East St. Louis massacre
1-3 July 1917East St. Louis, St. Clair County, IL
White mobs burned Black neighbourhoods of East St. Louis over three days while the National Guard stood by, killing dozens and driving around 6,000 people from their homes.
East St. Louis in 1917 was an industrial city whose employers had recruited Black workers from the South, in part as strikebreakers, into a town where white labour organisations and politicians openly campaigned against their presence. On 1 July, after a night of shooting in which two white police officers were killed, white crowds began attacking Black residents across the city.
For three days mobs beat and shot people in the streets, pulled passengers from streetcars, and set fire to the houses of the Black south end, shooting at those who ran out. Illinois National Guard troops were present and in many accounts did nothing, or joined in. The official toll was 39 Black and 9 white dead; investigators for the NAACP and later historians put the Black dead far higher. About 6,000 Black residents were burned out of their homes.
A congressional committee investigated in 1918 and condemned the city's police and the Guard. W. E. B. Du Bois and Martha Gruening published their own investigation in The Crisis. Few prosecutions followed, and those that did fell mainly on Black defendants.
39 Black deaths were officially recorded; contemporary investigators and later historians estimated considerably more.
Sources
- East St. Louis Race Riot (1917)BlackPast.orgblackpast.org
- The Massacre of East St. LouisThe Crisis, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1917)W. E. B. Du Bois and Martha Gruening's on-the-ground investigation, published two months after the killings.