Race Riot at East St. Louis July 2, 1917

Notes for national corpse month, continued:

I keep returning to this moment during the one-year memorial of Michael Brown’s death, August 9, 2015, in Ferguson, Missouri, when Marcellus Buckley was reading a poem he had written the night before. I stayed up all night, he said. I was standing beneath an oak tree with Dot Devota. There were hundreds of people gathered in a circle around Canfield Drive. An island of stuffed animals had taken Brown’s place. One branch of the oak hung above the stuffed animals. The air was solemn and modest yet momentous and angry. Oscar Grant’s uncle was there. Eric Garner’s daughter was there. Michael Brown’s father was there. At one point, when Buckley paused between lines, a woman shouted, I SEE YOU POET! It was simple and quick and cut through the silence, elevating the poet and the poem, in that moment, to a place of profound affirmation and accountability. But it was brief. The poem dissolved, and the poet too. What remained was the aftermath that proliferates in the silence of contested space. Maybe it’s called work. Dot Devota, born and raised in St. Louis, has been, in her writings on the Midwest, working through the aftermath; it’s the work of disinterment, each plunge uncovering a more raw and even more deeply inscribed impossibility: that of reconciling where we have been and what has happened, with—by the rasping, reincarnating voices that populate the margins, struggling towards an articulation of the crises in which they were made—where we are going and what will happen when we get there. The following are notes—excerpts from her (ongoing) book MW: A Field Guide to the Midwest. Here she is crossing and re-crossing a river, and a century, into East St. Louis, July 2, 1917:

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I haven’t succeeded in much of anything before appearing here today having failed in everything. I say that not out of self-pity, but in relation to my upbringing as the successor of tormentors, as the success of torment, my potential and all that it was fed must now be used to end the reign of terror, as I was born white in St. Louis in 1982 as a criminal of the law by the law. We are reminded that Guilt is part of the fear. The law’s disobedient self made me a fugitive in good standing. As a child in public school, after they passed the deseg program in the 1980s, whereby black children from the City were bused to the County to attend schools with mostly white children, I and other white children thereby forfeited being bused to the city to attend schools with mostly black children, as was legally outlined. It was supposed to be a fair exchange, so as not to drain funds and resources further from the city, and in order to have a real chance at equality, rather than elevating the county as ‘bearer of better opportunity’ while holding hostage black children far from their parents in hostile white environments. It had already been decided by parents before my parents, and the school board at that time already decided for everyone, that white families would never have to uphold their side of the exchange. Skin was Fog of Injustice. Education bedevils! Your unruly orphan the poet in whose name I tell the truth so far as my understanding of race relations in this middle country is concerned and so much as I can see straight since my own mind and bearings have been stunted by the hateful forces at play in St. Louis now and then and always with its murderous white forbears with eternal offspring of evil incarnate. Any fallen angels of this country stole their wings, a costume manufactured from forced labor and withheld wages and violence and riots in order to fortify the scales of injustice, which dip so far in a most horrible direction that the Mariana Trench has not even sank to this lowliest record. St. Louis you are on the wrong side of history, yet the bravest people this country has seen lived here and built a city paradise, created art as the eyes to this planet’s soul, the hippocampus of an otherwise lifeless universe, and have spoken directly to you lovingly with wrath and forewarning to change your ways, but white St. Louis you have been few saintly artists instead mostly greedy or greedily silent. Nor have you turned yourself in, as the law is your asylum, the law dragging us all under your shadow, so when the sun refuses, finally, to shine, I swear I will hold you alone responsible, screaming my last words which will be your UN-saintly name, Un-Saint Louis! screaming backwards into the flower of France, our fleur-de-lis, or rather European Iris, ugh! whose animality extinguishes the rainbow and severs us from the messages of gods! I will transcribe them for you Un-Saint Louis. This is all part of a rather long book; I’m writing specifically for this blog, one single month of dread, but I can only put what I know in a book, so please excuse my one wingédness, my debilitating science of the mind. Or instead, please see Ida B. Wells’ comprehensive account of July 2, 1917 here. Wells, having to argue with train operators to let her off in East St. Louis, covered the riot for a Chicago newspaper and describes shootings, beatings, drownings, lynchings, and the burning of over 200 black homes—black hands painted on properties as warnings—by mobs composed of American whites, white European immigrants, white women, white police and Illinois guardsmen, and in some cases white children who threw stones. Marcus Garvey’s speech, delivered just days after the massacre, in which he says, “This is no time for fine words…” is here. Also, King’s Why We Can’t Wait—Ch. 2. I found, in Deming, New Mexico, a 1973 publication, Race Riot At East St. Louis July 2, 1917, by Elliott Rudwick. Old but not outdated—it has all the smoking guns in the back of its truck. Otherwise, white girl from St. Louis of The Broken Family, whose divorced parents are County and City, transcribes messages while the gods of WELLS, GARVEY, and KING speak for themselves!

