first. At the city hall conference of military officials with the mayor and leading business men, it was decided to lay out the town in districts for the systematic placing of guardsmen. East St. Louis is not under martial law, it was stated, but persons in the streets will be kept moving. “I intend by all that is holy to stop this rioting,” the adjutant general said. “I don’t think martial law is needed, though.” There has been real martial law in Illinois only once in the last 100 years. The adjutant general said that the six companies on duty last night were insufficient in numbers for the task of patrolling the wide territory covered by the disturbances. He was asked why the guardsmen did not use force to put down the lawlessness, to

the point of shooting or bayoneting some of the daylight slayers of Negroes. He replied that if this had been done, there would have been wholesale bloodshed, and that the most determined group of rioters had been placed under arrest. He hoped this would help the military force now on hand to prevent further killings. Col. Clayton, who was in command of the militia until the arrival of Col. Tripp yesterday, said today, in answer to a Post-Dispatch reporter’s question, that the orders of the militiamen yesterday were to arrest all persons seen rioting, disperse all mobs and to use any means necessary for the protection of life and property.

MANY HELD BY THE POLICE Besides patrolling the streets, the militiamen guarded the police station, where a large body of white men, arrested for alleged participation in the street carnage, were held, and where a mass of Negro men was also held. Several soldiers watched the city hall, where Negro women and children refugees were huddled in a pitiable congregation. Sixty-two Negroes, injured by the rioters, were in hospitals and others were believed to be concealed in their homes. The 15 injured and wounded white persons were in hospitals. Negroes by the score were seen today walking out of town. One group was attacked by white men in a switch yard. Militiamen, firing their rifles in the air, dispersed the whites. No attempt was made to keep Negroes from leaving the city. Three cases of smallpox developed last night among the hundred or more injured Negroes quartered on the third floor of the city hall, according to Red Cross workers who are in attendance. The three were sent to the Isolation Hospital on the outskirts of the city. The quarantining of the building is being considered.

SALOONS REMAIN CLOSED Saloons remained closed today, by the Mayor’s order. Cars of the East St. Louis & Suburban Railway resumed normal service through East St. Louis. They were stopped at 7 p.m. yesterday by order of Mayor Mollman. Six Negroes were killed within an hour last evening on Fourth Street, near Broadway, one of them being lynched or were killed as they ran from

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their burning homes at Third Street and Brady Avenue, by a group of pursuers, in which four girls, none of them more than 20 years old, and all carrying revolvers, were conspicuous. In no case did it appear that any of the Negroes was known to have had any part in the killing of Detective Coppedge. Men were killed simply because they were black, and the only limit on the slaughter was the ability of the crowd to find Negroes, and the intermittent protection of the militia, which amounted to little, for a time, at the most serious centers of disturbance.

POLICE STATION IS FILLED The streets were quiet this morning, but the city hall and the adjoining police station were the scenes of confusion and distress. The police station was so full of white men, arrested by militiamen, and or Negroes, some under arrest and others in safekeeping, that it overflowed into the open spaces, where soldiers guarded groups of men. The white prisoners seemed to be little concerned about their arrest, which they took as an incident of the previous night’s excitement. Food was brought early to most of them, and they had breakfast while the militiamen were still hungry, and before any provision had been made for feeding the refugee Negro women and children who filled the offices and corridors of the city hall. These refugees were brought from the stockyards district by the truckload, in the big motor conveyances of the packing plants. They seemed afraid to remain outdoors, although militiamen were near, and they huddled within the building, some lamenting the deaths of husbands and sons, some exhausted by fatigue and terror.

BITS OF CLOTHING AS SOUVENIRS Pieces of the hats, coats and shirts of the Negroes left dead in the streets were displayed by many persons in East St. Louis today, and some of the “souvenirs” were shown on St Louis streets. On Fourth Street near Broadway, after dark, three men saw a Negro, apparently dead, lying in the gutter. One flashed a pocket electric lamp in his face, and saw that he seemed to be breathing. See RIOTS • S3

Mob’s utter brutality a striking feature of East St. Louis rioting RIOTS FROM S2

“Look at that — — — —,” he exclaimed. “Not dead yet.” And he and one of his companions each fired a bullet into the dying man’s head, put their revolvers back in their pockets and went on. Policemen this morning did their utmost to prevent the taking of photographs of the fire ruins or of the Negroes’ bodies, still lying in the streets. “It’s the chief’s orders,” they said. “East St. Louis doesn’t want that kind of advertising.” This belated expression of wisdom was repeated by others, indicating that it was a part of the official order. Photographs were taken in some places however, in the absence of policemen.

TWO ST. LOUIS NEGROES BEATEN BY WHITE MEN Jefferson Ross of 2007 Chestnut Street, a Negro, was beaten severely by several white men who pursued him in an automobile to this side of the free bridge. He was sent to the city hospital. Henry McCurry, a Negro, living at 2818 Clark Avenue, was treated for cuts and bruises at the central dispensary. He told the police that he had been beaten and kicked by a crowd of white men near the Swift plant in East St. Louis.

