Local author Harper Barnes has taken on the daunting subject of the East St. Louis race riot of 1917 in his new book Never Been A Time. The title is quoted from Eugene B. Redmond, English professor and longtime poet laureate of East Boogie.
“There has never been a time when the riot was not alive in the oral tradition,” Redmond told Barnes, during a personal and historical guided tour of his hometown.
This is the most compelling writing yet produced on this seminal event in the history of American race relations. It tells us a lot about how we came to be, who we are, and what we can and will be. Barnes tells a tale of innocence lost to greed, corruption and lust for power.
The description of the actual riot is so stark as to be stomach-churning. The author quotes W.E.B. Du Bois’ description of the riot:
“Germany (in World War I) has nothing on East St. Louis when it comes to ‘frightfulness’. 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.”
Like the riot, the descriptions go from stark to chilling to murderous. They include a three-year-old who is thrown bodily into a burning house, a black man who is beheaded with a butcher knife, and three men who are lynched from lamp posts.
A poignant scene is described by Oscar Leonard, head of a St. Louis Jewish charity, describing the aftermath of once-flourishing neighborhoods burned to the ground: “The little shrift gardens had escaped flames, and orderly rows where seeds had been planted gave the plots the appearance of miniature graveyards.”
How did this madness come to happen? It was a train wreck long a-coming. With clarity of thought, careful research and relentless storytelling, Barnes reveals the layers of history that brought European immigrants to the Midwest and African Americans up from the South.
By the beginning of the 20th century, blacks had been convinced that the danger of living in the poisonous atmosphere of the white supremacist South was a forever deal. A great migration began.
The arrival of a dispossessed agricultural nation of black people in the burgeoning white industrial North had a powerful effect. It set a materially poor, socially despised, politically defenseless minority down in the midst of a hardscrabble, exploited white working class. This was a recipe for social disaster.
The fear of white workers that blacks would take their meager jobs is, of course, reflected in today’s manipulations of these same classes by feckless governments and corporate employers. Thus we have the guy in Ohio who’s out of his manufacturing job and sees the Mexican cutting grass at an industrial park and somehow holds him responsible.
Barnes shows the stability of a black community that is slowly and methodically undermined by the same destruction of innocence that white workers had long accepted. This is where his book really begins to achieve its unfolding power. Barnes is telling a story whose end you can see clearly, but, in the way of great writing, you still flinch every time you reach an obvious signpost.
The destroyers of innocence are the corrupt mayor, the incompetent police chief, the absentee landlords and the industrialists. They pay low wages, steal from the public treasury, pay for the vote, and lie to any semblance of a decent citizenry. They break unions!
The stew is stirred by a strike at the Aluminum Ore Company. Blacks are brought in as strike breakers. The playing off of the dispossessed (blacks) against the exploited (white workers) begins.
Barnes’ cast of characters reads like a combination of Damon Runyan, Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters, conflicted presidents, famous social activists, black millionaires, celebrated expatriates, great musicians and eventual Nobel Prize-winning novelists are changed for the rest of their lives.
Barnes then relates the national and international political effects of what a youthful Josephine Baker rightly called an “apocalypse.”
The great march down Fifth Avenue in New York by an aroused black public was generated by the East St. Louis riot and became the basis for a huge expansion of the fledgling NAACP.
Marcus Garvey used this terrible event as a righteous recruiting tool for his back-to-Africa movement.
Madame C. J. Walker, the black hair care millionaire, was brought into black political life by the riot and would remain a major donor and political activist.
American Federation of Labor President Samuel Gompers and former President Theodore Roosevelt almost came to blows at Carnegie Hall. They were attending an official greeting of the delegation from the revolutionary provisional government of Russia. Gompers claimed the seeds of the riot were generated by corporate malfeasance and greed. Roosevelt took exception, claiming the near holocaust was rooted in the unbridled savagery that exists in the heart of spiritually undeveloped men.
This story is told by historical giants, and the ordinary folk who endured this American pogrom. They survived it, and out of the ashes of the riot another thing was created that has nurtured and recreated a people. Barnes subtitles his book “The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked the Civil Rights Movement.” And what a movement it has been.