Madeline Gobeil: What relationship do you see between the saint and the criminal?

Jean Genet: Solitude. And you, don’t you think that the greatest saints are a lot like criminals, if you look at them closely? Saintliness is frightening. There is no visible agreement between society and the saint. (January 1964)

I grew up in the county and 15 minutes from Ferguson. There is St. Louis County and there is St. Louis City, and across the Mississippi River is another St. Louis that doesn’t even get to live in Missouri. Any area that’s fallen into despair hasn’t fallen at all—it’s been kicked there. When I learned to drive, white St. Louis warned me, “Don’t miss the Last Missouri Exit.” I ask my mother, who has lived in Missouri her whole life, “When did you first here about the East St. Louis Riots?” She says, “From you right now.”

I don’t know how I first heard about July 2, 1917, except sometime after Michael Brown’s assassination I got sick of white St. Louis using the word ‘riot’ to describe what was happening in Ferguson. They could have driven 15 minutes to see for themselves, but white St. Louis sat at home watching the same three photos of the convenience store, McDonald’s, and the gas station. Media had the audacity to blame ‘outside agitators,’ another racist talking point that King dismissed in 1964. “No American is an outsider when he goes to any community to aid the cause of freedom and justice.” Clayton, the judicial seat of the County, boarded up its businesses in anticipation of looting and rioting, which was, for the record, what white St. Louis ultimately condemned. King recounts white moderates with signs demanding ORDER BEFORE JUSTICE.

And when you live under a situation like that constantly, and then you ask me, you know, whether I approve of violence. I mean, that just doesn’t make any sense at all. Whether I approve of guns. I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama.

—Angela Davis, from California State Prison, 1972

I go to Ferguson two weeks after Michael Brown’s assassination. I am there as a poet, that is to say, a ghost. Canfield Drive is sectioned off with road cones and flowers, red candles melting on the asphalt more quickly then they are able to burn. A recording of King is playing when a man with a loudspeaker begins reading Darren Wilson his rights, “You have the right to remain silent,” but the crowd, anxious to confront the cops, starts chanting “Police station!” There’s a woman in a gas mask and another with a Japanese fan cooling down a man in a suit. A girl of about six is filming the march from her driveway. There’s a group hug, crying, a phone drops out of a pocket and breaks. Members of the Nation of Islam escort Brown’s family. When it begins to rain, the march disperses, momentarily, each of us running for cover under the eaves of strip malls. In pictures I’m wearing a straw hat, half the brim torn off. Holding my notebook, taking notes. A group of white people camp out alongside Canfield in a patch of grass holding cryptic signs that read “Global Warming 1987” featuring a pie chart of some kind. As if to say: anything is more important than this. Antonio French on Twitter says it’s a “diverse crowd.”  Yes, there are white people, but white St. Louis does not show up to Ferguson. Not even white Ferguson shows up. On the day of the National March there is a farmer’s market. Driving through “white Ferguson,” shirts and signs in windows read WE LOVE FERGUSON. Once I reach West Florissant the shirts and signs change to I AM MIKE BROWN.

I return to Ferguson for the one-year anniversary. We march to the Greater St. Mark Family Church and hear Bree Newsome, Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, Rev. Starsky Wilson, Cornel West, Marc Lamont Hill, and Min. Rahiel Tesfamariam speak. Afterwards, St. Louis County cops aggravate crowds and shoot another teenager, Tyrone Harris. Brandon and I drive home, but continue to watch live feed from citizen journalists. Cops shining lights into lenses and ‘blinding’ cameras. The militia, with tanks, in full protective gear and armed, is not waiting for someone to cause trouble—they’re employing battle plays, V-formation type shit; a wall of shields rise a tidal wave on unassuming crowds; they are tackling and arresting people at random. They grab a girl around twelve who the media says is seventeen. They have answers for everything. An all-white paramilitary group from wherever shows up in camo completely armed, guns in the open, and are left alone by the police. I arrive downtown the next day where they arrest Cornel West, DeRay Mckesson, and several prominent leaders from Black Lives Matter, outside the federal courthouse. I’m not a reporter or journalist, I’m from the Midwest and therefore poison. The real activists fight, get in cops’ faces, save their friends from being arrested, stop traffic, stay through the night. Form a community and get to know everyone. I scribble notes, but my notes aren’t even good, or comprehensive, because more than anything I think I’m really sad, and shocked, because actually being here it feels like Ferguson is all alone. It fucks with my ability to make choices while I am here; I feel anesthetized, unable to speak in the moment before going completely unconscious. A ghost—I waft in then blow away. It seems my main job as poet is to visit the grave.

