Headline: THE DREAM BEGINS:  THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS STARTED EARLY IN THE CENTURY
Reporter: By Florence Shinkle and Greg Freeman

Publication: ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Last Printed:  Sun., Jul. 18, 1999
Section: Metro, Page: D6, Edition: FIVE STAR LIFT

For African-Americans in the St. Louis area, the 20th century has been one of hope and despair, one of seeing some dreams achieved and finding others dashed.
  
From race riots early in the century to last week's Interstate 70 protest, issues of race have remained prominent here.

On July 2, 1917, race riots erupted in East St. Louis over the hiring of African-Americans by industrialists determined not to meet the wage demands of their employees. In all, 44 people died, 39 of them black.

Out of the victimization was born the Urban League here, subsequently one of three groups essential to the civil rights movement. The others were the NAACP, the legal arm of the movement, formed nationally in 1909, with the local chapter originating in 1914, and the Congress On Racial Equality, or CORE, an organization dedicated to nonviolent civil disobedience, founded nationally in 1941 and locally in 1947.
  
Although in other cities more radical groups would accuse the Urban League of being accommodationist, in St. Louis the members of the various contingents worked well together, understanding their political advantageousness to each other.
  
"Oh, we were very glad to have the Urban League, " recalled Norman Seay, one of the founding members of the St. Louis chapter of CORE. "When the power structure was upset with us and wouldn't talk to us because of a sit-in or whatever, they would still be talking to the Urban League."

Early in the century, Homer G. Phillips, a lawyer and the son of a Methodist minister, was a vocal champion of the rights of black people. He fought vigorously for nonsegregated city housing, job equality and open public accommodations. The now-shuttered north St. Louis hospital is named for him.

In 1929, when the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters began its national struggle to get union recognition from Pullman, Theodore David McNeal, a Pullman porter, threw himself into it. What he learned of boycotts and marches, he applied to the civil rights struggle, to attack the notion of separate but equal.

In 1942, six years before President Harry S Truman formally ordered desegregation of the armed forces, McNeal and the March on Washington Movement held a rally of 9,000 people at Kiel Auditorium to protest hiring discrimination by the war industries. Then he organized a picket of one of those potential employers, the Carter Carburetor Corp., succeeding in breaking hiring discrimination there.

Of course, every protest wasn't successful. In 1944 -- 16 years before four blacks demanded to be served at the whites-only lunch counter of the Woolworth's in Greensboro, N.C. -- McNeal organized the first of many lunch counter sit-ins here at Stix Baer & Fuller. After 18 months, the protesters left, without success.

Future protests, however, would be different.


Next week: The Jefferson Bank protest and increased civil rights activism.


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