Photograph by Whitney Curtis
Harper Barnes grew up in the south — in a small town near Chapel Hill, N.C. — and read a lot. "I was a pretty lonely kid," he says. "And I was always fascinated by the race question. I played with black kids, and I kept thinking, 'Why are these people treated so badly?' It was clear there was a hierarchy, and we were at the top and they were at the bottom, but it baffled me."
Barnes' father was a labor lawyer, his mother a journalist, his grandfather a white man who defended blacks charged with murder. Barnes dove into the civil-rights struggle in the early '60s, as an undergrad at the University of Kansas, then joined his old college roommate, William Woo, at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Woo would eventually become the paper's editor. Barnes, livelier in temperament, went from reporter to rock 'n' roll critic; left to be editor of the Boston Phoenix; wrote for The Atlantic Monthly, Rolling Stone and The Village Voice; and returned to the Post in calm middle age as editor of the Sunday magazine. He left that plum job in 1997 to become editor of St. Louis Magazine, then took to writing books. His newest, Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked the Civil Rights Movement, reconstructs the riot that took place in East St. Louis 91 years ago this month. "It may well have been the deadliest American riot in the 20th century," Barnes says, "and most white St. Louisans have never heard of it."
Surely other books have been written about this riot? A good one was written in 1964 by Elliott M. Rudwick, but without the personal anecdotes. And a British scholar wrote one a few years ago.
A British scholar's writing about this, and St. Louisans don't even know it happened? Maybe people didn't want to think about horrible things like this. Even blacks, who invariably know all about it, don't necessarily want it discussed. We are just beginning to delve into this whole history; we are actually starting to talk openly about race in this country for the first time.
You wrote a murder mystery about a jazz musician in the 1930s and a biography of David Francis, who brought the 1904 World's Fair to St. Louis. What led you from there to a race riot? In 1991 I was writing the obit for Miles Davis, and I came across some of his quotes about how the riot affected him — like, "When I was coming up in East St. Louis, black people never forgot what sick white people had done to them back in 1917." He said the riot may well have affected his attitude toward white people for the rest of his life — yet it occurred almost a decade before he was born. I thought, "What a powerful story that must be."
What led up to the riot? Blacks by the thousands had moved north to East St. Louis, and many of them could not find jobs and ended up homeless or crowded into shanties near downtown. Sensationalist stories in local newspapers led many whites to believe blacks were on a rampage of crime. Also, blacks were competing with whites for jobs, encouraged by powerful white industrialists who controlled the city behind the scenes, polluting its air and streams while paying very low taxes. Employers used nonunion strikebreakers, some of them black, against white unions and continued to lure blacks north with promises of jobs long after the job market was saturated. Blacks were blamed for the city's troubles and attacked by white mobs in the street throughout the spring and early summer of 1917. When blacks finally fought back, and two white plainclothes policemen were accidentally killed, a full-scale riot broke out on July 2.
You acknowledge the power of mob hysteria, but you quote accounts of the whites' glee that make the riot sound more like coldblooded amusement. Yeah, I don't know that people got whipped up. I think they were so confident in their power as white people attacking black people — especially when the police and the National Guard let it happen — that there was almost a sense of play about it.
What acts disturb you most? The baby that was thrown into a fire. And the guy who was hung from a telephone pole in downtown St. Louis. They ripped his scalp off.
How many died? I think at least 100 people were killed in the riot. There were many reports of black people being thrown off the Free Bridge, which, by the way, is still there — it's called the MacArthur Bridge, a railroad bridge south of the Poplar Street Bridge. And some of the buildings that were put to the torch with gasoline were burned to the ground. Some people reported missing — like the child thrown into a burning building — were never found.
How do you answer the people who say, "Can't we just move on?" or tell you you're only fanning the flames of racial hatred? I just think we have to understand our history before we can come to grips with it. It hasn't been 150 years since slavery was over. It was ongoing into the 20th century, in many ways. I saw the subject of my book reflected in Barack Obama's speech about his pastor. What Obama said about his pastor wasn't PC, but it was true.
