The East St. Louis “Race Riots” of 1917 saw the indiscriminate massacre of men, women, and children in a one-sided spate of brutal burnings of people and buildings, lynchings, shootings, and beatings that left an official death toll of 39 black and nine white Americans dead, though historians estimate that more than 100 black people were actually killed.
The conflict started on July 1, 1917, when two white male plain-clothed officers were shot dead by armed black residents in East St. Louis, Illinois, the sister-city to St. Louis, Missouri, which falls just over the state line. The officers were driving in a Ford Model T, which many black residents mistakenly believed carried “white drive-by shooters” who had been terrorizing black people of the neighborhood.
Black residents armed themselves to defend their community from members being killed. But their intentions did not protect them, as whites in the town retaliated for the deaths of the two officers who were mistakenly killed in a racist massacre that took over the following two days.
On July 3, Carlos F. Hurd, a staff reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, published the earliest and gruesome reports out of the area. He reported that many white Americans, often dressed in suits and house clothes, roamed the streets looking for black residents to terrorize. He was even shocked by the calmness of their demeanor as they brutally killed black people. These weren’t drunken, dispassionate rabble-rousers; they were working people who were killing black people for fun. And they were doing so in the most sickening of ways.
Hurd noted that the term “mob” didn’t quite make sense with the scene at hand. “A mob is passionate. A mob follows one man or a few men blindly; a mob sometimes takes chances,” he wrote. “The East St. Louis affair, as I saw it, was a manhunt, conducted on a sporting basis.”
“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,” Hurd wrote.
Philosopher W. E. B. Du Bois called the riots “The Massacre of East St. Louis” in the September 1917 edition of the official publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), The Crisis. He detailed accounts of babies that were snatched from their mother’s arms and thrown into flames and shared that some black Americans were trapped in their homes and businesses as the buildings were set on fire. Other accounts tell of execution-style shootings as black people fled their homes in fear.
Like most large-scale racial tensions in the U.S., the East St. Louis Race Riots were rooted in systemic inequality, rather than the interpersonal animus credited with their spark. The area of East St. Louis had become a mecca for black Americans both fleeing the Jim Crow South and seeking opportunities for economic prosperity in the booming World War I trade and production industries.
“Thousands of black people from the South moved north to work in war factories. East St. Louis’s black population, 6,000 strong in 1910, nearly doubled by 1917,” according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. These growing populations not only brought with them skills and a desire for mobility, but a new sense of power and collective numbers that created tense competition for employment, housing, and public resources in the city.
In fact, the city was a hotbed for racial tension and violence before the riots. For years preceding July 1917, East St. Louis endured political antagonism between white machine political leaders who were threatened by growing black votes and political influence in the city. When white political leaders and their allies again failed to secure the power over the growing black political machines in East St. Louis, the more terror, and violence. In American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics, historian Charles L. Lumpkins explains that during this historical moment in the city, “certain politician-businessmen decided to employ mass racial violence to eliminate the threats that they perceived from rapid shifts in East St. Louis’s political culture between 1915 and mid-1917.”
While no deaths were recorded at that time, there was a significant outbreak of racial terror on May 28 of the same year after white laborers — feeling threatened by black migration to the area — “lodged a formal complaint” to the town mayor. When rumors spread about an attempted robbery by an armed black man (a rumor that remained uncorroborated), white mobs formed and began beating black residents at random and pulling them off of trolley cars and streetcars. The National Guard had to be called in to end the violence. The brutality on this day was an only prelude to what would happen that July.
By the end of the July massacre, nearly $400,000 worth of damages had been done, which would be about $7 million today. But the true toll of the East St. Louis Race Riots had nothing to do with money. The deeper, more insidious fact underlying this event is that, even though these horrors were vile and inhumane, this event and the lives lost have been mostly forgotten.
Like generations of race riots in this country, these accounts paint a picture of racial terror orchestrated and carried out by white Americans against people of color who tried to protect themselves in the face of threat. These pogroms — violence and riots meant to target a particular ethnic group — are rarely described as such to define massacres of indigenous people and black Americans.
Just because these histories are forgotten does not mean that we don’t experience and relive them in different ways. Many of the same struggles for political freedom, recognition, and autonomy that were alive in 1917 still exist today.
East St. Louis is a 20-minute drive from Ferguson, Missouri — the city where Michael Brown was shot and killed by then-officer Darren Wilson in August 2014. Findings from the Ferguson Commission — a group appointed by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon to investigate the preexisting racial tensions between black residents and police — suggested that, 100 years later, St. Louis is still suffering under the effects of its long history of racial inequality and animus. With East St. Louis being such a short distance from Brown’s hometown, there is no question that it is affected by the history and current conditions that shape the lived experiences of black Ferguson residents today.
Unfortunately, East St. Louis is not unique. There are sites of persistent racial trauma all over the country, traumas we have yet to fully expose and confront. By understanding and unearthing this history, we may come to terms with the never-ending struggle of justice for black Americans and the fights we have yet to face in the United States.