Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked the Civil Rights Movement

by Harper Barnes

The dramatic and first popular account of one of the deadliest racial confrontations in the 20th century―in East St. Louis in the summer of 1917―which paved the way for the civil rights movement. In the 1910s, half a million African Americans moved from the impoverished rural South to booming industrial cities of the North in search of jobs and freedom from Jim Crow laws. But Northern whites responded with rage, attacking blacks in the streets and laying waste to black neighborhoods in a horrific series of deadly race riots that broke out in dozens of cities across the nation, including Philadelphia, Chicago, Tulsa, Houston, and Washington, D.C. In East St. Louis, Illinois, corrupt city officials and industrialists had openly courted Southern blacks, luring them North to replace striking white laborers. This tinderbox erupted on July 2, 1917 into what would become one of the bloodiest American riots of the World War era. Its impact was enormous. "There has never been a time when the riot was not alive in the oral tradition," remarks Professor Eugene Redmond. Indeed, prominent blacks like W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Josephine Baker were forever influenced by it. Celebrated St. Louis journalist Harper Barnes has written the first full account of this dramatic turning point in American history, decisively placing it in the continuum of racial tensions flowing from Reconstruction and as a catalyst of civil rights action in the decades to come. Drawing from accounts and sources never before utilized, Harper Barnes has crafted a compelling and definitive story that enshrines the riot as an historical rallying cry for all who deplore racial violence.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, American History, Social Justice, Justice, Politics

304 pages, Hardcover

First published June 24, 2008

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have read up a bit on the history of slavery(worldwide, not just America) and learned that a lot is not talked about. Lately I have read a couple of books about race relations in America just after slavery(1880-1930) and though I'm not surprised I'm disgusted and angered. People can be so horrible. Another book that can be hard to read but can definitely educate and help people to have a better understanding of how the past helped create some of our modern problems in race relations. If you already have racial issues, you don't need to read this book. Just gas on the fire. If you want to learn more about the history of race relations in America, this book will help.

[Antona Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in advance of the 100th Anniversary of this travesty against humanity. It was written with a journalists voice for investigating what happened and with the storyteller's pen to imaging the sights, sounds, and sorrows of the tragic event sparked by the same racial, economic, and propagandized fear America is confronting now with the election of the 45th President.

[jakilah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fuck the police.

[Joshua Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What are we to do? We can't live South, and they don't want us North. Where are we to go?"

Yet another piece of our country's brutally violent history that has been largely ignored. As more and more Black folks continued to move north during the Great Migration in hopes of a better life, many of them took jobs as strikebreakers. White workers often participated in strikes to protest the terrible working conditions, long hours, and low pay in the industrial plants of East St. Louis, and Black migrants were used to replace them. This outraged the white community, as they realized that they were being easily and cheaply replaced.

Racial tension began to build in the East St. Louis community. It finally boiled over in the summer of 1917. Even in a city that was known for crime and corruption, the unspeakable terror that conspired in July of 1917 was uniquely horrifying. Black men, women, and children were slaughtered indiscriminately. Hundreds of people were murdered, and entire neighborhoods were burned down. Many of them had worked their whole lives to be able to afford the shanties that went up in smoke that night.

The massacre included arson, beheadings, hangings, shootings, and brutal beatings. Black men, women, and children were dragged from streetcars and beaten to death. After one Black man had his head bashed in with a brick, a white man grabbed him by his gaping head and pulled him up to be hanged.

The Illinois National Guard was called in, but both the National Guard and the East St. Louis police watched, ignored, and even participated in the brutality throughout most of the first day. As one old Black man on his way home from work was running from the violent mob, he saw a group of national guardsmen and ran toward them, thinking he would be protected. Instead, they drew their bayonets on him and forced him back into the mob, where he was beaten unconscious. When an ambulance pulled up, a white man threatened to kill the driver if he took the victim away. The ambulance driver, startled, drove off.

Black homes and businesses were set on fire, and their occupants were shot when they tried to escape the flames. Reporter Carlos Hurd wrote in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "It was stay in and be roasted, or come out and be slaughtered...I have read of St. Bartholomew's night. I have heard stories of the latter-day crimes of the Turks of Armenia, and I have learned to loathe the German army for its barbarity in Belgium. But I do not believe that Moslem fanaticism of Prussian frightfulness could perpetrate murders of more deliberate brutality than those which I saw committed, in daylight, by citizens of the State of Abraham Lincoln."

After running from one burning building, a mother and her four-year-old child were accosted by the white mob, who savagely beat them until they were completely still. Then, in a shocking act of inhumanity, they threw the small child back into the burning building, prompting the crowd around them to cheer.

"Rock-a-by baby - higher an' higher!
Mammy is sleeping and daddy's run lame.
(Soun' may you sleep in yo' cradle o' fire!)
Rock-a-by baby, hushed in the flame."
- Lola Ridge

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I live in a city that is burdened with a past, and a present, of racial prejudice if not all-out hatred. Across the river from me is East St. Louis, the site of the race riot Harper Barnes describes in specific detail with numerous stories of the people involved. He begins with a capsule but thorough history of racial conflicts in the United States, including that inhuman practice called lynching, and eloquently discussses the East St. Louis milieu before settling on the days of the 1917 riot in the town that still bears the scars of that period.

