JF Ptak Science Books Post 2752
The Crisis, a journal of the NAACP, called for attention and action in response to the terrible 2 July East St. Louis Riot and massacre in their issue of September 1917. The leadership published a long article detailing the background and the horrors of the event, which you can read if you follow the link. The back of the cover of the journal featured a plea for membership (actually calling for people to “enlist”, much like the people doing so during WWI which the U.S. finally entered 6 April 1917 after nearly three years of European warfare) which was followed in a few pages by the details of the event.
Long story short, racial tensions in East St. Louis were increased due to northerly African American migration from the Southern states, causing anxiety among the whites on purely racial reasons as well as the belief that there would be stiffer competition for work. The main catalyst though seems to have been a strike at American Steel, the management hiring hundreds of Black workers to replace the White strikers. Tensions high, a carload of Whites drove into the segregated Black side of town and opened fire on a group of Black men. Shortly afterwards another car of Whites–this time including two policemen–made a similar tour of the area, the Blacks responding with gunfire thinking that it was another drive-by. The two policemen were killed, and then things escalated quickly and brutally, with tens of thousands of Whites turning out to ESL and rioting, beating, clubbing, shooting, and setting fire to buildings (while cutting the hoses of the fire department to ensure that the arson burned the buildings to the ground. Impartial eyewitnesses to the event reported that the National Guard and the police were in very large part unresponsive to the threatened population, and in many cases aided and abetted the rioting. In the end estimates ranged stating that 50-200 African Americans were killed and 6,000 made homeless, while later on a Congressional investigation reported that an accurate estimate of the murdered could not be made.
- Source: The Crisis, September 1917, vol 14/5, pp 218-238, via Marxists.org: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/civil-rights/crisis/0900-crisis-v14n05-w083.pdf