Free Never Been a Time by Harper Barnes Page B

had been kept busy over the weekend answering frequent calls to deal with crime in neighborhoods that blacks had recently moved into, the paper reported, and many blacks were found carrying revolvers. A white man from Detroit was shot in the leg and foot when he didn’t respond quickly enough to a black holdup man, and “worse trouble,” the
Journal
reported, came from whites and blacks fighting at Tenth Street and Piggott Avenue southeast of downtown, where the arrival of police and the firing of a few shots “narrowly averted a riot.” Below that story, beneath a small one-column headline, was a brief report that the bodies of two black boys had been found in an East St. Louis canal. It was speculated that they had drowned while fishing. 33
    The evening of May 28 was pleasant and mild. By six thirty, the temperature was in the lower sixties, and East St. Louisans had already begun arriving downtown for the meeting. The most direct route from the main downtown streetcar stop to city hall went right by the Collinsville Avenue pawnshop with the guns in the window. The shop, which had a mostly black clientele, was closed, but the window was lit.
    By seven P.M. the council chamber was packed to overflowing and the meeting was moved upstairs to the auditorium, which seated about twelve hundred. Just before the meeting began, a large group of women from the waitress and laundry workers union and the retail clerks union, dressed for a night on the dance floor, arrived with a flourish. They waved and swirled their long skirts as they walked into the crowded auditorium and werecheered loudly. A labor leader explained later that the dramatic entrance was intended to make an impression on the mayor, putting a human face and figure on the dangers posed to pretty white women by the black immigrants from the cotton and cane fields of the Deep South. 34
    Outside, two white men, George Fisher and Arch Dodge, were heading up Main Street toward city hall when they ran into a couple of friends from the police department. One of the policemen warned the two not to go to the meeting. There was going to be trouble, he said, because a lot of men were going to the meeting just to stir up an attack on black people. The policemen did not seem inclined to intervene except to keep their friends away from city hall. 35
    By the time the meeting was called to order, all the seats were filled and dozens of men and women stood in the back or sat in the aisles. Mayor Mollman made a brief speech, warning against “hotheadedness” and announcing that the city council was prepared to stop the northward migration, although he was vague on exactly how that would be accomplished. He said he had recently spoken with his counterparts in large Southern cities, asking them to do what they could to stem the tide.
    He stood down and the debate went back and forth, with all speakers agreeing that something must be done to prevent so many blacks from coming to East St. Louis. One repeated allegation was that much of the trouble was caused by a relatively few black holdup men who had influential lawyers and were able to get off scot-free with small fines and bribes paid to the corrupt justices of the peace. There were several reports of whites being held up twice or even three times by the same black man. People complained that black men, because they were willing to work for much less than the going wage, were stealing jobs that once had gone to white men, not just at the aluminum plant and the packing houses but all over town. Men who once were able to support their families “were now at the back door of the poorhouse,” one man said. 36
    Earl Jimmerson of the meat-cutters union cautioned against indiscriminate attacks on blacks. Several other labor leaders also warned against violence, and for a time, the voices of moderation seemed to prevail. Then a garrulous, jowly sixty-three-year-old lawyer named Alexander Flannigen rose to