EAST ST. LOUIS

Both of my parents were born and raised in East St. Louis, and my sister and I were both born there. Both of my parents came from Southern Illinois families who had moved to the “big city” during the 1910’s or 1920’s. Thousands of families flocked to East St. Louis during the early decades of the twentieth century.  Back then it was said that if you couldn’t find work in East St. Louis you just weren’t trying. Yet by the mid 1950’s white flight had begun, and by the 1990’s what remained was a virtual ghost town. In 1950 the city reached its peak population of 82,000.  In 2010 the population had shrunk to 27,000 – a little less than the population it had in 1900. 

East St. Louis may hold the distinction of being the most failed city in the country.  These days the only people living there are those who cannot escape, and they are subjected to subhuman living conditions that should bring shame to us all. Residents suffer from multiple threats: air pollution from the chemical plants in nearby Sauget; lead, arsenic and mercury deposits in the soil from decades of industrial pollution; overflowing sewers that often back up into playgrounds, back yards and residents’ kitchen sinks; sporadic to nonexistent trash collection; an unbelievably high crime rate; and schools staffed by permanent substitute teachers earning only $10 grand a year.  Today the city is 98% black, a fact that allows most people in the area to shrug and roll their eyes, as if to say, “Whaddaya expect?” Interstate highways encircle the city, allowing anyone traveling east or west, north or south, to completely bypass the city with nothing but a brief glimpse of abandoned streets and factories. It is impossible to talk about East St. Louis without talking about race, but the story is much more complicated than that, because this is a city that was failing even when it was succeeding, inasmuch as the seeds of its ultimate demise were planted from the very beginning.

To understand East St. Louis you need to go back to the late 1800’s. East St. Louis occupies a wide swath of Mississippi River bottom land directly opposite the City of St. Louis, and despite the fact that it was prone to frequent flooding, it had river and rail access and, with the Southern Illinois coal fields nearby, it was attractive for industrial development. Back in the 1800’s it was heavy industry that fueled the growth of the large cities in the Northeast and Midwest.  Industry back in those days was coal powered, and the more affluent residents of the cities had no desire to live near smokestacks belching a constant stream of black smoke.  East St. Louis being separated from St. Louis by a state line guaranteed that the City of St. Louis would never annex the area and thereby subject its businesses to stricter pollution controls. The State of Illinois and county governments encouraged the growth of industrial suburbs, allowing corporations to form their own towns.  These company towns could establish their own taxes, conveniently exempting their own factories from property taxes, and could dump whatever toxic wastes they wanted, not having to answer to any independent local government. The East Side is full of these towns.  Granite City was incorporated by a couple of brothers who formed a kitchen supplies company; Sauget was incorporated by Monsanto; Alorton was incorporated by the Aluminum Ore Company (ALCOA); Hartford was incorporated by International Shoe; Wood River and Roxana were incorporated by Standard Oil and Shell Oil, respectively. East St. Louis was the largest of these industrial suburbs, and for a time the most successful, but unlike some of the smaller municipalities, it was not a one company town; there were many industries and factories within its boundaries.  Nonetheless, the same pro-industry tax structure existed in the city, and for a time, there were enough residents and small businesses to provide adequate revenues.  That, however, did not prevent the city leaders from siphoning off plenty of cash to line their own pockets, as the city government was created in such a way as to allow political corruption to flourish. Politicians also enriched themselves by turning a blind eye to prostitution and gambling within the city limits. It seems most large cities have to have some place for the stalwart citizens of the city to go to get down and dirty, and the East Side was (and is) that place for St. Louisans.

