Free Never Been a Time by Harper Barnes

union and wanted to come back to work could apply for jobs, but there was no guarantee they would be hired. 23
    But hundreds of men continued to picket, sustained as much by anger and bitterness as any real hope of winning the strike, and by the opportunity to vent their anger on the replacement workers who entered the plant every day under armed guard. The aluminum plant had been stockpiling guns, and strikers were sometimes fired upon. In the most serious incident, late on the evening of May 10, a powerful searchlight suddenly blazed from a tower in the plant, blinding the seven hunderd picketers near the gate, and security guards inside the plant compound fired into the dazed crowd. Five men were seriously wounded, including a unformed policeman who had been trying to maintain order. 24
    After a rash of violent crimes that spring, including the killing of two white men by blacks, Mollman announced on May 15 that police patrols were being beefed up downtown and that acting city attorney Thomas L. Fekete had been instructed to prosecute strongly anyone caught violating the ordinance against carrying loaded guns inside the city limits. At the same time, a sign went up in the window of a pawnshop on Collinsville Avenue about half a block from city hall and the police station. It was propped up in the middle of a pile of several dozen cheap used pistols, and it recommended, BUY A GUN FOR PROTECTION. 25
    That spring, Mollman visited New Orleans to speak to the city’s Board of Trade and do a little fishing. On April 26, in an interview published the next day in the
New Orleans Times-Picayune
, he said that thousands of blacks from the South had come to East St. Louis recently, and the number had grown so large it was beginning to create a problem for city officials “in regard to housing and segregation.” He tied the large number of arrivals to the need for workers by companies with union troubles, including the Aluminum Ore Company. “Conditions are very bad in East St. Louis because many plants are suffering for the want of labor.” 26
    The interview managed simultaneously to suggest that far more blacks were arriving in East St. Louis than the city could comfortably handle and that there were plenty of job openings in East St. Louis. The visit to New Orleans would come back to haunt Mollman. Although businessmen tended to recall that the mayor had discouraged blacks from coming, labor leaders remembered the mayor saying there were still plenty of jobs for blacks in East St. Louis. 27
    By mid-May, with the
Chicago Defender
’s Great Northern Drive officially under way, more than two thousand blacks were arriving in Chicago every two days, according to a daily newspaper, and trainload after trainload of blacks arrived in other Northern cities as well, including East St. Louis. As the trains crossed into Illinois and other Northern states, the blacks would ceremoniously move from their segregated cars and spread throughout the train and fill it with the rich harmony of joyous spirituals of exodus:
    Â 
    Going into Canaan, the promise has come;
Testing time is over, the victory is won. 28
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    Downtown East St. Louis, it seemed to many whites, was simply overrun with blacks, most of them young men. Some of them seemed to lose their Southern inhibitions about how to behave around white people, perhaps under the illusion that they had left racist attitudes behind. Southern Illinois whites, even those whose instincts were not implacably racist, were not used to being treated in a “familiar” manner by blacks. There were reports of black men rubbing suggestively against white women on the streetcars, or sitting so close to them they were “practically in their laps.” Finally, at an industrialists’ meeting at the Aluminum Ore Company late in April or early in May, one large employer admitted, “Negroes are coming in here in such quantities that it is a menace to the