EAST ST. LOUIS – “If you want to understand what’s happening in America, pay attention to what’s happened in East St. Louis,” East St. Louis Mayor Emeka Jackson-Hicks said last month.
She spoke at a press conference on November 30 to announce plans to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the East St. Louis riots of 1917. The East St. Louis 1917 Centennial Commission and Cultural Initiative is the organizing body.
“We cannot move forward if we haven’t grounded ourselves in our history, and we cannot own our future without owning our past,” said Jackson-Hicks.
In July of 1917, blacks in East St. Louis were targeted in a deadly massacre resulting an unknown number of deaths presumed to be in the hundreds. Thousands were left homeless because their houses were burned to the ground, and thousands more fled the city to places like Cairo, Illinois, Ferguson and Kinloch.
The deadly incident, which included drive-by shootings and lynchings, was sparked by a rumor on July 1, 1917 that a black man had killed a white man. Its roots were in black workers coming up from the South and then being used as strike breakers by the Aluminum Ore Company.
The massacre was reported as one of the most deadliest race riots in U.S. history.
The commemoration will include the groundbreaking for a statute, educational events, plays, exhibits, creative expression contests, band and choir concerts, receptions and special reflection presentations.
“The significance of it is therapy,” Joseph A. Brown, initiative co-chair and professor and chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, told The American. “If you are a victim of sexual abuse and you try to suppress what happened to you, you’ll be sick from it for the rest of your life. I say this city needs to deal with it so that we don’t have to be sick anymore.”
The great scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois described the riot, as quoted in local author Harper Barnes’ book about it, “Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked the Civil Rights Movement.”
“Germany (in World War I) has nothing on East St. Louis when it comes to ‘frightfulness,’” Du Bois wrote. “Indeed, in one respect Germany does not even approximate her ill-famed sister. In all the accounts given of German atrocities, no one, we believe, has accused the Germans of taking pleasure in the sufferings of their victims. But these (white) rioters combined business with pleasure.”
Jackson-Hicks said the commission would not shy away from the tragic facts.
“We don’t need to paint a pretty picture or somehow make it seem like what happened was okay in the end, it was not,” she said. “It was a dark time that holds a lot of pain.”
However, she said, it also shows the resilience of survivors.
“It does show that our people can take the most horrific thing and build upon it,” Jackson-Hicks said. “The people of East St. Louis are strong and enduring. We always have been.”
She also admitted that the struggling, now majority-black city had not come as far from 1917 as its leaders hoped.
“While it makes me proud of where we are now,” she said, “it also reminds me of the work we have yet to do.”
The first event to kick off the centennial commemoration will be an essay and creative expression contest on Monday, January 2. An MLK day service will be held 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday, January 16 at the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation. For more information, visit www.estl1917ccci.org.