What caused East St. Louis to crash and burn while some of the other industrial communities managed to stay afloat was that it was hemmed in by these other industrial suburbs, and had very little room to annex.  Furthermore, early agreements made by city officials tied the city to huge debts and service obligations, far beyond the city’s abilities to fulfill. For example, one early Mayor (and real estate tycoon – conflicts of interest were of little concern) exempted the huge National Stockyards from any sort of taxation or annexation by the City of East St. Louis, while at the same time obligating the city to provide infrastructure.  Additionally, an early controversy in the city was “resolved” when city leaders floated a bond issue to raise the grade of the main thoroughfares above the floodplain so that traffic could continue to pass even when the river was in flood stage.  Although the railroads and other industries were the primary beneficiaries of these improvements, the burden for paying off the debt was squarely on the shoulders of residents, since property tax assessments for industries within the city limits were at ridiculously low fractions of the actual properties’ worth. After WWII interstate highways were built and trucking began to compete with the railroads, and electricity replaced coal as the primary power source. The industries that had fueled the growth of the city moved on to greener pastures. Unemployment skyrocketed, the population dwindled, property values plummeted even lower, crime became uncontrollable, and the city lacked the resources to maintain the most basic governmental services.

But in my opinion it was not just the unfavorable tax structure that killed East St. Louis, nor was it the persistence of vice and corruption.  The coup de grace was the issue of race.  In July, 1917, there was a terribly brutal and bloody race riot in the city.  By the time it was over 39 blacks and 8 whites were confirmed dead, although this number is much lower than eyewitness accounts, which placed the number at anywhere between 100 and 400, with many more injured. Several hundred buildings were burned to the ground.  The riot ended, but the racial animosity only intensified. The riot provided a fertile ground in which that animosity grew and, in my opinion, fueled the white flight of later decades. As bloody as it was, the death and destruction did not satisfy the white citizenry.  Unbelievably, after the riot a number of whites were quoted as regretting they hadn’t killed more. Understandably, blacks living in the city developed a hatred and suspicion of whites that remained for years. What follows is a brief recounting of how the riot came about, and why. 

By the early 1900’s labor unions had begun to make inroads into East St. Louis.  Most of the industries in the East St. Louis area were processing plants that turned raw materials into intermediate goods for final assembly and sale by other manufacturers.  The profit margins of these types of firms are generally low, so the focus of these intermediary companies is cost control. Obviously labor unions were not welcome.  Immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe were brought in to undercut the costs of labor in the slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants and steel foundries.  Then in the 1910’s the Aluminum Ore Company (ALCOA) began advertising heavily in Southern newspapers for black workers.  As a result of the new flood of low paid workers, union membership dropped precipitously.  The local Republican Party was quick to capitalize on the new voters, and openly engaged in bribery to win elections.  The Democratic Party was all too willing to peddle stories of crimes committed by blacks, hoping to whip up their own base, and the muckraking newspapers of the day were eager to sensationalize any stories of black crimes, though the actual crimes were few in number. The white citizenry was angry that their quality of life was again being undercut, but their built-in racial prejudice inflamed their rage even further. The spark that ignited the riot was the shooting of two white plain-clothed detectives who were driving through a black neighborhood.  It may have been a case of mistaken identity.  Earlier that day, a similar model car driven by whites had cruised through the neighborhood firing shots randomly. Regardless, the angry white mob’s retaliation that followed was brutal and violent, and not only left a stain on the city’s reputation for years to come, but created racial hatred and tensions that persisted for decades.

I do know that the Underwoods were living in East St. Louis at the time of the riot, and the house where they lived in the 300 block of S. 5th St. was only a couple of blocks from where the riot began, along Broadway between Collinsville Avenue and 4th St.  I remember being told within the last few years that my great uncle Daniel Underwood was injured seriously during this riot, but I do not remember who told me, or any other particulars. He would have been a teenager at the time. If this did happen that may partially explain the lingering hatred, although this would have occurred before any of my father’s generation were even born. What I do remember quite clearly was an argument I had once with my aunt Audrey and her husband, Jack. Jack had made a derogatory comment about blacks in football (“they lack the intelligence to play quarterback”), and I, being a teenager and quite unwilling to let the remark go, challenged him on it.  The argument that followed created a schism in our family that lasted many years, but the final word was had by Audrey, who stated flatly, “You can love the blacks all you like, but they hate you as much as they do me, because you’re white.”  I thought she was being overly dramatic at the time, but after reading about the riot, I can certainly understand why any black person from East St. Louis would have harbored a hatred for whites, so what she said was probably the truth as she had experienced it.  True as it may have been for her, that fact did not excuse the remark that was made, and I kept my distance from that side of the family from that point onward.  I also remember quite clearly my father’s near phobia of crowds.  Back in the sixties when demonstrations were a common thing, he never failed to warn all of us kids about the dangers of crowds, and in fact refused to allow us to participate in any sort of public protest. Did some lingering family stories about the riot inform these opinions of my father and his siblings?  Perhaps, but growing up I never heard a word spoken about the riot.  Ever.