NEGRO BARBERS, TRAPPED IN SHOP, KILLED AS THEY FLED FROM FLAMES At Eighth Street and Broadway in East St. Louis, about 7:30 o’clock last night, the mob of white men surrounded a barbershop on the southwest corner. Two white men went into the barbershop searching for Negroes. Two Negroes hiding in the shop fired on the two members of the mob, who ran out and fell on the sidewalk in front on the shop. Both had been wounded. The mob set fire to the barbershop, and guarded it with their guns while it burned. There was no rear entrance, and the Negroes were penned up in the building. After the building had been burning about 15 minutes, the Negroes fired through the windows into the mob, killing an unidentified white man and wounding Charles Carson, a 14-year-old boy. A few minutes later the Negroes dashed through the flames and ran into the street. There was a fusillade of shots fired by the mob, both Negroes being killed.

BURNING OF NEGROES’ HOMES About 8 p.m. part of the mob began burning houses at Fourth and Division streets, and as soon as the Negro homes in this vicinity were destroyed another group of houses at Seventh

BOWEN ARCHIVES • Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Mineola McGee, one of the victims of the riot in East St. Louis. A caption accompanying the original photo says her arm had to be amputated because she had been shot.

Narcis Gurley, 70, with burns to her arms. A caption accompanying the photo says she was afraid to leave her burning house until blazing walls collapsed.

Street and Broadway was set on fire. All the houses occupied by Negroes between Missouri and St. Louis Avenue were burned a few minutes later. Charles Beach, an ambulance driver, was shot in the head by a mob of Negroes at 10th Street and Missouri Avenue about 11 p.m. Beach had been on the ambulance all the evening, aiding in removing wounded to the hospitals. Thomas Canavan, president of the Board of Local Improvements, told a Post-Dispatch reporter today of his experiences with a Negro mob in the vicinity of 14th Street and Bond Avenue. As he was driving west on Bond Avenue, with his son and two grandchildren in his automobile, he met Dr. A.B. McQuillan, and his wife, of 3138 Virginia Avenue, driving east. Dr. McQuillan told Canavan that his machine had been fired upon by Negroes at 13th Street and Bond Avenue, and that it was dangerous to go into that zone. Canavan turned his machine and he and Dr. McQuillan drove to 15th Street, where they were confronted by a crowd of armed Negroes. In an effort to escape Dr. McQuillan started to drive across a vacant lot. Suddenly armed Negroes, hiding in the weeds, arose and began firing on his machine. He was hit on the head with a bullet and stunned. The Negroes charged the machine. One Negro placed the muzzle of his gun against Dr. McQuillan’s breast, while the mob yelled, “Finish him.” Mrs. McQuillan pushed the muzzle of the gun away from her husband’s breast and pleaded with the mob not to kill him. Some of the Negroes employed by the Aluminum Ore Co. recognized Dr. McQuillan as the company’s physician, and interceded for him. Their pleas were heeded by the

mob, and Dr. McQuillan was allowed to escape. Canavan said that he saw the Negroes shoot two men at 15th Street and Bond Avenue, one being unidentified and the other being George Herr. Canavan said that the unidentified man appeared to be dead, but he stopped his machine and picked up Herr and took him to the dispensary. As he was escaping he said that many shots were fired by the Negroes at his automobile. He said that the Negro mob was made up of 300 or 400 men, all armed, who fired at every white man they saw. The militia arrived on the scene a few minutes later and arrested nearly all of the Negro rioters. As soon as the Negroes had been taken away, a mob of white men formed and burned all the Negro houses on Bond Avenue between 10th and 12th streets, 43 houses being destroyed. In the fire zone at Sixth and Broadway, two Negroes are reported to have been burned to death. At Fifth and Railroad, another death by fire was reported. One of the mid-afternoon killings was at 4 o’clock, at Broadway and Main Street. A Negro was shot down, one of those firing on him being a boy in short trousers. The driver of the first ambulance that came was not permitted to remove this body, and it lay for an hour beside the street car tracks, seen by the passenger in every passing car. At 9:30 this morning a Negro, still living, but in a critical condition, was found in a sewer manhole at Sixth Street and Broadway. He was beaten by the mob with paving bricks 13 hours before and thrown in. The 2-year-old Negro child who was killed was the daughter of Wil-

liam Forest of 1118 Division Avenue. A bullet fired into the house entered the body near the heart. City Attorney Fekete is credited with having saved the life of a young Negro who was running from a crowd which had fired a number of shots at him while the Negro was plainly visible in the glare of burning buildings. Fekete placed the Negro in his own automobile, and after arguing for several minutes with the group of men succeeded getting away with the rescued man. The coarse and brutal attacks on Negro women and girls, made by white women of a class, which the police are usually supposed to keep surveillance, were a revolting feature of the demonstration. No Negro woman is known to have been killed, but the utmost viciousness was shown by their assailants, who beat Negresses in the face while they were held helpless, and who tore their clothing off. Men cheered the women on, and helped with kicks and thrusts at their victims. From dusk Eads Bridge was thronged with St. Louisans crossing to see the fire and to witness the rioting. Some of these visitors stopped those coming from the East Side, with questions about the safety of going farther. They were told they would have to take their chances. Many went no farther than the limit for returning without paying a second nickel, but hundreds of others pressed on toward the glow of the Broadway blaze.

