Never Been a Time by Harper Barnes Page A

the meeting by telling Tarlton he had five days to close down one particularly notorious “hotel” or Allison and his supporters would shut the place down themselves and nail the door shut so no business of any kind could be conducted there for a year. “If you don’t clean this town and get rid of thisidle thug crowd you’ve got here,” he said, “you will have a riot here one of these days and that little thing you had in May will not be a patching.” 11
    As summer arrived, East St. Louisans stayed in the streets later and later. Even without daylight savings time, darkness didn’t fall until about eight o’clock, and by then the temperature had usually gone down to the low eighties. Holdups increased, and so did assaults on blacks. But blacks in East St. Louis had not retaliated for the frequent attacks on them.
    On Sunday, July 1, the temperature hit ninety-one degrees at ten in the morning, and hovered around ninety until late afternoon, typical of a summer day in East St. Louis. The air was blanketed with moisture, as usual. The coming together of the Mississippi and the Missouri, the two largest river systems in America, cranks up the humidity that hangs palpably in the miasmic summer air of St. Louis and East St. Louis.
    Out-of-work white men had taken to hanging out near the eastern end of the Free Bridge, harassing blacks verbally and sometimes shoving and hitting them. The crowd of whites was larger than usual that Sunday, perhapsin anticipation of the Fourth of July. The whites drank, boasted, and flourished guns—many East St. Louisans of both races routinely fired guns into the air in lieu of fireworks to celebrate the Fourth. Some blacks who were unlucky enough to be caught alone at the East St. Louis end of the Free Bridge were beaten. Reports of the beatings quickly spread to the black neighborhoods a few blocks away, adding strength to a rumor that whites planned on killing everyone—men, women, and children—at a black Fourth of July celebration in a city park in the South End. A similar rumor—blacks were planning to attack white Independence Day festivities—spread among whites.

    The Free Bridge facing east
    About seven o’clock Sunday evening, in a South End neighborhood near Tenth and Bond Avenue—the intersection near the approach to the Free Bridge was a focus of black street life—a black man was attacked by roving whites. He pulled a gun and fired, possibly wounding one of his attackers. The story of the shooting, much magnified by rumor, made its way into both the black and the white communities. Shortly after that, a black woman in the same neighborhood ran crying hysterically onto Eleventh Street, where a group of black men stood at a corner waiting for the cool of the evening finally to descend. The woman screamed that she had been attacked by three white men a block to the west. “Let’s go to Tenth Street,” a black man shouted. 12
    About the same time, black plainclothes policeman John Eubanks reported to duty at police headquarters and saw a white railroad security officer with three men in custody—two white, one black. “I want them booked,” the security officer told the police lieutenant in charge. “This negro was running and these two white men were running after him up the railroad tracks.” It turned out the two white men had been in the vanguard of a mob of fifty or more chasing the black man through rail yards near the Free Bridge. The lieutenant asked the white prisoners what had happened and they said the black man had insulted them and they had hit him in retaliation and he had taken off running. The lieutenant told the black man to go home and ordered that the two white men be held and booked. Normally, a booked suspect was held at least overnight, but Eubanks checked later and found out the white men were released and back on the street by ten thirty P.M. 13
    A little after