St. Louis Massacre, July 1917

The Right To Not Be Oppressed

I do not support violence.  I think no matter it’s cause, it is always wrong.  But if one sees someone being physically abused, I think it is essential not to turn away.  The only way to stop someone being assaulted as  far as I can tell is to stop the assaulter.  It is of no use to demand justice in its aftermath, if it can be stopped from occurring.  This is not vigilante justice.  Vigilante justice was dragging Medgar Evars out of his house and being killed.  To stop that from happening, then houses should have emptied in the neighborhood and everyone, man, woman, and child should have come out and stood between Evars and his assaulters.  Well they could have called in support, they could have killed a lot more, or they could have turned away.  It is always a risk that one might not survive in defense of another, but ask yourself this, if you do not defend your neighbor, will he even be alive to defend you?

There has been a recent outcry over Oklahoma’s outcry over not teaching the Tulsa riot was about race.  Well they are half right, it was about white people attacking black people who were attempting to defend themselves.  Actually it was not even a “riot”, white Tulsans attacked black Tulsans, calling it a riot in the first place is bad history already.  If it is termed a riot, then why in the name of some inferior being would whites not want to teach about it?  The very concept of a riot is nasty blacks were attacking nice white people.  Of course it was an aggression by white people attempting to subdue and remove black people from their community and properties those nasty white people were attempting to steal from orderly and somewhat prosperous black people.  So framed correctly, of course they don’t want to teach black children whites were trying to steal from an early middle class community.  If they taught that, then how could they justify teaching blacks are by nature, criminal, and therefore should be locked up.  If they taught that then they would have to teach criminality was on the part of the community who invaded and slaughtered everything in their path to accomplish that mission.  But if they taught that, well then, they would have to teach that the only good honky is a dead honky…oh well, let’s not get carried away, I’m a honky and probably no better than others, so certainly I don’t want to made to “feel bad about myself, do I?

St. Louis 1917

Four years prior to trying to stomp out a flourishing black community in Tulsa, that had largely been there and owned their community long before whites knew it existed on the map (many descendants of Cherokee slave owners), there was another attack of whites on blacks in a shanty village on the Illinois side of St. Louis.  (Known as East St. Louis, although today East St. Louis is just the largely black poverty-stricken  neighborhood of St. Louis).

As early as 1910 there was a small community of black citizens that lived on the east side of the Mississippi of about 6000.  But Missouri was one of those border slave states that had legal slavery that did not secede with the south.  To comprehend exactly why is slightly more complicated, especially today as it has become just as oppressive as any deep south state that did secede.  I think the legacy of Missouri cannot be understood without the towering legacy of one man, Thomas Hart Benton.  Benton was a wealthy slave owner, and early in his career he pushed expansionist policies to annex Texas and the Oregon territories.  As an ally of Andrew Jackson he became one of Jackson’s chief architects in the Senate and remained one of its most powerful and dominant for the next 30 years.  The career of Benton had many twists and turns, because at one time was quite at odds with Jackson, but there’s plenty of biographies of one of the most interesting characters in American history that I have found.

At any rate, although headstrong, and the fighter and winner of multiple duels, he was a rare politician in that he did not believe political leaders should support policies that favored either them or their chief backers financially.  When the 1824 election was thrown into the house, although he had supported Clay, he told the lone delegate from Missouri (at the time the Senate had no role if there was no clear electoral college winner) that he had to cast his vote for Jackson because Jackson had won the popular vote in Missouri.  But Benton had become to be at odds with southern slave owners because he thought they were putting their personal interests over the interests of the Union. In some ways he may have been the precursor to the preserve the union movement favored.  In 1849, after much soul searching and recognizing he would be a great economic sacrifice to him personally, he made a speech that he favored abolishing slavery (and as relevant to the events in 1917, many of the first black inhabitants that settled on the “free” Illinois” side of St. Louis moved there after Benton would end his relationship with slavery, on land he assisted them into moving to.) He opposed the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act and during intense floor debates Henry Foote nearly pistol whipped him to death on the Senate floor.  Other Senators wrestled Foote to the ground and disarmed  him.  

Although Benton remained in the Democratic party, his son-in-law, John Fremont would be the first Republican presidential nominee.  (And Fremont’s state, California gave their electoral votes to Breckenridge in ‘60).  But all the powers that be that selected the Senators in Missouri were slave owners and they denied his return in 1852 after having served since Missouri had become a state, but two years later the voters would send him back to Washington as  their representative.  Benton died before the 1860 election, but his memory was invoked by the non-slave holding free (white men) citizens and Missouri did not secede. Nevertheless it was a contentious decision and like both Kentucky and Tennessee would encounter mini-wars within the state during the war.

For black Missourians, the 1860’s and 1870’

s brought many changes. The Ordinance to Abolish Slavery in Missouri was completed on January 11, 1865, thereby freeing enslaved Missourians eleven months before the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (and remember Lincoln in his emancipation proclamation only freed slaves in states that  had seceded, he had non authority to free them elsewhere) ended the “peculiar institution” of slavery for good. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment granted black Americans citizenship and guaranteed them equal protection under the law and all civil liberties afforded white persons, and the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 gave black men the right to vote.

