July 2, 1917: East St. Louis

In the spring of nineteen seventeen, the Aluminum Ore Company and other manufacturers in East St. Louis, Illinois, had been recruiting Black workers from the South to replace striking white workers. The wages were low and the work was dangerous. The Black population of East St. Louis had grown steadily. White workers and residents watched it grow.

On July second, nineteen seventeen, the violence began. It was organized, not spontaneous. Armed white men moved through Black neighborhoods, setting fire to homes and shooting the people who fled them. Escape routes at bridges over the creek were blocked. The death toll in the historical record ranges from approximately forty to one hundred fifty Black people killed, a range that reflects both the scale of the chaos and the inadequacy of official documentation: coroners' records for the Black community were incomplete, and the police, in many documented cases, participated in or stood aside from the attacks. An estimated six thousand Black residents were driven from their homes.

Ida B. Wells traveled to East St. Louis and documented what she saw in detail. Marcus Garvey called it the most outrageous massacre ever committed by white people in American history. W.E.B. Du Bois and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People organized a response. On July twenty-eighth, nineteen seventeen, ten thousand people marched silently down Fifth Avenue in New York City. Men wore dark suits. Women and children dressed in white. They did not speak. They carried signs that named what had happened. The federal government declined to prosecute.

The site across the river has no formal historical designation. The massacre at East St. Louis is the bloodiest documented anti-Black attack on an American city before the Tulsa Greenwood massacre of nineteen twenty-one. You are looking at the Illinois side of the river from St. Louis. The distance is a few miles. There is no marker.