Saying "I really liked this book" is somewhat akin to I really enjoyed, say, a particularly realistic production of Medea. But it's true. Never Been a Time is researched and written very well, and it's a story many local African Americans have grown up with for nearly a century. It's a story that we white folks should take as our own, not to flay ourselves for our guilt in whatever degree, but to understand that we were part of it and to consider how to see that such events cease -- even though since 1917 all too many events bear an unhealthy resemblance.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harper Barnes revisits one of the most tragic events in American history, the East St. Louis Race Riot of 1917. The first part of the book reviews many of the earlier race riots and the Jim Crow era of American history and then recounts the events of May and July of 1917 in East St. Louis. I found the book disturbing because it is difficult for me to understand the deep seated racial violence perpetrated upon innocent people simply because of their color. What happened in East St. Louis is no different than what Hitler and his cronies did to the Jewish culture. I am not sure I would go so far as to imply that the event made the civil rights movement.

[Sheila · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was the third generation of my family born in East St. Louis, Illinois, so this book held special meaning and history for me. I've tried to read a few other books dealing with the especially significant and horrific 1917 race riot in Illinois, but this one is the best - it locates the riot in history and geography and socio political relations, such as the bosses' recruitment of African-Americans to the City in order to increase the labor pool and reduce wages and their use of African-Americans as scabs, in order to divide the labor movement. Fabulous account of an interesting historical time in general and horrific riot.

[Helena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book Journeys. I had never heard of the 1917 race riot in East St. Louis until a customer suggested it for our library book discussion. This book has helped me understand that the Civil Rights movement didn't just occur in the 1960's. I highly recommend it as a must read.

[Rhuff · Rating 4 out of 5]

American history is chock full of "incidents", swept under the rug of polite society as it puts the tragedy behind and moves on. The result is a convenient amnesia and an unwillingness to acknowledge suppressed tensions and passions until they erupt yet again, leaving victims and bystanders to wonder once more how it could have happened here. The truth is that Americans have a long history of doing things that Americans "don't do." The 1917 pogrom in East St. Louis was one of many.

Although the riot seemed unprecedented, the racial violence of Reconstruction was still within living memory. More recently, the ethnic cleansing of blacks (commonly termed "bulldozing") out of whole communities and counties - especially where most vulnerable, in the upper South and lower Midwest - had been a recurring phenomenon since the 1890s. What made it especially galling was such "southern" behavior in the Land of Lincoln; yet even this is no real contradiction, when one recalls that Lincoln was a Kentucky migrant and southern Illinois a hotbed of pro-Confederate opinion.

Layered onto this heritage was the labor crisis of early 20th century America. The status of blacks as perennial outcasts made them a perfect corps of strikebreakers - a "scab race", as Barnes notes - gulled by promises of high wages in wartime industry, abetted by black leaders in collusion with white businessmen. The result was not only race war in American cities of the period, of which East St. Louis was the first and worst. US labor was ruptured, with the union movement conveniently discredited as a breeding ground of crime and violence: a nest of grafters, bomb-throwers and killers of black babies whom all respectable folk should shun.

The agony of progressive America was epitomized in the confrontation, almost coming to blows as recounted on pp. 178-179, between two icons of the period. Both Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor and former president Theodore Roosevelt attended the Carnegie Hall reception of a delegation from the Russian provisional government, hailing the birth of a fledgling democracy. Gompers tried to spin the violence as a capitalist plot akin to tzarist intrigue; but Roosevelt would have none of it, insisting the riot disgraced the name of American democracy in a wartime world supposedly being made safe for it. The highly-engaged audience cheered and booed according to class lines, noted the New York Times. Labor representatives applauded Gompers, while middle class liberals championed Roosevelt's near-violent denunciation of the riot and its racist apologists.

The axis of class and race displayed in East St. Louis was, however, not created by wartime recruitment, nor early 1900s strikebreaking, nor political machines and corrupt demagogues. Its roots go to the founding core of American political economy, when black slaves replaced white indentured servants in the Virginia tobacco fields. No sooner had the 1688 English Bill of Rights guaranteed the "Rights of Englishmen," than English subjects were displaced by the massive importation of those without such rights for life. From then onward the "wages of whiteness" ensured race feeling would trump class solidarity through most of American history; while facilitating an easier assimilation for the children of white immigrants. Thus the East St. Louis riot of 1917, for all of its modern industrial trappings, was but a station stop on a long track of tradition.

For black Americans its flames sparked the first mass activism since Reconstruction. To say that the modern civil rights movement is a product of this period is stretching a point: the reason this era was forgotten by so many, on the long march between Reconstruction and M. L. King, is that it proved impotent to fundamentally change American society without the backing of federal courts and enforcement. But as Barnes notes, it's quite wrong to assume this era was a mere glacier of racism. The urging of American blacks to arm themselves and fight for freedom at home, as recounted at the Liberty League meeting in Harlem, was a call for militance as provocative as anything out of the 1960s. That white America should be so shocked by the "unAmericaness" of Rap Brown or Eldridge Cleaver is again proof of its convenient amnesia. Not only Russians or Germans need reminding of an unsavory national past.

