- [Gabrielle] What do
you want people to know about East St. Louis
in the decade that came after what happened that day? - [Joseph] The decades
that came after people carry that
memory as trauma. And I think one of the most
important things we should do is to understand that what
people don't wanna tell stories, it's not because
they wanna forget it, it's because they don't
want to relive it. Those are two very
different things. - [Gabrielle] What Father
Joseph Brown is talking about happened more than
100 years ago. It was July of 1917. And while accounts of
how it started differ, Brown, a professor of
Africana studies at SIUE and many others want you
to know the whole story. - But since my father's
family was living here in East Louis at the
time of the riot, I knew about it from childhood because they would talk about how they had to hide people
under the front porch. - Wow. - So I think that
was one of the... No, I don't think. I know that was one
of the motivations that forced me into calling
people into a conversation about having the 1917
Centennial Commission. (somber music) - [Gabrielle] So what happened
in that first week of July? Congressional reports show
after several cars fired shots into black neighborhoods, two white police
officers ended up shot. What happened next will leave
parts of the city in ruins and people dead at
11:00 pm on July 1st. This sound, (bell ringing) a bell at True Light
Baptist Church rang and violence against
black East St. Louisianans was erupting everywhere. (somber music) On July 2nd, white men and women shot and set a blaze their
innocent black neighbors. They burned down homes
with people inside. They pulled men, women, and
children off of street cars and as the story goes, national guardsmen and
police just watched. - [Milton] What is unique about
the pogrom or July the 2nd is the magnitude and that
it all occurred at one time. - [Gabrielle] But to
tell the whole story means to tell many stories. Judge Milton Wharton, who's also on the commission
to preserve this story, recalls one. - Yes, there was a
particular story of a family that returned on the (mumbles)
from a day of fishing. A wonderful day, they
were having a picnic and a fishing trip and they wound up in
downtown St. Louis in the heat of the riot. The rioters came in, shot and
killed the lady's husband, shot and killed her son and then they turned on
her and they beat her. And there was one
white individual who had the courage
to step forward and protect her and prevent
her from being killed. That very much
stands out in my mind about the horrors of
this particular incident. - [Gabrielle] So where did
the massacre happen exactly? The simple answer is a
little bit of everywhere. (somber music) It happened at McCasland
in 11th street, parts of 10th and Bond, but anyone will tell
you much of the violence happened in the downtown area. At the time of St. Louis
Post-Dispatch reporter counted six bodies in
the street at one point and we know several
people were lynched. Were there any other stories
that they would talk about? - Well, there was the one
that I also knew about, and that is that corner
around Collinsville Avenue in 4th street or down there where the Broadview Hotel is now or used to be. And I can remember my
father pointing out saying, "You know, they hung
somebody up there." (somber music) - [Gabrielle] To get away,
people ran for their lives down the train tracks. Entire families escaped to
the municipal free bridge were white rioters tried
to stop them, killing some. (somber music) Are there any parts of it that you'll remember always or is there any story
that sticks with you and your learning
of what happened? - Some of the things
that stick with me are the brutality
and the vicious ways that people were
murdered by women. When you hear the stories of women gathering
around the street cars, pulling black women and
their children off those cars and beating them to death or standing around yelling
at people in their houses when they were burning
the houses down, forcing the people to
come out and be shot and the babies being thrown
back into the houses. And the fact that so much of
that mob activity was organized in what we would now call the Red Light District
of East St. Louis, where there were the bars, the gambling joints
and the brothels. And so it was gender inclusive, the mob. And when you think about
what happened in 2021, 2017 in Charlottesville,
what we have seen, what we have always known
about America's history, it has always been
quite inclusive, the violence and the
death and destruction. (somber music) - We revisited
several sacred sites where blackie St.
Louisianans lost their lives and their homes, entire
neighborhoods flattened, entire families gone. That includes right here at
10th Street in Trendley Avenue. (somber music) - They wouldn't. It wasn't
a constant conversation, but I do about it. - Yeah. - And I knew how ugly it was. - So was anyone ever
held accountable for these heinous acts? In some ways, yes, in others, the injustice just continued. - That really wasn't
an isolated incident, extra judicial executions
of African Americans were occurring frequently prior to what happened
on July the 2nd and they've
continued afterwards. - [Gabrielle] But you
can't tell the story of the East St.