THE SURGEONS WORK BY LIGHT OF ELECTRIC FLASH LAMPS Surgeons at St. Mary’s Hospital worked by the light of electric flash lamps and candles after the cutting of wires by the mob had plunged the operating room in darkness. The patients operated on under these difficult conditions were Negroes who had been maimed or shot by the rioters. At this hospital 50 Negroes were treated before midnight and 10 after midnight.

INSURANCE DOES NOT COVER FIRE LOSS DUE TO RIOTING No fire insurance can be collected by the owners of property destroyed in the East St. Louis riot, insurance men said today. The standard policy in use all over the United States contains a clause which provides that the company is “not liable for loss caused directly or indirectly by invasion, insurrection, riot, civil war, or military or usurped power or municipal authority.” Lawyers said the only redress of property owners would be to sue the city of East St. Louis for damages on the ground that the municipality had not furnished adequate protection from the mob.

MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM

Fire burns on the night of the riot in East St. Louis near the city library, at Eighth Street and Broadway.

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EDITOR’S NOTE Coverage of the East St. Louis riots continued for weeks in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Though the paper did not publish on July 4, subsequent editions focused on criticism of police and the filing of criminal charges. Numerous state and federal inquiries followed. The excerpts below include graphic descriptions of violence as well as racial terminology of the times, including racial epithets.

EAST ST. LOUIS RIOTS AFTERMATH JULY 5

Under the headline “Employers urge Negroes’ return to East St. Louis,” a front-page story discusses how the city’s civic leaders were seeking the return of black workers.

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The number of law-abiding Negroes who have left the city, and those whose return there is now desired, was estimated at 3,000. The greater part of these are in or near St. Louis, where they have taken refuge in Negro neighborhoods, or in the municipal lodging house. The resolution states there is now “absolute security” and that Illinois troops can handle the situation without the need of federal soldiers. A meeting of 300 businessmen was called for at 2 o’clock Friday afternoon in the East St. Louis City Hall to consider further means for getting desirable Negroes.

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The “secret inquest” by the coroner into the riots continues, with reporters gaining information from sources. It is reported that Col. E.P. Clayton, who was in charge of the militia, confirmed that “soldiers shot and killed two Negroes … on the orders of Police Sergeant Con Meehan.” At least three inquiries in all are in the works, with arrests continuing. Meanwhile, Post-Dispatch reporters continue to encounter those boasting of their role in the bloodshed:

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“Too many of the members of the committee are men who are directly interested in getting Negro laborers back to work,” the District Attorney asserted. “These men seem to have forgotten that a bloodthirsty mob of more than a thousand men killed and burned less than a week ago because they were convinced that large employers of labor intended to give permanent preference to Negroes over whites.” “Those men have not left the city and they have not repented of their excesses. They are just as bitter as they were, and the action of the Chamber of Commerce is forcing these Negroes down their throats is only inflaming the men who participated in the riots.” The District Attorney told of seeing a man on a street car exhibit a revolver and remark that “it had killed niggers, and would kill some more as soon as the damned militia leaves.”

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Daniel McGlynn, a prominent attorney, said that while the rioting was going on last Monday leading businessmen tried in vain to have the police do something: but nothing was done. “We want the people to know the police did nothing,” said McGlynn.

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A story documents the police department’s effort to bar the public from hearing testimony concerning “the inefficiency and indifference of policemen during the massacre of 31 Negroes, Monday afternoon and evening.” The same story mentioned that the Red Cross would only continue sheltering those displaced by the rioting until Tuesday, eight days after the violence. U.S. District Attorney Charles Karch calls for a federal grand jury inquiry and criticizes the Chamber of Commerce, saying its response is off target.

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A separate front-page item documented mounting criticism of Mayor Mollman at a meeting of the Citizens’ Committee of the One Hundred.

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A front-page story documents the launching of a coroner’s inquest of what is now listed as the deaths of 31 blacks and four whites. Meanwhile, efforts to persuade blacks to return to the city were failing.

Labor officials, in turn, blamed the Chamber of Commerce for encouraging black workers to relocate to East St. Louis from the South.

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Representative Dyer of Missouri today introduced a joint resolution for a congressional inquiry into the recent race riots of East St. Louis. In the Senate Senator Sherman submitted a resolution from the East St. Louis Chamber of Commerce deploring the riots.

JULY 6

United States District Attorney Karch of East St. Louis today said to a Post-Dispatch reporter that the city will be responsible for damages for the lives of all persons who were killed in the race rioting … A resolution adopted by the Citizens’ Committee of the Chamber of Commerce … declares that the primary cause of the city’s disgrace is the failure to enforce the law thoroughly and impartially, and the Police Department is “condemned in the severest terms for the helpless and ineffectual manner in which it permitted these riots to take place.”

