The East St Louis riots (1917) took place across the Mississippi River from St Louis. W.E.B. Du Bois called it the Massacre of East St Louis. It left eight Whites and 39 to 200 Blacks dead. Nearly half of the city’s Blacks were burned out of house and home.
The worst of the riots took place on May 28th and July 2nd. Both times it became a free-for-all of White violence against Blacks, touched off by a report of Black-on-White violence. Both times the governor had to send in the National Guard to restore order.
East St Louis: Because of the First World War there was plenty of work in East St Louis for unskilled labourers.
- For Blacks, coming from the Klan violence and low pay of the Jim Crow South, East St Louis offered good pay and friendly Whites. But:
- The White working class, in the form of labour unions and the Democratic Party, saw Black workers as a threat: Blacks voted Republican and were used as strike-breakers. But what made Blacks such great strike-breakers was that the labour unions would not let them join – because they were Black!
On May 28th the labour unions marched on city hall, which led to the first riot. But the city did nothing about it and a few weeks after the National Guard left violence broke out again, on July 2nd, only this time it was worse.
Street after street the massacre unfolded. Blacks were burned, hanged, shot, stoned, bricked, beheaded, beaten, clubbed, both male and female, both the living and the dead. They were pulled off of trams. Those who hid in their homes were burned out and then shot. It was not just White men who took part in the violence, so did White women and White children. So did some of the police and the National Guard!
The National Guard disarmed many Blacks but few Whites.
Inferno: About ten blocks of Black homes and businesses were on fire. So was a school and a church.
When Blacks tried to flee across the bridge to St Louis, the police shut down the bridge. When Blacks tried to swim across the river, Whites shot at them.
In St Louis you could hear the screaming and gunshots and see the horizon glowing.
The September 1917 issue of the Crisis, the NAACP magazine, is full of horrifying accounts by eyewitnesses and the press, stuff like:
“They went in small groups, there was little leadership, and there was a horribly cool deliberateness and a spirit of fun about it.”
“Girls with blood on their stockings helped to kick in what had been black faces of the corpses on the street.”
“The mob seized a colored woman’s baby and threw it into the fire. The woman was then shot and thrown in.”
One 11-year-old girl who lived through the riots would later recall:
“The very idea of America makes me shake and tremble and gives me nightmares.”
At age 19 she left America and never looked back. She wes Josephine Baker.
– Abagond, 2017.
Update (July 28th): OMG! Today’s Google Doodle in the US marks the 100th anniversary of the Silent Parade of 1917:
It was an NAACP protest against the recent killing of Black people in race riots in East St Louis, Memphis, and Waco. Some 10,000 to 15,000 Black people marched in silence down Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, men dressed in black, women and children dressed in white:
Some held signs, saying stuff like:
“We have fought for the liberty of white Americans in 6 wars; our
reward is East St. Louis.”“We are maligned as lazy and murdered when we work.”
“Cain, where is Abel, thy brother?”
“We are excluded from the unions, and condemned for not joining them.”
“They refuse us opportunity, then deny our capacity.”
It was the NAACP’s biggest protest to date. The September 1917 issue of the Crisis, linked to below under Sources, has an article on it.
Sources: mainly Crisis (1917), Smithsonian (2017), Black Past (accessed 2017).
See also:
- similar events:
- 1919: Red Summer
- 1920: Duluth lynching
- 1921: Tulsa race riot
- 1923: Rosewood
- 1930: The Strange Fruit lynching
- 1985: The MOVE bombing
- those who lived through the East St Louis riots or had family who did:
- The Great Migration
- also near St Louis
- Jim Crow
557
The general lack of White concern about video taped murders of Black people by the police are an indicator that if (or when) contemporary White mobs form, the police will certainly not be stopping them from harming Black people.
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Reblogged this on IBHE Collaborative University.
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Funny how they underwhelm the numbers killed in ‘official research’. Eyewitness accounts mean nothing.
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This is crazy!
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When i listened to Black Agenda Report I listened to the details of the savageness of the whites against the black people of that town it was nightmarish and surreal.
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Humm… quite similar episodes happen(ed) from time to time in different parts of the world and different eras:
1) In 1922 White workers marched in South African cities shouting “Workers of the world, unite and fight for a white South Africa!”.
At the root of the episode was an attempt of the capitalist class, more specifically mine owners, to pit White and Black mine workers against each other and to cut wages. Later gentlemen agreements between the various White fractions led, decades later, to Apartheid with the explicit goal to leave no White person behind (read: below a person of color)
See (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rand_Rebellion) for more details.
2) In 1907 in North America Whites tried to drive out Asians (already discussed in this blog). The motives included probably racial as well class motives, I guess.
Read (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Coast_race_riots_of_1907) for more details.
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And don’t forget, white people called us ‘savages’. SMH.
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Horrible.
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@Brothawolf
I’m sure most of these people want you and others around the world they’ve done wrong to forgive and forget. Let ‘us’ impose on you and trample you over and over again and you can forgive and forget….
