East St. Louis Race Riot 100 years Later

July 3, 2017 8:34 AM

"In less than 48 hours—from the evening of July 1, 1917, to midday on July 3, 1917—East St. Louis descended into one of the deadliest race riots in U.S. history. As many as 200 African Americans were killed, hundreds more were left homeless, and large sections of the city were ruined. The national response ranks among the foundational moments of the modern civil rights movement, but like much so of our region’s civil rights history, the East St. Louis race riot's legacy has faded outside of museums and history textbooks."

The Missouri History Museum is live-tweeting the events of the riot under #ESTLRiot100 and provides a three-part series about the riot:
Part I: “A City without a Social Contract”: Tensions in St. Louis's Industrial Suburb
Part II: “This Was the Apocalypse”: East St. Louis, July 2, 1917
Part III: “A Stain on the Name of America”: The Nation Reacts

An oral history of the evening of July 2, 1917, when a white mob slaughtered scores of African-Americans in East St. Louis by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the paper's original coverage of the flight across the MacArthur and Eads bridges to escape the violence. (CW: graphic details of the violence and use the ugly racial terminology of the era, including a racial epithet)

On Sunday, hundreds marched across the Eads bridge to commemorate those who lost their lives in the riot (video of commemoration in 2nd link).

posted by gladly (23 comments total)

I always feel "race riot" is such a weak euphemism for these. It implies that they had two sides, when they really should be called what they were: pogroms.
posted by tavella at 10:00 AM on July 3, 2017 [70 favorites]

Completely agreed with that, tavella.

One of the biggest propaganda coups for white supremacy was making the Rodney King riots the most common image of not just "race riots" but "riots" in general, when in reality race riots almost always looked like this one.
posted by tobascodagama at 10:21 AM on July 3, 2017 [13 favorites]

I think we've discussed the appropriateness of the word "pogrom" before, and while I'm not gonna pretend to be an expert, it does feel like using "progrom" both confuses and diminishes both pogroms as we understand them and events like these. We absolutely need a word to describe these periodic mob attacks on black people. It needs its own name. It's a unique phenomena, obviously similar to others, but particularly American in both how they're carried out and in the aftermath of how they're treated in the context of race in America. Again, I'm not a historian, but the mass gaslighting that occurs after these mob attacks seems traumatic in and of itself, and persists for a long time.

It needs its own name. At the very least so we can call it out.
posted by schadenfrau at 10:40 AM on July 3, 2017 [16 favorites]

I mean, "terrorism" doesn't even capture the full horror of the madness of a mob attack. Literally there is no word. There needs to be one.
posted by schadenfrau at 10:47 AM on July 3, 2017

Is organized mass lynching more on note? [not a historian either]
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 10:51 AM on July 3, 2017 [6 favorites]

I did omit some links because I didn't want to step into the pogrom/riot discussion. The East St. Louis Centennial and Cultural Initiative prefers "pogrom" (#ESTLPogrom100). There's a map on that page with an introduction by historian Charles Lumpkins, author of American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics.
posted by gladly at 10:52 AM on July 3, 2017 [8 favorites]

I think we've discussed the appropriateness of the word "pogrom" before, and while I'm not gonna pretend to be an expert, it does feel like using "progrom" both confuses and diminishes both pogroms as we understand them and events like these.

The most recent discussion of the appropriateness of the word "pogrom" was in a politics megathread when someone used it to describe the recent U.S. political atmosphere. I don't think anyone would object to using the word for an event that rivals Kristallnacht in its body count.
posted by Etrigan at 11:07 AM on July 3, 2017 [11 favorites]

One of the biggest propaganda coups for white supremacy was making the Rodney King riots the most common image of not just "race riots" but "riots" in general, when in reality race riots almost always looked like this one.

Yeah, I distinctly remember my high school American history class covering riots of the 1960s in places like Watts and Detroit, but absolutely nothing of early 20th century riots in East St. Louis, Chicago, or Tulsa where hundreds of black citizens were murdered.
posted by mcmile at 11:24 AM on July 3, 2017 [23 favorites]

"We absolutely need a word to describe these periodic mob attacks on black people. It needs its own name."

REPORT OF THE NATIONAL ADVISORY COMMISSION ON CIVIL DISORDERS

While the above link covers the events of
1967, it seems congress likes the usage of "civil disorder". Hard to compare and contrast these two events.
If this discussion is going to concentrate on semantics, massacre works, pogrom works.
But using "kristallnacht" does not as Germany used Law to re-enforce its brutality. While kristallnacht is a fancy code word for pogrom, any comparison to "body count" is absurd as tens of thousands of German citizens were rounded up shortly after this event while tens of thousands marched in protest against the St. Louis massacre, thus helping spurn the modern civil rights movement in America.
posted by clavdivs at 11:50 AM on July 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

"In the evening of July 2, 1917, 11-year-old Freda McDonald was laying on the bed she shared with her siblings, studying the peculiar humming sound growing outside her family’s small shack on Gratiot Street, near downtown St. Louis. Her brother, Richard, finally spoke up, curious whether he was hearing a coming thunderstorm. Their mother, Carrie, replied, “No, not a storm, child, it’s the whites.”"
posted by doctornemo at 11:56 AM on July 3, 2017 [14 favorites]

Note, too, Wilson's response.
posted by doctornemo at 11:58 AM on July 3, 2017

I wish they had linked to more primary sources in the articles! Like I would love to read DuBois' account, and Wells'! But great post.
posted by corb at 12:40 PM on July 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

Corb, here is a pretty fair starting point.
posted by clavdivs at 1:09 PM on July 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

The St. Louis riot and Tulsa riot both involved official complicity.

