East St. Louis: The Pittsburgh of the West

Across the Mississippi River from Saint Louis, Missouri, lies one of the most overlooked industrial cities in American history, and the site of one of the worst episodes of racial violence the twentieth century ever produced.

East Saint Louis began as a ferry crossing established around seventeen ninety-seven by James Piggott, a pioneer judge, in what was then called Illinoistown. The arrival of railroads in the eighteen fifties and the opening of the Eads Bridge in eighteen seventy-four transformed it from a river crossing into a major transportation hub. Meatpacking followed. So did chemical plants, aluminum foundries, and manufacturing of every kind. By nineteen seventeen, East Saint Louis was known as the Pittsburgh of the West, an industrial machine of extraordinary scale sitting directly across the river from the Gateway City.

And then, on July second, nineteen seventeen, white mobs turned on the city's Black population in an explosion of racist violence that lasted through the night and into the next day.

The immediate trigger was labor tension. When white workers struck the Aluminum Ore Company, the company hired Black workers to replace them. Rumors, race-baiting, and months of escalating hostility exploded into open assault. White mobs burned hundreds of homes in Black neighborhoods. They shot people fleeing the flames. They dragged men from streetcars and beat them in the streets. The official count was thirty-nine Black residents and eight white residents killed, but historians believe the actual death toll was far higher. Nearly six thousand people were left homeless.

W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells investigated and wrote about the massacre. A silent protest march down Fifth Avenue in New York City drew ten thousand people. East Saint Louis never fully recovered. Today it remains one of the most economically distressed cities in the United States, its industrial past visible in the rusting landscape along the river.