Headline: CEREMONY MARKS `SCENES OF HORROR' BURIED IN AREA'S MEMORY
Reporter: By Gregory Freeman

Publication: ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Last Printed:  Sun., Sept. 29, 1996
Section: NEWS, Page: 6A, Edition: EARLY FIVE STAR

THE TEMPERATURE WAS a chilly 46 degrees at 7 a.m. Saturday as about 100 people gathered near the East St. Louis riverfront.
    
Poet-critic Eugene B. Redmond pointed to the Mississippi River as he recited a poem about the "river of bones and flesh and blood." A spirited group of men in African garb pounded drums with their hands at speeds that made them impossible to follow.
    
Bishop Michael Bates, pastor of the Word Harvest Full Gospel Baptist Church in St. Louis, told the gathering that "if a man doesn't know from whence he comes, he certainly doesn't know where he's going."
    
Kofi Maalik of Chicago performed a colorful African ceremony giving nourishment of water and food "to free the souls of the ancestors killed in 1917."
    
The gathering was part of a black political convention being held here this weekend. Organizers of the convention felt it was important for their delegates - many of whom are not from St. Louis - to understand what happened here nearly 80 years ago.

They'd be surprised to learn how many St. Louisans don't know what happened either.

In 1917, gangs of whites terrorized blacks in East St. Louis, killing at least 39, forcing thousands to flee and causing those blacks with jobs in the city to return only under special precautions.
   
It was in that year that the Aluminum Ore Co. hired thousands of blacks from the rural South as replacements for white workers who had gone out on strike. Employers in a variety of industries found that the blacks would work more cheaply than whites, and many displaced their white workers with black ones.
    
The result was legions of white families who went hungry because their chief breadwinners had lost their jobs. But it wasn't easy for the blacks either, whose numbers overwhelmed the city's employment opportunities. Those who were fortunate enough to find work often found themselves living in hovels, earning less than in the jobs they'd left behind in the South.

On the night of July 1, 1917, a Ford automobile drove through a black neighborhood, terrorizing residents as the car's occupants fired guns indiscriminately. No one was injured, but a black crowd assembled to the calling of church bells that night.
    A police car arrived, and the group immediately opened fire on it, killing two white officers inside. No one knows whether the intention was to kill police officers. Some suggest that because the police car was a Ford like the one that had terrorized the neighborhood, angry residents might not have known the difference.

Regardless, the shootings caused a bloody riot the next day, as mobs of whites ripped into black neighborhoods, torturing, beating and shooting black men, women and children. In some cases, homes of blacks were set ablaze while whites with guns waited to shoot the occupants who fled.
    
Some blacks were set afire; others were hanged. The murders were carried out randomly; in one case, a black St. Louis family was returning home from a fishing trip when they were attacked. The mob killed a 14-year-old boy and his father and scalped his mother.
   
East St. Louis was a city on fire.

At the end of the day, 47 people were reported dead - 39 black, eight white. More than 240 buildings and 44 rail cars were destroyed by fire. The damage was estimated at $500,000, more than $2.5 million in today's dollars.
    Reports indicate that about 300 National Guardsmen arrived early during the riot, but in some instances they turned against the blacks, as did many police officers.

According to the 1918 report of a congressional investigating committee, "Scenes of horror that would have shocked a savage were viewed with placid unconcern by hundreds, whose hearts knew no pity and who seemed to revel in the feast of blood and cruelty."
    
Terrorized blacks fled the city in thousands. The congressional report said: "The fright of the (black) laborers went to such an extent - and it was fully justified by existing conditions - that special means of transportation had to be provided for them back and forth between St. Louis and East St. Louis in order to get them to work at all."

More than 21 people were arrested, though only 21 ever went to the penitentiary for their crimes: nine whites and 12 blacks.

The riot was a low point in this area's history.

It was against that backdrop that those killed were honored Saturday morning, in a dignified remembrance of the senseless murders of 1917.


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