Carlos Hurd of the Post-Dispatch staff, who was an eyewitness of atrocities of the East Side, told a plain circumstantial story of the outrages he witnessed. The assaults and murders were cold-blooded, deliberate and incredibly brutal. They were not the work of a mob infuriated against particular offenders. They were the work of groups of men and women who sought out and burned out the Negroes and then shot, beat, kicked or hanged them. The work was done in the spirit of flippant, relentless barbarism.

Meanwhile, the U.S. attorney criticized the city, as did a civic organization.

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The same story mentioned the formation of committees on prosecuting those involved in the riots, though it mentioned that 92 suspects were released for lack of “definite individual evidence against them.” The newspaper editorial that same day blasts the “utter failure” of the Illinois National Guard to protect citizens.

A representative of Malleable Iron Works of East St. Louis, who visited the Municipal Lodging House in St. Louis this morning, with an offer of jobs for 30 men, found only five out of 400 Negro men there could be persuaded to return to East St. Louis. The others said they were afraid their lives would be in danger, although East Side police and military authorities have promised that they will be protected.

JULY 9

Train tracks Homes burned

JULY 11

With the resumption of the inquest into the East St. Louis race riots this afternoon it became known that the Coroner, as a result of the testimony given at the previous sessions, has the names of the four white men who aided in murdering Negroes July 2 … The inquest, thus far held behind closed doors, is also understood to have revealed the names of a number of Negroes who were in the mob which killed two policemen the night of July 1, thus precipitating the riots. Scott Clark, a Negro who was injured by the mob, died at St. Mary’s Hospital today. This increases the known total of Negro deaths to 32. Clark was the man whom the mob tried to hang at Fourth Street and Broadway late in the afternoon of July 2, as graphically described by Carlos Hurd of the Post-Dispatch …

KEY SITES IN RIOTS 1. TRUE LIGHT BAPTIST CHURCH Its bell was rung to warn of violence, call blacks to arms to protect the neighborhood

2. LEROY BUNDY HOME

Dr. Leroy Bundy, a leader among East St. Louis blacks, was found guilty of starting the riot but was exonerated

3. 10TH AND BOND AVENUE

Shooting of two police officers here on July 1 sparked the next day’s violence

JULY 13

4. 10TH AND TRENDLEY AVENUE

The secret inquest focuses on fatalities at a saloon near the waterworks plant. Under the headline “Swear policemen ordered them to fire on Negroes,” several militiamen said they were ordered to shoot.

Black residents here set up well-placed firing positions, repelling white rioters

5. 10TH AND PIGGOTT AVENUE

When the Negroes saw the soldiers approaching under the command of the policemen, they ran. Then, according to the testimony of all the militiamen, when the Negroes had neither fired a shot nor displayed any weapons, one of the policemen ordered the squad to fire upon the Negroes. Both policemen joined in the shooting and were among the first to fire, it was testified. The shots killed two Negroes and shot a hand off of a Negro woman.

Victims of violence tried to flee across bridge; one woman said she saw someone beheaded

6. BROADWAY OPERA HOUSE Many blacks were rumored burned to death in empty theater

7. 8TH AND EAST BROADWAY

Home of East St. Louis’ only black detective. He was forced to hide in the weeds as his home was destroyed.

JULY 14

8. 8TH AND BRADY AVENUE

Four white men and six blacks are reported to be charged with murder.

Armed men stood along railroad tracks and gunned down people as they fled

9. SOUTH 6TH AND RAILROAD AVENUE

W.E.B. DU BOIS PAPERS • Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst

More than 100 African-Americans barricaded themselves in two homes and resisted the white rioters

10. One of the first actions of the mob was to stop a streetcar, which was easily done by pulling the connection from the wire overhead.

10. FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH PARK

12. OLD CITY HALL AND POLICE BUILDINGS

Apex of the violence; newspaper reporters counted six corpses on the street and witnessed a lynching here

11. NORTH 4TH AND DIVISION STREET

Police described how the cremated body of a boy was found here; he appeared to have hidden under a bed as the house burned

RECOVER THE PAST

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An intoxicated soldier returning to East St. Louis from St. Louis on the back platform of the street car today boastfully exhibited clips of cartridges to the conductor and a passenger, who happened to be a Post-Dispatch reporter, and said that he fired 17 of them during the riots. “I must have hit something,” he said. He was asked about what he was shooting at. “Niggers, of course,” he said. “I can’t see anything but black targets.” He had a bottle of whiskey in his pocket.

In this infamous photo, white rioters attack African-American passengers while soldiers stand and watch.

Bloody police car in which Officers Coppedge and Wadley died was parked outside the station for all to see

13. LABOR TEMPLE

Richard Brockway, who helped incite the white rioters here, eventually was sentenced to prison

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Mayor Malbern M. Stephens, the city’s longest serving mayor, lived here. He was displaced as mayor in 1903 and followed by a series of corrupt administrations. After the 1917 massacre, civic leaders begged him to come back, and at age 72, he served eight more years.