These developments ushered in an era of transformation, with many freed slaves celebrating independence, while simultaneously struggling to find jobs, receive an education, and survive in an environment of increasing intolerance and oppression.

Unlike some of the rebellious states Missouri had no need to rewrite their constitution and the war’s devastation had severely hampered the job market, but left the former power brokers mostly untouched. By 1870, there were fewer blacks in Missouri than there had been before the Civil War. And those who had formed intra-state militias to support the southern cause during the war did not actually  cease when the war officially ended, they took to burning black neighborhoods and their schools and churches.  Beginning around 1880,Missouri became one of the first southern states to begin initiating “Jim Crow Laws” that had long been established in the north, which established legal segregation, and continuing through the Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which stated that separate facilities for black and white citizens were constitutional, the passage of discriminatory laws that oppressed African Americans became standard. The turn of the century saw a rise in acts of violence and murder perpetrated by angry mobs living outside the law. These lynchings of black citizens drove black Missourians to depart, and one of those departures was across the border into East St. Louis, where blacks could work in the city, but feel somewhat  protected in their homes.

Census data shows the detail of this population shift and resulting social change. Moberly’s population was 10.6% African American in 1900, and by 1920 it was 6.5%. In 2000, it was 6.7%. Hannibal’s population was 14.5% in 1900 and 8.8% in 1920. By 2000, it was down to 6.6%. Conversely, the city of St. Louis rose from 6.1% African American in 1900 to 9% in 1920. But the reason that the black population increased (and the expansion of blacks back across the river into the eastern part of St. Louis proper was World War I. Now during the mobilization for the war blacks were encouraged to enlist with promises of bonuses and become more fully integrated into the American society.  Nearly a third of the army was Afro-American, something that would not reoccur in the next war.  But as many were joining the war effort, American industry boomed shipping supplies and food to Europe.  Now the war was going on for three years before the U.S. entered the war and began mobilizing, and when they did those working in industry were favored to stay at their jobs. St. Louis was one of the most industrialized cities and one of the easiest migration points for southerners (of both races) to go and find work.  The black population in the St. Louis exploded to more than double of what it had been in 1914.

There was a great deal of labor unrest around the country after the war in both the private and public sectors after the war, but during the war anti-union regulations had in many places ceased due to a huge demand for workers and governments turning from strong anti-union legislation and adjudication, to, at least, legislative support.  

But not so in Missouri, a wildcat strike was called at the Aluminum Ore Co.  The workforce was mostly whites, and few union workers, at that time, recognized the efficacy of joining races together to increase labor power. Government pressure demanded the company to keep production going, and strike busters were hired to escort black workers through the pickets.  At the May 28th city council thousands of whites began lodging complaints that the blacks had been initiating mob violence. In actuality the violence was being done by white strikebreakers hired to  get the blacks into the factories and as strikebreakers are wont to do, they beat in a few white strikers heads, who might have been trying to prevent their escort.   Then one worker claimed that one of the black workers had attempted to rob him on the picket line (unlikely, after all the black men were going to work and the white men were on strike and not getting paid.)  

But now, influenced by this account, mob violence began for real.  Blacks, any blacks that could be found, were dragged off street cars and trolleys, and beaten with rocks, pipes and sticks, and guns, or any other makeshift weapon they could get their hands off.  Black neighborhoods were invaded and homes burned, and black girls were kidnapped and dragged back into white neighborhoods.The national guard was called in to restore and by June it seemed to have returned to calm and they left. 

On July 1 , a white man driving a Ford drove into East St Louis and began shooting randomly—here we go, the dawn of the drive-by shooter–and a few hours later another Ford entered with a passenger with a drawn gun.  This time they shot back and killed the two white men in the car. Supposedly these two men were police officers who had come to investigate the prior shooting.

The next morning there was an overflow meeting at the Labor Temple in downtown St. Louis and it was determined that they would “rid the city of the nigger infestation.”  In other words, kill ‘em all. They marched into East St. Louis with blazing torches and began burning homes and shooting any fleeing woman and  children, and any man they could catch would be held back to be lynched in the evening. A mother and daughter were trying to deboard a trolley and the girl slipped and then fainted and when the mother bent to pick her up, she was left with a gaping hole in her head.  

Officially 39 blacks died (and six whites), but none of the reporters that had been covering the event agreed, estimates range from over a hundred black deaths in some newspapers owned by whites, to between 300 and five hundred by black accounts.  

Not much of a black riot was it?  More like a white genocide.  

So surely we don’t teach our children that maybe the :black criminal personality might actually be a white criminal personality, do we?  No, not that.  Spoken from one of those white criminal personalities who think maybe it’s not to face the “truth”and take a little bit of DAMNED responsibility and maybe feel a little bit bad about the white race.

Maybe it’s time.