10-02-08, 12:40 pm
Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked the Civil Rights Movement. by Harper Barnes, New York, Walker & Company, 2008.
Harper Barnes’ most recent book Never Been A Time tells the story of one of the most bloody race riots in US history – the 1917 East St. Louis race riot. Barnes, a longtime editor and cultural critic for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, outlines the underlying and unique factors that lead to the riot – racism, political corruption, government incompetence, strike breaking and fear whipped-up by a sensationalist media – while also illuminating a moment in US history some would rather forget.
The first part of Barnes’ book provides historical perspective that confronts America’s long history of racism. “Decades before the civil war,” he writes, “in such Northern bastions of abolition as Cincinnati, Boston, Pittsburgh, and New York, and in smaller cities and towns throughout the North, Blacks were attacked in the streets by gangs of whites and their neighborhoods were invaded and sacked.”
Often these attacks lead to hundreds of wounded and dead, mostly African Americans. Clearly, even in cities far from the open slavery, bondage and jim [CAP JIM CROW] crow oppression of the South, African Americans lived in fear of mob violence and lynchings with little or no legal protection.
After the Civil War and Reconstruction, and into the early 1900’s as the industrial revolution expanded, hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved from the South to the North in search of work and better living conditions. According to Barnes, “Between 1910 and 1920, at least half a million Blacks moved North, the great majority of them – four hundred thousand or more – in the second half of the decade.”
Employers, eager to weaken northern unions, enticed southern Blacks with promises of good jobs and good wages. In fact, “Labor agents from Northern cities, including the major rail hub of East St. Louis, made weekly hiring trips to Southern cities.” Some Northern employers even offered “free transportation to Blacks who wanted to work in the North.” However, in-spite of employer promises, “the great majority of the Black migrants founds themselves, at best, with low-paying, menial jobs.” Northern employers, including those in East St. Louis, used Southern Blacks “as a highly visible ready reserve of workers desperate for jobs in case of a strike.” And unfortunately, “Blacks became the scapegoats” for Irish, German, and other immigrant communities’ failure to “achieve anything remotely resembling the American dream.”
As the hot, humid summer months of June and July neared, and as the U.S. entered World War I, tensions began to rise in East St. Louis. The aluminum workers union went on strike and the streetcar workers were going through bitter contract negotiations. The National Guard and “professional strikebreakers from Chicago” camped out around the city. And most white workers feared that Blacks imported from the South were about to take their jobs.
According to Barnes, workers fears were exacerbated by East St. Louis’ notoriety as “one of the most corrupt and crime-ridden cities in America.” East St. Louis, he wrote, had a “wide-open red-light district.” In fact, in 1916, saloon licenses made up “an astonishing...43 percent of the city’s $400,000 income for the year.” And “fines for illegal and unlicensed saloons (and brothels and gambling joints) were crucial to the city,” he concluded. So with little or no incentive to cleanup the city, politicians and government officials left most law-abiding citizens, Black and white, to fend for themselves.
Just days before the riot broke-out, white gangs, encouraged by a minority of racist labor leaders and petty criminals, drove through Black neighborhoods shooting into houses. African Americans were also attacked crossing the bridge into St. Louis as they tried to get away. The powder keg – stoked by racism, fear of job loss, tensions around the war, and rampant crime – was about to ignite.
While the riot and its aftermath make up the bulk of Never Been A Time, Barnes does a great job building his narrative around the events as they unfolded, and providing context for the riot within the unique circumstances of East St. Louis. This is one of the book’s major accomplishments.
With a keen eye for detail and a judicious use of local newspaper reports from 1917, Barnes relays a human story – one of irrational death and destruction, as well as, the insurmountable human spirit.
Never Been A Time is an important book and a story that needed to be told.
