Columnist James Ingram
On a day when local media attention was focused on President Barack Obama’s visit to the St. Louis area, touting healthcare reform, East St. Louis politicians said goodbye to the self-described one-time “boss” of old-school politics.
Before there was a Charlie Powell, Clyde Jordan, William Mason or Carl Officer, Charles Merritts Sr. called the shots on the ESL political landscape.
Only two months after the death of his son, Charles Merritts, Jr., Merritts Sr. passed away at the age of 92, leaving a legacy of accomplishments as well as controversy.
A businessman, Merritts owned his first gas station as a senior at Lincoln Senior High School. His entrepreneurial drive led him to, later, own a chain of liquor stores, an insurance company, a cab company as well as nightclubs.
But Merritts was best known as the consummate African-American political powerbroker in ESL, rapidly moving from precinct committeeman to deputy sheriff to school board president.
Merritts’ grooming came under the tutelage of Mayor Alvin Fields (the last white mayor of ESL), John T. English, Tom Lewis and Esther Saverson (one of the early black political powerbrokers in ESL politics).
His greatest ambition, however, was to become the first black mayor of ESL. That goal was never realized when he lost to James Williams in 1972, despite having the backing of the white political machine at the time.
That was a bitter defeat for Merritts, only to be compounded by his indictment for allegedly taking kickbacks as president of School District 189, as well as for allegedly putting out a contract for the murder of Clyde C. Jordan, a fellow school board member and publisher of the ESL Monitor newspaper.
In an interview with the late Rube Yelvington (of the Metro East Journal), Merritts stated that the federal prosecutors had no evidence against him, despite his guilty plea.
Merritts later claimed, 42 days after he began serving time, that he had been told if he had snitched on then-school board attorney Bob Rice, William Mason (former ESL mayor), Francis Touchette (former Centreville Township supervisor) or Claude Bush (father of former ESL Mayor Gordon Bush) that he would be freed the next day.
However, in that same interview, he made no bones about his hatred for Clyde Jordan. Merritts revealed to Yelvington, “Hell yes, I wanted him killed, I hated the son of a bitch.” His hatred was so profound that he tried to hire what turned out to be an FBI agent as the hitman. So much for a lack of evidence.
We all know the old expression that we should not speak ill of the dead. Yet, somehow, not to do so would be a flagrant case of revisionist history in this case.
Many wonder and ponder the reasons for the historical and repetitive cycle of political corruption, kickbacks, indictments and convictions of ESL politicians (both black and white).
Charles Merritts Sr., while an African-American political pioneer in many respects, was also a major contributor and cultivator of the politics of corruption and greed which still runs rampant among black politicians in East Boogie.
To engage in distortions of that history would only deprive the ignorant of the proper context for comprehending ESL’s political legacy, which has been largely molded on the anvil of greed, egotism and the lust for power.
Email: jtingram_1960@yahoo.com.