Home of Mayor Fred Mollman, an incompetent politician who knew the city was on the edge of violence but was unprepared to respond to any civil disturbance, much less a massacre Site histories provided by Andrew J. Theising, a political science professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Several of these descriptions have been condensed.

This information was obtained from a member of the Coroner’s jury by a Post-Dispatch reporter … The juror complained that most of the police efforts had been directed in the investigation toward incriminating Negroes who participated in the riots, rather than the whites who, in addition to taking Negro lives, destroyed about $300,000 worth of property by burning it.

JULY 18 Three policemen, including Sergeant Con Meehan, are charged with the two murders at the saloon in which a woman’s hand was also shot off. Two additional white victims are reported to have died of their injuries.

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POST-DISPATCH MAN, AN EYE-WITNESS, DESCRIBES MASSACRE OF NEGROES Victims driven from home by fire, stoned, beaten and hanged when dying — women fight militiamen and assist in work. BY CARLOS F. HURD St. Louis Post-Dispatch

or an hour and a half last evening I saw the massacre of helpless Negroes at Broadway and Fourth Street, in downtown East St. Louis, where a black skin was a death warrant. I have read of St. Bartholomew’s night. I have heard stories of the latter-day crimes of the Turks in Armenia, and I have learned to loathe the German army for its barbarity in Belgium. But I do not believe that Moslem fanaticism or Prussian frightfulness could perpetrate murders of more deliberate brutality than those which I saw committed, in daylight by citizens of the State of Abraham Lincoln.

I saw man after man, with hands raised, pleading for his life, surrounded by groups of men — men who had never seen him before and knew nothing about him except that he was black — and saw them administer the historic sentence of intolerance, death by stoning. I saw one of these men, almost dead from a savage shower of stones, hanged with a clothesline. Within a few paces of the pole from which he was suspended, four other Negroes lay dead or dying, another having been removed, dead, a short time before. I saw the pockets of two of these Negroes searched, without the finding of any weapon.

ROCK DROPPED ON NEGRO’S NECK I saw one of these men, covered with blood and half conscious, raise himself on his elbow and look feebly about, when a young man, standing directly behind him, lifted a flat stone in both hands and hurled it upon his neck. This young man was much better dressed than most of the others. He walked away unmolested. I saw Negro women begging for mercy and pleading that they had harmed no one, set upon by white women of the baser sort, who laughed and answered the coarse sallies of men as they beat the Negresses’ faces and breasts with fists, stones and sticks. I saw one of these furies fling herself at a militiaman who was trying to protect a Negress, and wrestle with him for his bayonetted gun, while other women attacked the refugee. What I saw, in 90 minutes between 6:30 p.m. and the lurid coming of darkness, was but one local scene of the drama of death. I am satisfied that, in spirit and method, it typified the whole. And I cannot somehow speak of what I saw as mob violence. It was not my idea of a mob.

CROWD MOSTLY WORKINGMEN A mob is passionate; a mob follows one man or a few men blindly; a mob sometimes takes chances. The East St. Louis affair, as I saw it, was a manhunt, conducted on a sporting basis, though with anything but the fair play which is the principle of sport. The East St. Louis men took no chances, except the chance from stray shots, which every spectator of their acts took. They went in small groups, there was little leadership, and there was a horribly cool deliberateness and a spirit of fun about it. I cannot allow even the doubtful excuse of drink. No man whom I saw showed the effect of liquor. It was no crowd of hot-headed youths. Young men were in the greater number, but there were the middle-aged, no less active in the task of destroying the life of every discoverable black man. It was a shirt-sleeve gathering, and the men were mostly workingmen, except for some who had the aspect of mere loafers. I have mentioned the peculiarly brutal crime committed by the only man there who had the appearance of being a business or professional man of any standing. I would be more pessimistic about my fellow-Americans than I am today, if I could not say that there were other workingmen who protested against the senseless slaughter. I would be ashamed of myself if I could not say that I forgot my place as a professional observer and joined in such protests. But I do not think any verbal objection has the slightest effect. Only a volley of lead would have stopped those murders. “Get a nigger,” was the slogan, and

it was varied by the recurrent cry, “Get another!” It was like nothing so much as the holiday crowd, with thumbs turned down in the Roman Coliseum, except that here the shouters were their own gladiators, and their own wild beasts. When I got off a State Street car on Broadway at 6:30, a fire apparatus was on its way to the blaze in the rear of Fourth Street, south from Broadway. A moment’s survey showed why this fire had been set, and what it was meant to accomplish.

