Carlos F. Hurd, the reporter for the Post-Dispatch, wrote in the archived article that he was appalled by the casualness with which white mobs roamed East St. Louis and stoned Black men who had their “hands raised, pleading for life.” He witnessed a Black man, “almost dead from a savage shower of stones,” hanged with a clothesline. When that broke, the mob hanged him with a rope.
A group of white women beat a group of Black women with sticks and stones as they begged “for mercy,” Hurd wrote. But the white women “laughed and answered the coarse sallies of men as they beat the negresses’ faces and breasts with fists, stones and sticks.”
The East St. Louis Massacre launched a reign of racial terror throughout the U.S. that historians say stretched from 1917 to 1923, when the all-Black town of Rosewood, Florida, was destroyed. During that period, known as the Red Summer, at least 97 lynchings were recorded, thousands of Black people were killed, and thousands of Black-owned homes and businesses were burned to the ground. Fire and fury fueled massacres in at least 26 cities, including Washington, D.C.; Chicago, Illinois; Omaha, Nebraska; Elaine, Arkansas; Charleston, South Carolina; Columbia, Tennessee; Houston, Texas; and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
“During the massacres, they murdered and maimed people indiscriminately, unprovoked,” said Alice M. Thomas, a Carnegie scholar and a professor in the School of Law at Howard University. “They went into homes, stole personal belongings, and burned down homes. They used the massacres as a cover to murder without sanction, maim without sanction, and steal without sanction. No one, to this day, has been held accountable.”
Racial terror was common in many parts of the country following the end of slavery. “It was an intentional use of violence against African Americans,” said David F. Krugler, author of 1919, The Year of Racial Violence. “The motivation was to punish African Americans for economic success and take it away. In Tulsa, they burned it to the ground.”
