On July 2, 1917 mobs of armed white people attacked Black workers at the Aluminum Ore Company in East St. Louis, Illinois.

The attack came because white workers were upset that the company had hired Black people in an attempt to break a labor strike. The results were disastrous as white workers burned buildings and shot African Americans (Waxman 2020).

Campbell found that “Black inhabitants either died inside from smoke and the flames, or were shot down as they ran from the fire” (p. 22). Campbell continued writing that “African American women were stoned to death, while two black infants were shot in the head” (p. 22).

Between thirty-nine and two hundred Black people died during the uprising and “three hundred homes and commercial buildings” were destroyed (Campbell, p. 22).

Black leaders across the United States were outraged by such horrific violence and called for an investigation.

Marcus Garvey referred to the riot as: “a massacre that will go down in history as one of the bloodiest outrages against mankind for which any class of people could be held guilty” (PBS, n.d., para. 4). Garvey’s speech about the riot, "The Conspiracy of the East St. Louis Riots," was subsequently published and became one of the catalyzers driving him to national prominence (para. 4).

Ida B. Wells published a book about the riot, The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of the Century. In it she included interviews of those who had survived it.

Below is an excerpt from one of the accounts of a Black woman in East Saint Louis:

The street cars ran right along in front of her house, and she saw white women stop the street cars and pull colored women off and beat them. One woman's clothes they tore off entirely, and then took off their shoes and beat her over the face and head with their shoe heels. Another woman who got away, ran down the street with every stitch of clothes torn off her back, leaving her with only her shoes and stockings on. Mrs. Howard saw two men beaten to death. She had escaped all excepting having rocks thrown at the house, until this soldier humiliated her by coming into her house and arresting her and the other women there, because they couldn't find any guns concealed. This happened on the morning of the 5th (Wells-Barnett, 1917, p. 6).

The NAACP organized silent protest parades across the country calling attention to the riot and other horrific acts of violence perpetrated against Black people.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported as follows (1917):

All the impartial witnesses agree that the police were either indifferent or encouraged the barbarities, and that the major part of the National Guard was indifferent or inactive. No organized effort was made to protect the Negroes or disperse the murdering groups. The lack of frenzy and of a large infuriated mob made the task easy. Ten determined officers could have prevented most of the outrages. One hundred men acting with authority and vigor might have prevented any outrage (St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1917).

While African American soldiers died for the United States in World War I, at home they were slaughtered by fellow Americans.

Historian Winston James noted the particular irony of this riot, when he wrote:

You have black troops going off to fight to make the world safe for democracy in April and in July you have black people being murdered in the most wanton and barbaric manner in East St. Louis; children being thrown back into flaming houses, people being boarded up in their houses before they're torched so that they couldn't escape. So even by American standards, East St. Louis was a horror (PBS, n.d., para. 3).

To read more about the descendants of this massacre and their efforts toward justice click here.