The Great Migration, East St. Louis, 1917. Factories were accused of breaking up unions and strikes by bribing black workers up from the south. Unions comprised of whites and immigrant whites refused to include black workers. Countless unfounded reports from the media about violence against whites and ammunition purchases criminalized black people—militia only searching their homes—while white people stockpiled more guns. Black people living in the “riot zone” were outnumbered by whites and disarmed by police in the month leading up to the riot.

According to witnesses, black Americans who were killed had their hands in the air. Regardless of evidence, no one believed the officers would be convicted so the city started a fund for their legal defense. Most accounts of July 2, 1917 have been destroyed from the archives. No autopsies. No one knows how many died by police bullets. I’ve seen reports stating anywhere between 39-700 black people were killed on July 2, 1917. Most murders occurred in early afternoon. “Reporters describing the violence said ‘there was a visible coolness and premeditation about it … this was not the hectic and raving demonstration of men suddenly gone mad.’” (Rudwick). Each mob had thousands of white spectators. White Mayor Mollman, afraid of being attacked by white laborers, stayed in his office. The commanding officer of the Guardsmen stayed in his office in civilian clothes and refused to survey the conditions on the streets until after he’d taken a one-hour lunch. The National Guard came late and stayed, occupying the city to ensure no reprisals against whites. They blamed being inexperienced and outnumbered by mobs, although they were given orders not to use force against white people.

July 2, 1917. A grand jury did not convene and no indictments resulted. To put it lightly, “Nevertheless, what was presented to Congress clearly showed how the community’s mores, employers, labor organizers, and politicians created a milieu that made the race riot possible.”

After the Civil War, the form of slavery changed from chattel to economic slavery, and we were thrown onto the labor market to compete at a disadvantage with poor whites. Ever since that time our principal enemy must be isolated and identified as capitalism.

—George Jackson, letter to Fay Stender, April 4, 1970

My psyche is such: how to report back? Ferguson isn’t a place one goes. It’s the earth having a stroke and appearing as rings of Saturn. Go to the Midwest, look into the crystal ball. Before Ferguson, there was … I’d have to recount not only the riots of July 2, 1917, but Dred Scott, the Veiled Prophet, the Pruitt-Igoe housing project, the St. Louis Board of Education and their ‘line drawings’ keeping us eternally segregated, and Meacham Park, in my own suburb, when in the early 1990s they razed a historical black neighborhood dating back to the Civil War—to build Walmart, Payless Shoes, parking lots—making us 98% white.

And I’m against the ‘poetry of witness’ as a genre. The more anthologized white versions. A white person anywhere is anything but a passive presence. Growing up in St. Louis I cannot call my writing ‘witnessing’ and cannot say I ‘witnessed’ apartheid; I was an active participant who benefitted. The witness is either a victim or an onlooking criminal so how can a poet report back as an onlooking criminal who roams free?

In St. Louis there are these groups called Witnessing Whiteness. From what I can tell, they gather with other white people in rooms to cry about how awful growing up racist has been for them. This group approached me during the National March in Ferguson and began talking to me as if they only came to recruit other white people for their cause, meaning, to take white people off the streets of Ferguson and back to those little rooms where the rest of them were?

I’m more of a criminal alumna than witness or outsider in my own hometown and under the incorrigible riddles and lies told through local dialect that then get amplified nationally.

Look to the Midwest. But do not refer to this as the fly-over any longer. You are living our slop. The heartland is the heart-attack. Our cities are most famous recently! St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland… Any Midwestern city is more influential than New York, Hollywood, Silicon Valley… Some day I want to fling myself into the Mississippi. Speak through the bubble. I’m incapable of fine words. And so long as I remain shocked the real study can’t begin. Let me just interrupt myself while Garvey finishes his statement, “This is no time for fine words, but a time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy…The white man has never found it convenient to live up to the principles of brotherhood which he himself teaches to all mankind.”

Next year will mark the 100^th anniversary of the July 2, 1917 race riot in East St. Louis, one of the most deadly race massacres in the U.S. during the 1900s, all but forgotten. History talking over itself. My primary research is not St. Louis, it is home. Home: an illogical but reasonable mythology. Land of Lincoln’s scowling face. Put a condom on history. The white latex spermicidal promise. Buckets tossed in the river were carried away by what they, in a single person’s hands, had once carried. I fought hard against that last one... The confusion is monumental. The confusion is the monument.

To be continued.

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[Guest Editor’s note: Notes for national corpse month is the title of/refers back to the essays I wrote last year for Harriet, also for the occasion of National Poetry Month (2015). Re/visit Parts One, Two, Three, Four, and Five. See also: Yanara Friedland’s "Unknown," Caitie Moore’s "Corpse and Slur," and Youna Kwak’s "This having been earthly seems lasting."]