Other reviewers have criticized the book for its non-academic, journalistic lack of depth and narrowed focus on the East St. Louis community, instead of the macro issues of discrimination and race violence. Yet the subject's importance compensates well for the book's flaws. Barnes' effort is overall a good introduction to a time and place that cries for remembrance from the Orwellian depths of US history.

[Jay Babcock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily the best nonfiction book I read this year. Great research, including interviews with witnesses who were children at the time of the riot, as well as content from congressional hearings from 1917 that somehow no other writer sought out. The historical context is a bracing correction to the sanitized American history of my public high school education, and a sobering mirror image to contemporary politics and social issues. Most of all, the quality of the narrative, weaving together multiple eyewitness accounts, conveys the scale, rhythm, and sheer horror of the events of those days, to provide a captivating story that I can't help sharing with every reader I talk to. Should be required reading. My only complaint is with the subtitle: numerous similar riots, as well as a legion of other appalling historical conditions (generously recounted in Mr. Barnes's history), surely all contributed to the Civil Rights movement.

[Erica H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was great. Very well researched and detailed. I liked that the author established the climate of race relations in the country from the end of slavery leading up to the 1917 riot. I learned lots that I didn't know before about the motives of blacks who left the South after slavery, as well as about how new immigrants to the U.S. felt about blacks.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unbelievable how this massacre got wiped from history. I didn’t realiE there was so many accounts starting with 1917 Ida b Wells. Harper Barnes was a newspaper columnist as I was growing up in St Louis

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

My father-in-law grew up in East St. Louis, so when I found this book after he passed, I knew I had to read it. I am so glad I did--I had no idea of it's history and importance.

[Mona B-j · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great historical read about my hometown...East St. Louis, Illinois

[Frank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian is famous for its gory descriptions of massacres. Disturbing as I found that book, however, I found Harper Barnes's account of the East St. Louis riot even more so. Maybe because it happened right across the river, in a town that I've heard about all my life but never been to because the interstate skirts it by design, and because its reputation forbids sightseeing. Barnes narrates the riot, which he notes is more properly described as a massacre, in the central chapters of this book. Working from the transcripts of Congressional hearings, he tells the story through an array of eyewitnesses. I found these chapters nauseating; they weighed on my spirit with a kind of diffuse pain. I doubt I'll ever forget the stories of blacks being pulled from streetcars and killed, or of the young boy whose beaten body was thrown back into a burning building by a mob of whites.

On either side of this central horrifying narrative, Barnes provides concise historical context. As prologue to the riot, the "Redemption" in the South as whites reinstated brutal inequality, the Great Migration to the North of blacks in search of work and better treatment, and their exploitation as strikebreakers against unions they weren't allowed to join. As a consequence of the riot, the galvanization of the NAACP and other civil rights groups, and the radicalization of W. E. B. Du Bois in response to the wave of violence epitomized by the East St. Louis riot.

It's a fine book, hard to read in many ways, but important for all Americans, and especially for St. Louisans.

[Kristi Isaacs]

The purpose of Harper Barnes writing the book Never Been A Time is to give the historical events of the 1917 riots. The book tells about black people-moving north looking for work. They moved to many cities in the North including, Cincinnati, Boston, New York and smaller cities and towns, including East St. Louis where the July 2, 1917 riot occurred. This was the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. With the moves to the North this meant that the black people were competing for the jobs of the whites. The white people rioted against the blacks. Black’s were blamed for all the cities problems and troubles in East St. Louis. During the summer of 1917 there were many attacks and mobs in the streets against the blacks. This led to an all out riot on July 2,1917. This book was written in third person point of view.
The theme of the book was how destructive and devastating racial riots can be and the leading to the Civil Rights Movement.
The book was written in a description style of writing.
Never Been a Time was not my favorite. It didn’t hold my attention or have any suspense to it to keep me wanting to see what was going to happen. There were some interesting facts about the history of the 1917 riots. I am grateful that our country has moved past the rioting times such as these.

[Jaki Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book "Never Been a Time" was a very good book to read. It gave me a history of what happened in East Saint Louis in the early 1900's with all of the racism and violence. It told the horrible accounts of the people who lived in East Saint Louis and the troubles they had to go throught. The only downside I have to this book is that it gave to much details for me to read, and made me lose intrest fast. Overall the book was a great read!

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

An important book for St. Louis Metro East residents who would like to understand the social history that shapes our region. Like most historical dramas, there are villains and heroes; unfortunately, in this tale, the villains far outnumber the heroes. Careful: it’s a difficult and disturbing read.

[Jason S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book about the 1917 East St. Louis race riots. The claim in the title to be what "sparked the civil rights movement" is quite a bit exaggerated, and the book does not talk about this very much at all

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent chronicle of the building racial tension in East St. Louis and the resulting riot and aftermath. This is also a great book for anyone interested in St. Louis history.

[Michael Hicks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Learn some TRUTH!!!