Never Been a Time by Harper Barnes Page B

nine P.M., a veteran black policeman named W. H. Mills finished a relatively uneventful twelve-hour shift in the northern part of downtown and took a streetcar out to Seventeenth and Bond on his way home. A couple of black men he knew asked him what the trouble wasdowntown. None that he knew of, said Mills. One of the men said with agitation, “Why, two colored women just came by and said that the white folks down at Tenth Street and the Free Bridge were rocking every nigger they could see.” Mills gathered some details and ran across the street to a garage that had recently been opened by Dr. Leroy Bundy, who operated several small businesses in the neighborhood, and used the telephone to call police headquarters. He reported that whites, some of them drunk, were attacking blacks and pulling them from automobiles around Tenth and Bond. Then he walked to his home on Market Avenue and went to bed. 14
    Later that evening, nearby on Bond at Nineteenth Street, the day’s last services ended at St. John American Methodist Episcopalian Zion Church. A bishop from St. Louis had given a guest sermon. Dr. Thomas G. Hunter, who lived across the street from the church, saw the bishop outside the church and offered to drive him back to St. Louis. Two other men, a minister named Oscar Wallace and a teamster named Calvin Cotton, came along for protection: Hunter had heard of the attacks near the Free Bridge, and he was concerned for the bishop’s safety. While they were across the river, they found out later, a black Model T Ford full of white men had sped through their neighborhood firing into houses. The streets in that part of town were unpaved or in poor condition, and Model T Fords have minimal suspension systems, so the car would have bounded down the street from pothole to pothole, with the men firing wildly, unable to aim. But if the purpose was intimidation, it didn’t really matter what they hit—homes, cars, people.
    They also found out that some of the men who had lingered in front of the AME church, holding on to the evening, heard the shots about a block away and went home and got their guns.
    Hunter, Cotton, and Wallace made the trip back and forth across the river without incident, and returned to the neighborhood after eleven thirty. A couple of blocks southeast of the AME church, Dr. Hunter stopped at Twentieth Street near Market to let Cotton off at his house. As they were standing on the street, chatting about the evening, a black automobile—Hunter could not ascertain the make—sped up from the south on Twentieth Street with its lights out, made a screaming left turn, and headed west on Market. As it accelerated, men leaned out of both sides of the open car and fired into the houses on either side of Market. 15
    At his home at 1914 Market, black lawyer N. W. Parden was awakened bya fusillade of gunshots that sounded “like firecrackers popping.” He ran out into the yard in his pajamas in time to see a carload of white men firing with pistols. Then he heard the crack of rifle fire and the boom of shotguns. Although he could barely see anyone in the shadows, it was clear from the flashes of light from either side of the street that blacks along Market Street were returning fire. The white men stopped shooting as the car sped west into the darkness.
    Parden’s next-door neighbor, policeman W. H. Mills, was exhausted from his long shift and was pulled from a deep sleep by the gunfire from the street. Urged by his wife to get out of bed and see what was going on, he ran to the front door. Parden was standing in the front yard with a pistol in his hand, and a young man named Harry Sanders who lived nearby shouted that a car had gone through full of men shooting guns—“a gang of white fellows,” Sanders said. 16
    Mills immediately thought of the brutal beatings of blacks on May 28, and the fires that had been set. He was worried about his wife—she was sick in