Dad always insisted that Edgemont, the area his parents moved to when he was a teen, was a fine place to grow up, a big village where everybody knew everybody else. A village it may have been, but it was a village with gambling joints operating openly and a tavern on every block. I think the truth of the matter is that to many families it was, for a time at least, a good enough and safe enough place to live.  Vice and crime existed, but that was a separate world. My parents were both born in the 1920’s, and it is true that East St. Louis did not suffer as badly as many cities during the Depression due to the many meatpacking plants located there. When WWII came along, East St. Louis again rode high on a surge in demand for its industries. This was during the time that my parents were growing up.  They may have been only dimly aware of the city’s violent and lawless past, and as children and teenagers they were preoccupied with the business of growing up.  In the 1950’s the industries began to lay off workers and the mass exodus began in earnest.  The resulting increase in the percentage of black population merely served to accelerate white flight.  With high unemployment, crime rates soared. Thus began the downward spiral.  My own parents had bought a small home in Washington Park in the early 1950’s, but by 1957 they had moved to Belleville. In the early 50’s my mother’s parents purchased some land on the East St. Louis side of Signal Hill, and my grandfather set about building a home there.  By the time his building spree was over, he had built a home for himself, an apartment building to provide retirement income, and homes for his two sons. Mom Cil and Pop Underwood remained in their house on North 82^nd Street, but by the late sixties some black families had moved in down the street, and Pop was sleeping in the front bedroom with a shotgun under his bed.(!) All of the family resented what had become of the neighborhood they had lived in, and the black population was an easy target for their wrath, however misguided. In my own family we escaped this dose of bitterness because we left the area in 1961 when my father was transferred to South Florida, and as a result we kids grew up separated from the attitudes of the rest of the family.  I am forever grateful for that.

Growing up I always dreaded going to visit my Underwood grandparents.  Their house was dark, they laughed only rarely (and humorlessly), they didn’t like kids, and they grumbled constantly about things over which they had no control. I can’t help but think that decades of bearing witness to the decay of East St. Louis soured their outlook on life in general, and that was unfortunate.  Mom Cil and Pop had started out in the most working class of neighborhoods, right down by the railroad tracks: Market & Main; Brady & 8^th. Mom Cil’s dad was a bartender; Pop’s worked for the Mobile & Ohio RR.  By their 40’s they had managed to work their way out to the comparatively bucolic community of Edgemont, only to see it, too, become blighted twenty years later. I believe I have gained at least a superficial understanding of why they felt the way they did.  I could probably dig deeper to feel it more keenly, but I don’t want to. What I do think about is how their experience was shared by thousands of other families.  Some may have picked up and left and never looked back.  But I’m willing to bet that many of them carried around the loss and disappointment for the rest of their lives, and poured those feelings into their own children, who in turn passed it on to theirs, until finally, nothing remained but an ugly attitude. And when I multiply the East St. Louis experience by all of the other hollowed out industrial suburbs that used to be home to the working class, and think about the lingering effects on our national psyche, I begin to wonder:  are these the people who brought us Donald Trump? Because this is what happens when the powerful pit the powerless against each other to fight over table scraps. At some point they just want to blow it all up.

For additional information on the history of East St. Louis, I would highly recommend Andrew J. Theising’s book Made in USA: East St. Louis, Virginia Publishing, St. Louis, MO

Also:  Excerpts from the book, Savage Inequalities, by Jonathan Kozol, published here: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Third_World_US/SI_Kozol_StLouis.html

Read Ida B. Wells' account of the riot here: (warning:  not for the faint of heart)
Ida Wells Pt. 1 East St. Louis Riot 1917
Ida Wells Pt. 2 East St. Louis Riot 1917