The 1917 East St. Louis Race Riots
By Russell Roberts.
The 1917 East St. Louis race riots were one of the worst race riots of the 20th Century in the United States.
A massive government fueled propaganda campaign designed to pressure people to do their part kicked off the United States entry into World War I. However, African-Americans who long suffered from the rampant Jim Crow discrimination quickly realized that “everyone doing their part” meant they were supposed to put up and shut up.
“There is no intention in the War Department,” said then Secretary of War, Newton Baker, “to undertake at this time to settle the so-called race question.”
East St. Louis was Illinois’ major railway and manufacturing center, and during the early part of 1917, thousands of blacks poured into the city expecting to do the jobs of men sent off to war. However, with wages lower than those of white workers, they lived a vagabond existence, sleeping in railroad boxcars or on the streets. Inevitably, blacks stole what they needed to survive, and the whites, resentful of blacks for taking their jobs became fearful too.
On May 28, 1917, armed white mobs heard a report of an armed robbery by a black man, and they roamed the downtown area, beating any black person they found, even dragging them off streetcars. But that was only the beginning.
On the evening of July 1, a car drove through a black district shooting randomly into houses, causing the fearful black community to mobilize, and the entire city exploded. Over the next 36 hours, at least 39 blacks and 9 whites – possibly more on both sides – were indiscriminately murdered. Blacks were hung, shot, scalped, stabbed, and dragged through the streets as white mobs screamed “Get A N…..! Get Another!”
One young mother witnessed the murder of her husband and son who were returning from a day of fishing. Black homes were set on fire, leaving the occupants the choice of burning alive or rushing outside into the waiting gunfire.
While the East St. Louis violence abated with the arrival of the National Guard, the riot triggered hysteria throughout the United States, a fear that “uppity” blacks were planning violence everywhere. White women began buying guns, and The New York Times headlines screamed, “South Alarmed By Threat of Negro Uprising.”
Although WWI was supposed to be the war “(that made) the world safe for democracy,” it showed African-Americans that this democracy did not include them.
Featured Photo Credit: rarenewspapers.com
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