That makes the word pogrom PERFECT.
posted by ocschwar at 1:49 PM on July 3, 2017 [7 favorites]

I don't think anyone would object to using the word for an event that rivals Kristallnacht in its body count.


The St. Louis riot and Tulsa riot both involved official complicity.

That makes the word pogrom PERFECT.


Uh, for the avoidance of doubt, I'm not saying atrocities like Tulsa and East St Louis are not "enough" to be described as pogroms. I'm saying that they are their own horror. Again, not a historian, but I don't think pogroms as they exist in Europe are associated with the same gas lighting / white washing of history. These seem uniquely American. And it seems like an ongoing manifestation of that trauma that we refuse to even give it its own name.

(Although if I'm wrong about the gas lighting / denial of history, please someone tell me. I'm off to google more, and I'll self correct, but it seemed like I needed to clarify my original comment.)
posted by schadenfrau at 2:09 PM on July 3, 2017 [3 favorites]

Reference to Kristalnacht (night of broken glass) is THE defintion of whitewashing history, so no, not unquely American.
posted by clavdivs at 2:23 PM on July 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

On retrospect, "The Final Solution", is a perfect example of euphemistic "white washing". One insidious part of kristalnacht was the Nazis demanding that Jewish citizens pay of all that broken glass. Some contrast is interesting as "A federal investigation was eventually opened and among those brought to trial was Dr. LeRoy Bundy, a black dentist and prominent leader in the East St. Louis black community, who was formerly charged with inciting a riot. Trial was held in the St. Clair county court, Bundy along with thirty-four defendants, of which ten were white, were given prison time in connection to the riot."

The citizens of the US protested the St. Louis massacre, wrote about it, and brought about change how ever slow. So did people after the Reichstag fire and Kristalnacht, its that few of any were German.
posted by clavdivs at 3:06 PM on July 3, 2017

Let's just say massacre, and leave it at that.
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:17 PM on July 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

1. Aimed at a despised minority: check.
2 Triggered by economic conditions centered around rapid unrbanization and industrialization: check.
3. Official complicity: check.
4. Official suppression of self-defense by the victims: check.

Even the casualty figures are about the right scale. East St. Louis was deadler than the Kishinev pogrom of 1903. The aftermaths have their own parallels. Outrage over the pogrom of 1903 was stronger than over the deadlier pogroms of the 1880s, because the latter was documented with Kodak cameras. Ant-black violence in the US in the 1880s and 1870s resulted in abandonment of black civil rights, while outrages like Tulsa and St. Louis had the opposite effect. You could take Israeli history textbooks like I had as a kid, and with very little editing come up with descriptions of East. St. Louis.
posted by ocschwar at 6:57 PM on July 3, 2017 [2 favorites]

This is a really interesting historical post. THe Missouri History Museum has been a fieldwide leader in socially responsive, relevant, and honest interpretive work. I had never known about this event and am thankful for the psot about it.

It would be awesome if we could concentrate on the substance of this event and not spend a lot more time debating whether it was a "pogrom" or not.
posted by Miko at 8:03 PM on July 3, 2017 [5 favorites]

We need more posts like this. I'm sickened we never learned about this in my public schools, and I went to progressive "good" schools.
posted by Pocahontas at 8:35 PM on July 3, 2017 [1 favorite]

I speak often in an educational sense about this period of riots, and I often have to repeat very explicitly that "race riots" in this sense are absolutely not like in the 1960s with Black people rising up in rage against injustice, but rather were mass racial terrorism against whole neighborhoods by white people.

I also sometimes see these white descendants' eyes glaze over when I say that, because I think they actually don't believe me. I think they think I'm exaggerating because they've never heard of this period in time, post Civil War, when their ancestors (ancestors in living memory even) attacked Black people en masse. Their grandparents maybe. People they actually met at family reunions when they were small.

Being a white person who has described this period quite often to groups of white people, I've had to refine my descriptions over time. Talking in detail about the spurious excuses white people used to excuse what happened. In Charleston, attacking a neighborhood because some white soldiers were cheated out of $8 in illegal liquor. In Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919, it was started because a middle school aged Black boy accidentally drifted into the "white section" of water in Lake Michigan and was stoned until he drowned by a white man, and Black people on the beach objected in anger. (Actually, in Chicago, there was more fighting back than there had been in other places.) So so many of these riots seemed to be in the mob's consciousness (what little there was) about pre-emptively attacking the Black community because they believed the Black folks were righteously coming for them in response to a previous attack.

Anyway, I just want to say that I too struggle with using terminology here. I talk about "heinous violent attacks" and "racial terrorism by white people" and "mass violence against Black neighborhoods for no good reason" and "perversions of justice." Some people in those groups nod and believe. And some cross their arms and stare somewhere behind my head as if they can't hear me at all.
posted by RedEmma at 9:42 AM on July 4, 2017 [17 favorites]

I also want to emphasize that for people (of any race) reading the daily papers then, there were literally lynchings and riots described on a weekly and sometimes daily basis then. It must have been terrifying for Black people, and certainly stress-inducing and contagious perhaps (?) for white people who had been taught that Black people were naturally criminally inclined. [insert modern day analogy here.]
posted by RedEmma at 9:47 AM on July 4, 2017 [3 favorites]