FIRE DRIVES OUT NEGROES The sheds in the rear of Negroes’ houses on Fourth Street had been ignited to drive out the Negro occupants of the houses. And the slayers were waiting for them to come out. It was stay in and be roasted, or come out and be slaughtered. A moment before I arrived, one Negro had taken the desperate chance of coming out, and the rattle of revolver shots, which I heard as I approached the corner, was followed by the cry, “They’ve got him! …” And they had. He lay on the pavement, a bullet wound in his head and his skull bare in two places. At every movement of pain which showed that life, there came a terrific kick in the jaw or the nose, or a crushing stone, from some of the men who stood over him. At the corner, a few steps away, were a sergeant and several guardsmen. The sergeant approached the ring of men around the prostrate Negro. “This man is done for,” he said. “You better get him away from here.” No one made a move to lift the blood-covered form, and the sergeant walked away, remarking, when I questioned him about an ambulance, that the ambulances had quit coming. However, an undertaker’s ambulance did come 15 minutes later, and took away the lifeless Negro, who had in the meantime been further kicked and stoned. By that time, the fire in the rear of the Negro houses had grown hotter, and men were standing in all the narrow spaces through which the Negroes might come to the street. There was talk of a Negro, in one of the houses, who had a Winchester, and the opinion was expressed that

POST-DISPATCH PHOTO

Katherine and Carlos Hurd gave the first detailed account of the sinking of the Titanic. Carlos Hurd also reported on the East St. Louis riots in 1917.

he had no ammunition left but no one went too near, and the fire was depended on to drive him out. The firemen were at work on Broadway some distance east, but the flames immediately in the rear of the Negro houses burned without hindrance.

MILITIAMEN TRY TO CURB MOB A half-block to the south, there was a hue and cry at a railroad crossing, and a fusillade of shots was heard. More militiamen than I had seen elsewhere, up to that time, were standing on a platform and near a string of freight cars, and trying to keep back men who had started to pursue Negroes along the track. As I turned back toward Broadway, there was a shout at the alley and a Negro ran out, apparently hoping to find protection. He paid no attention to missiles thrown from behind, none of which had hurt him much, but he was stopped in the middle of the street by a smashing blow in the jaw, struck by a man he had not seen. “Don’t do that,” he appealed. “I haven’t hurt nobody.” The answer was a blow from one side, a piece of curbstone from the other side, and a push which sent him on the brick pavement. He did not rise again, and the battering and kicking of his skull continued until he lay still, his blood flowing half way across the street. Before he had been booted to the opposite curb, another Negro appeared and the same deeds were repeated. I did not see any revolver shots fired at these men. Bullets and ammunition were saved for use at longer range. It was the last Negro I mentioned who was apparently finished by the stone hurled upon his neck by the noticeably well-dressed young man. The butchering of the fire-trapped Negroes went on so rapidly that, when I walked back to the alley a few minutes later, one was lying dead in the alley on the west side of Fourth

Street and another on the east side. And now women began to appear. One frightened black girl, probably 20 years old, got as far as Broadway with no worse treatment than jeers and thrusts. At Broadway, in view of militiamen, the white women, several of whom had been watching the massacre of the Negro men, pounced on the Negroes. I do not wish to be understood as saying that those women were representative of the womanhood of East St. Louis. Their faces showed all too plainly exactly who and what they were. But they were the heroines of the moment with that gathering of men, and when one man, sick of the brutality he had seen, seized one of the women by the arm to stop an impending blow, he was hustled away with fists under his nose, and with more show of actual anger than had been bestowed on the Negroes. He was a stocky, nervy chap, and he stood his ground until a diversion elsewhere drew the menacing ring of men away. “Let the girls have her,” was the shout as the woman attacked the young Negress. The victim’s cry, “Please, please, I ain’t done nothing,” was stopped by a blow in the mouth with a broomstick, which one of the women swung like a baseball bat. Another woman seized the Negress’ hands, and the blow was repeated as she struggled helplessly. Finger nails clawed her hair, and the sleeves were torn from her waist, when some men called, “Now let her see how fast she can run.” The women did not readily leave off beating her, but they stopped short of murder, and the crying, hysterical girl ran down the street. An elder Negress, a few moments later, came along with two or three militiamen, and the same woman made for her. When one of the soldiers held his gun as a barrier, the See WITNESS • S7

BOWEN ARCHIVES • Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Police and others look for bodies after the riot in East St. Louis. Local investigations were inept, making an accurate death count impossible. The bodies of some black victims were buried in a common grave. Others were thrown into Cahokia Creek, which ran between downtown and the riverfront rail yards.

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SEVERAL HUNDRED NEGROES BROUGHT ACROSS RIVER

n officially conducted exodus of several hundred East St. Louis Negroes to St. Louis took place shortly before noon today. The Negro men, women and children who had been under the protection of Illinois militiamen in the East Side city hall since last night were rounded up and were marched by the Eads Bridge route to this city. Two militia companies served as their escort. The St. Louis Municipal Lodging House, 110-112 South Twelfth Street, was opened to the refugees by order of acting Mayor Aloe, and $100 was taken from the Mayor’s contingent fund for the feeding of the Negroes there. A Negro charitable organization, with an office near city hall, did what it could to care for those who were directed to it. A meeting of city officials and Red Cross representatives was called for the purpose of providing for the needs of the destitute blacks in the next few days. The refugees were of every age and size. They were infants in arms and children pushed in buggies or pulled in express wagons. There were pickaninnies carrying pets, one hugging a small chicken. There were white-haired men and buxom mammies, and there were men and women, young and middle-aged, who seemed unable to recover from the horror of yesterday’s experiences, or to realize where they were going. The fugitives carried hand baggage and household possessions of all