You say you shunned the library in grad school and only realized the fun of scholarly detective work when you wrote your first novel. What sources did you uncover with this one? The mother lode was five reels of microfilmed congressional testimony taken three months after the riot. I read every page and copied probably 1,000 pages, and then I went through and did a chronology, mapping parallels of who was where when. That took a couple years. The whole book took five.
What did the congressional committee decide caused the riot? They blamed a lot of people — crooked politicians; the National Guard, a bunch of farm kids who brought racist attitudes with them; industrialists who were bringing in more blacks than there were jobs for.
And who did those folks blame? There was some talk of un-American activity, German agents. And the white power structure tried to blame the leaders of the black community. LeRoy Bundy [a prosperous black dentist and civil-rights advocate] went to prison as the organizer of the riot, which was directed against his people.
You give tons of background and local history — everything from the boll weevil to Bloody Island. But what factors do you think made the difference? I think the most important thing was that blacks finally stood up to attacks by whites — and tragically, that ended in the killing of two policemen. I also think an important factor was that East St. Louis was so corrupt. The police did nothing to stop the riot, and you had all of these what Marx called the lumpenproletariat, ne'er-do-wells that lived their lives in saloons and participated.
You point out that many of the prostitutes and thugs in that era were white — and that vice was the core of the economy. East St. Louis was set up as a satellite city with basically no tax base; industry — even the slaughterhouse — was outside the city limits. But there was a row of bars and brothels — the "whiskey chute" — on St. Clair Avenue, across from the stockyards on the East St. Louis side, and in 1916 saloon licenses brought in 43 percent of the city's income. Sin was a source of revenue — and today the largest taxpayer in East St. Louis is the Casino Queen.
Do you agree with Andrew J. Theising, who wrote that every major city needs a trash heap, a place to put its slaughterhouses and smokestacks and general ugliness? I don't know if every city needs one, but traditionally it would seem that every large city had one — a satellite, often in another state, at least in another municipality, where laws against everything from vice to pollution are lax, and poverty and crime are rife.
You mention a brief period of racial harmony and integration in East St. Louis before the riots. Was it real or just a facade? I think there was harmony, as long as white people weren't threatened. But they were threatened when the black population was growing rapidly. And because Illinois was a free state, blacks who came in large numbers were led to believe they would be treated better than they were.
Why hasn't more changed by now? I think racism is inherent in our character. There's every evolutionary reason for tribalism; it made a kind of evolutionary sense. But we can no longer afford it. We have to rise above it. Evolution moves way too slowly; we will have killed each other before it catches up.
Do you agree with those who say racial attitudes are different in Chicago and northern Illinois than they are in East St. Louis, St. Louis and southern Illinois? Yeah. When I was doing the research on David Francis, I came across an article in Harper's or The Atlantic that said blacks in Chicago right after the Civil War walked proud, and in St. Louis they walked with their eyes downcast.
What surprised you, after doing the research? The level of the violence. The sheer malevolence. And how few whites helped blacks. I really didn't know a lot of the history before I started this book. I fell in love with W.E.B. Du Bois.
I fell out of love with Booker T. Washington. Yeah, I may be a little hard on Booker. I take it from a 21st-century view, I realize that. But he accepted the white man's caricature of blacks.
If they make a movie, who do you want to direct it? It's time for Jonathan Demme to do a good movie, and he's very interested in racial issues. Denzel Washington could be the doctor. For villains, you've got the real-estate and political bosses. There are too many characters, though ...
And you'd need at least one bright spot. How about the woman who escaped on a raft with her kids, and her son became an alderman?
What could cause a riot this violent today? [He shrugs.] When you look at places like Sarajevo, you realize that tribal animosities lurk right beneath the surface. A demagogue could do it. Fear could do it. Poverty.
What's your next book? My grandfather was called a "nigger lawyer," because he defended blacks charged with murder. He was involved in a violent textile-union strike; I'm looking into that.