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Wow. Another example of the hate a fear whites have for black progression.
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It could happen again.
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One factor that led to the East St. Louis progroms was the unease of White people in the South (and throughout the nation) with the rapid rise of Black people after emancipation. Even though Black people did not get the promised “forty acres and a mule”, they worked hard, bought land and started businesses.
The generation of Black people born after Emancipation was particularly hopeful and determined to better themselves. They saw education as a fast track to equality. According to Yale Professor Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore’s article,
“Somewhere” in the Nadir of African American History, 1890-1920″:
http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/tserve/freedom/1865-1917/essays/nadir.htm
Those efforts to progress ran into the brick wall of White Supremacist ideology (WSI). At the core of WSI is the belief in the inherent superiority of White/European people. However, that ideology was being disproved through the actions of an energetic and increasingly self-sufficient Black landed class. White Americans responded with racial violence and terrorism to threaten and intimidate those emergent Black communities throughout the South.
Moreover, between 1890 and 1908 former slave states amended their constitutions and passed legislation completely disenfranchising Black voters. White voters and politicians painted their suppression of Black political power as a means of protecting themselves from the dangers of “Black rule”. For example, the Raleigh, N.C. News and Observer posted an inflammatory political cartoon in August of 1898 that described Southern White fears:
1898 is the year White Supremacist forces in North Carolina started the push for political disenfranchisement. By 1900, Black citizens were hemmed in by both the Black Codes, which allowed open discrimination against them in public spaces and voter disenfranchisement. Professor Gilmore states that by,
One way Black people responded to the hostile climate in the Southern states was through migrating to places like East St. Louis, Illinois in hopes of a new life free from discrimination, intimidation and disenfranchisement.
Instead they found more of the same….
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@Afrofem
“Instead they found more of the same….”—Do you see it as worse? In a way I do because in the south Black’s knew what to expect and look for. In the North it was hidden behind polite smile’s and a false sense of equal opportunity.
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@ Sharinalr
I think the racial climate in the North and South was essentially the same.
In the South, Black people faced open discrimination, intimidation and disenfranchisement. Those conditions were codified into law de jure and enforced with violence and terror.
In the North, Midwest and West, Black people also faced rampant discrimination (especially in housing and employment) and intimidation. Those conditions were part of local custom de facto and also enforced with violence and terror.
Mob violence against Black people occurred in Chicago,IL, Detroit, MI, Johnstown, PA, Tulsa, OK, Reno, NV and Los Angeles, CA——-all locations outside of the South. In addition, many Midwestern and Northern small towns operated as “sundown towns”.
Black people could vote in the North and Midwest but local politicians tended to funnel Black votes into political machines that kept a few Black people fat on patronage while ignoring the needs of the rest of the Black community.
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Years ago, I lived in Cleveland, OH. On a bus commute home one summer day, the driver stopped with a jolt on a main boulevard. In the street in front of the bus was a twelve year old Black boy on a bike surrounded by five White men with baseball bats.
The Black men on the bus poured out of the exits and surrounded the White men. When the White men ran away, the Black men grabbed the boy and his bike and quickly reentered the bus. The driver also quickly drove the bus out of that Serbo-Croatian neighborhood before the Whites could regroup.
That incident, among others reminded me of how violence and terror are used against Black people no matter where we are in this country. For me, there was no polite smile or sense of equality when you could be beaten to a pulp for straying into a White neighborhood.
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Why do people love to use blacks instead of Black/black people when the first is wrong and white when blacks are used as a plural form.
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@ Afrofem
Just another reminder that white violence is typically of the cowardly kind. They’re quick to press on the weak and defenseless, but collapse and run when confronted by equal or superior strength.
Part of me feels that those five white guys should have had their bats taken and their heads caved in as a poignant and instructive lesson, but we all know how that would have turned out in the end.
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@ Mack Lyons
“Part of me feels that those five white guys should have had their bats taken and their heads caved in as a poignant and instructive lesson, but we all know how that would have turned out in the end.”
Yes, we do know how that would have turned out in the end.
Yet, for me it was a poignant lesson in the lesson of taking collective action. There were no debates or political schisms on the bus during that ten minute incident. Those Black men acted without hesitation to protect and defend the weak and the defenseless.
Their very presence was enough to make the bat-wielding cowards run away.
They also retained the understanding that making a fast getaway was vitally important to the safety of the women and children still on the bus. I still remember the collective sigh of relief when we rolled into the Black section of that boulevard.
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OMG! Today’s Google Doodle in the US marks the 100th anniversary of the Silent Parade of 1917! It was in protest against East St Louis and other recent race riots. I added some information about it in an Update to this post (see above), but I will probably break it off and make it into a full post. If I do, I will add a link to it in the Update.
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I saw the Google Doodle today there are many articles on quite a few sites. I will be doing lots of reading.
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