sorts. Some talked of finding relatives or friends in St. Louis, and some were without any thought than to get away from a town where, they felt, their lives might be no safer tonight than they were last night. They were more than 20 minutes crossing the Broadway viaduct, which leads to the bridge approach. The two companies of soldiers would have been a scanty protection for so many Negroes if the spirit of last evening had been shown by the white men along the streets, but there was no attempt to molest the pitiable procession. At the St. Louis end of the bridge, a police guard inspected and searched the men, but permitted all to enter the city. Two Negro men seized suit cases which travelers had laid down, and ran way with them, a policeman throwing his club after one of them in the attempt to stop him. Earlier in the morning, smaller groups of Negro refugees were taken into St. Louis over the free bridge. One of the boys told of his home

MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY

East St. Louis residents flee across the river to St. Louis in search of refuge during the riots in 1917. They left their homes with whatever possessions they could carry.

having been fired upon by whites. He said that every time he ventured out on the street he was slapped or kicked. He and his mother finally packed some of their belongings and fled. Among the refugees were several Southern Negroes who said that they had been attracted to East St. Louis by advertisements for laboring men, offering good wages. The jobs were offered by steel plants, street railway companies and the aluminum ore works, they said. They did not know that their presence was not desired by the white inhabitants, they said.

Some of the men expressed intention of returning to the East Side after the present trouble is over, but the women declared that they would never cross the river again. Policemen confiscated several weapons which were dropped on the bridges by the fleeing blacks. Two rifles and a half dozen revolvers were picked up and taken to Central Station. Chief Young this morning ordered an embargo on the sale of firearms by Market Street dealers. Half a dozen Negroes who carried weapons were held.

Vivid description of massacring of negroes WITNESS FROM S6

woman with the broomstick seized it with both hands, and struggled to wrest it from him, while the others, striking at the Negress, in spite of the other militiamen, frightened her thoroughly and hurt her somewhat. From Negress baiting, the wellpleased procession turned to see a lynching. 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.

STOUTER ROPE OBTAINED An old man, with a cap like those worn by street 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 7 feet from the ground. The body was left hanging there. While this lynching was in preparation I walked to Broadway, found a corporal’s guard of militiamen, who had just come from where the firemen were working, and called their attention to what was going on. I do not know that they could have done anything to stop it. I know that they did not try to. In the first hour that I was there I saw no sufficient body of militiamen anywhere, and no serious effort, on the part of the few who were about to prevent bloodshed. Most of the men in uniform were frankly fraternizing with the men in the street. But beginning at 7:30, I did see instances of what national guardsmen, in reasonable numbers, and led by worthy officers, can do.

RESCUE SOME NEGROES First, there came a hollow square of soldiers from the fire zone along Broadway. In the front row of the frightened group within the square was a mulatto boy, not more than 6 years old. Further within the group were other children with their mothers. The Negro men were marching with their hands raised, and some of the women were also holding up their hands. The natural point of attack was in the rear, and the soldiers, under sharp commands from an officer, repeatedly turned and made room for their bayonets. The pitiful procession got safely

around the corner and to the police station. Some smaller rescues of a similar kind were carried out in the next few minutes. Following one of the these rescue parties to the police station, I suddenly became aware that a new man, and a new spirit of soldiery, had entered into the situation. A man in a light suit and straw hat, who had just come into town, was listening to a few details of what had happened in the neighborhood. He gave some quick commands, and in the moment, the first adequate body of guardsmen that I had seen was marching toward Broadway. The soldiers were B Company and other companies of the Fourth Illinois, and the apparent civilian in command was Col. Stephen O. Tripp of the Adjutant General’s office in Springfield. As they turned onto Broadway, double-quick was ordered, and it was none too quick, for another lynching was being prepared. This lynching was apparently to be on Broadway, and the Negro, his head cut, but still conscious and struggling, was being dragged along the pavement with a rope around his neck. “Get those men!” was the command, and a moment later several white men were in line on the south sidewalk, some of them with their hands raised, while guardsmen faced them with bayonets. On the opposite sidewalk, the soldiers merely told the men to “move on,” and this brought a sharp reprimand from Col. Tripp. “Don’t let them get away,” he ordered. “Make them prisoners.” Most of these men were again lined up, and two lines

BOWEN ARCHIVES • Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

Members of a special congressional committee investigating the riot meet in East St. Louis in October and November 1917 to take testimony. In July 1918, the committee released a report blaming the riot upon manipulative industrialists, corrupt local officials and the “savagery” of the white mob.

SUNDAY • 07.02.2017 • S7

of prisoners, 25 or 30 men in all, were then marshalled in the car tracks, and the march to the station began, a guard being left behind to protect the Negro, and to keep the street clear. I did not learn what became of this Negro.

THE TEMPER OF CROWD CHANGES The temper of the men in the street showed a change after the first encounter with Tripp’s methods. It began to seem that the situation had found its master. But the most efficient colonel cannot be everywhere at once, and while the uniformed line was busy keeping a crowd from forming about the police station, scattered shooting began in the neighborhood of the recent killings. One Negro ran the gauntlet on Broadway. Several shots were fired at him in a reckless fashion that explains the number injured by stray bullets earlier in the day. But it appeared that he got away. It was nearly dark, and the fire on Broadway was becoming more threatening. A half hour before, some lines of hose, though apparently in insufficient number, had been in use, but now the use of water had ceased, and it was said that hose had been cut. The fire was nearing the Mollman harness establishment, in which the mayor of East St. Louis is interested, and the big wooden horse on top of the building was silhouetted in the twilight. As I returned from a look at the fire, I saw an ambulance drive into Fourth Street, to get the bodies which had been lying there for nearly an hour. I saw one body placed in the ambulance. I heard it said, as I was leaving town, that the men in the street had prevented the removal of one of the bodies, saying that the Negro was not dead, and must lie there until he died. I did not verify this, and do not state it as fact. Everything which I have stated as fact came under my own observation. And I was, as I have said, but a small part of the whole. I must add a word about the efficiency of the East St. Louis police. One of them kept me from going too near the fire. Absolutely the only thing that I saw policemen do was to keep the fire line. As the police detail marched to the fire, two of the men turned aside onto Fourth Street, apparently to see if the two Negroes, lying on the pavement within a few steps of Broadway, were dead. These policemen got a sharp call from their sergeant. They were not supposed to bother themselves about dead Negroes. In recording this, I do not forget that a policeman — by all counts a fine and capable policeman — was killed by Negroes the night before. I have not forgotten it in writing about the acts of the men in the street. Whether this crime excuses or palliates a massacre, which probably included none of the offenders, is something I will leave to apologists for last evening’s occurrence, if there be any such, to explain.

EDITORIAL

THE EAST ST. LOUIS MURDERS

aw, order and governmental authority were trampled under the feet of a murderous mob in East St. Louis Monday, to the shameful disgrace of the city and State. Anarchy and murder ruled the city for several hours. Scores of Negro men, women and children were killed or beaten and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of property was destroyed without apparent effort to check the violence of the mob on the part of the police force and companies of the national guard sent to the city to maintain order and enforce the laws of the State. Either from terror or sympathy with the mob, the police did nothing to check the mob’s violence, but why, were the forces of the national guard inactive until the mob had done its bloody work? Why was there not a bullet nor a bayonet used against the mob which freely used torch, club and bullet against Negroes, regardless of age or sex or character? If the word of Adjutant-General Dickson, who arrived after the mob had finished its work, is to be taken as evidence of the intent of the national guard officers the guardsmen lacked proper orders. Gen. Dickson is quoted as saying that the guard accomplished the purpose for which it was sent by arresting several hundred of the mob without the use of bullets or bayonets and if the guardsmen had used bullets and bayonets there would have been wholesale killings. But there were wholesale killings and wholesale burning of property. The mob did the killing in defiance of law, when, if any killing was done, it should have been done in enforcement of law by the soldiers and police. Why was the mob permitted to collect and begin its work? The critical time to stop the disorder was in the beginning. Having failed to check the gathering of the mob, why were not its members shot down when they began to kill Negroes? Better that a thousand lawless murderers be killed in support of law and orderly government than that one citizen be killed by a lawless mob. The failure of the soldiers sent to sustain law and order and to use force for

This cartoon by the Post-Dispatch’s J.R. Lemen ran just days after the rioting and shows a vulture perched on a U.S. shield with a noose in its mouth. In the background, the East St. Louis skyline smokes.

that purpose did not prevent bloodshed. It merely encouraged murder and arson. It is hardly worth while to question the authorities of East St. Louis. They have failed utterly in their duty, for well-known causes. They have known of the gathering storm without taking effective steps to check it. They have never, except in spasmodic temporary efforts, enforced the laws. The bloody mob work of the disorderly elements of the city is the culmination of a long reign of lawlessness. Lawlessness and discrimination in law enforcement have been the foundation of political power in East St. Louis for years. The lawless elements have long been the masters of governmental authority and used their license without fear of restraint. The State of Illinois, however, is responsible for consequences of Monday’s outbreak. It assumed

In this J.R. Lemen editorial cartoon, a crowd throws stones at a cowering woman labeled “Justice.” The caption: “More violence in East St. Louis.”

responsibility when Illinois guardsmen were sent to East St. Louis to maintain law and order. The State should inquire into the conduct of the officers in charge of the State’s forces and hold every man guilty of failure to do his duty to strict accountability. This much, with the prosecution of the mob leaders, must be done for the future of civilization and law in the State. Meanwhile we indulge the hope that Monday’s lesson will be effective to prevent further mob violence. Hereafter, at least, neither false humanity nor political weakness should restrain soldiers sent to sustain law and order from using bullets and bayonets on murderous mobs or individuals.

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH ARCHIVES

July 3, 1917 • The second page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, with more images and a map of East St. Louis.

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