Louis race massacre without talking about
Dr. Leroy Bundy. Bundy was a black dentist
and a community leader. His home stood right here. He was wrongfully charged
for starting the massacre. He stood trial and
was even found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. Later, the Illinois Supreme
Court exonerated him. As for everyone else, more
than 100 people were indicted, that included a number of police
officers and 23 black men. The mayor at the
time, Fred Mollman, even faced the charge
of malfeasance, but with whole families and neighborhoods
completely wiped out, was that enough? - [Reginald] No, not even close. - [Gabrielle] Reginald
Petty was born and raised in East St. Louis and says his family
passed down the story from generation to generation. - [Reginald] I
remember my parents, my father talking about
the number of relatives that disappeared. - [Gabrielle] So in your family? - Yeah, my family. And he talks about, I
remember him talking about that he was somebody
worked in the stockyards and they were coming home and they were pulled off
the train in the stockyards (mumbles) somewhere
downtown and disappeared. I remember it helping
produce a fear in me of these white people,
you know, be careful. And also, and just... But I didn't hear
any more about it, I don't think, until I was maybe in college. (somber music) - [Milton] It was like the
elders of our community want to give us
an upbringing free of much of the
stress of brutality that many of them had
experienced (mumbles) - [Gabrielle] What happened
on that day in 1917 would become a
difficult story to tell for generations to come. It's a part of that
because of the pain that comes with that story. - Of course. - [Gabrielle] Dr. Lillian
Parks says it was a while before she learned
the story herself. Did you learn
about it in school? - Yes, to a certain degree. We taught civics The story was 1917 race riot. Very, very bad, terrible. Hurt our children,
hurt the town. It really was something
that we were not able to really get back
if we wanted to, but we did, to a point we did. And so when that comes up, I just say, "We did
the best we could." - Parks is a lifelong educator having spent more than four
decades in the classroom, she'd even serve as
the superintendent. - A black woman never had that. And I said, "There are
some things we need to do." And we did them. - [Gabrielle] Though retelling
the story is extremely hard, Father Brown says
it's for that reason that it has to be told. (somber music) - [Joseph] There were
two aspects in my idea of bringing this
commission together. One was to heal the land
where the blood was spilled. We had to have some kinds of
rituals to name the places, to pray over them and to honor the
ancestors who died there. The second one was to make sure that there was always
gonna be a component that taught our young. It is not about how bad
and how traumatic it was, it's how we have survived and transformed the
trauma into action. - Why is it so vital that
the commission exists and that the work continues? - Because history is still
not being taught well. And part of the game that we
knew was rigged against us, was that what we
grew up knowing, our young people did not know. So we've made it our
highest priority. We were not totally successful in all that we
wanted to accomplish, but we made sure that
Centennial Commission will always have some impact on this city, because we want our
young people to know as the slogans and
the posters said, "East St. Louis, the
city that survives." (somber music) - [Gabrielle] Part
of that has to do with how the story
is passed down, making sure that it
tells the whole story. Do we have an estimate or do we know how many people
lost their lives that day or is it hard to even know? - We will never know how
many people lost their lives. They weren't gonna be
counting the people that they threw back
into burning buildings, there were no bodies. They're not gonna
count the people that they threw into ditches
and rivers and streams. And they're not ever
going to count the people who were buried in mass graves. So when people say it's
maybe 40 or 50 people, no, I'm gonna say
100s of people. And we don't know the
people who fled here and died somewhere else. We don't know because people may have
moved to Kinloch, Missouri and died there. They may have died in the
hospital in St. Louis. So they're not gonna
be reporting that because black lives
did not matter. - [Gabrielle] That also
means using the right word to describe what happened in the first place. - And one of the things that we as a commission
had to choose to do was to stop calling it the
East St. Louis race riot, and change it to Charles
Lumpkins preferred term, that he wrote his book
about, the American Pogrom, that word from Eastern
Europe in which genocide was being inflicted
upon Jews, for instance, wiping out a group of people,
the pogrom or the massacre. Because until the 1960s, the word riot always referred
to mobs of white people going in the black communities, killing inhabitants. And now we have large gatherings of black and other people protesting for civil
rights and justice. And if things are
being destroyed, it's businesses, it's
property, it's materials, they do not go into
neighborhoods to kill people, but the word riot has
been imposed upon them. And we did not want
that word to be here because it doesn't tell
us the whole truth. It's a pogrom, it was genocide and
it was organized. (somber) - [Gabrielle] So what makes
East St. Louis, East St. Louis? For this commission, it's not only their love for where they come from. - [Milton] This was an
(mumbles) opportunity for children to grow up. It felt very
protective, isolated. - [Gabrielle] It's
also about making sure the world knows where it's been. All the places it has left to go and who it could be. - [Joseph] And if you
don't know your history, you will be trapped when somebody else
throws it to you in a corrupted version. (somber music) People survived it. And instead of saying,
"Oh, those poor people," we might want to say, "Could you all teach us
some survival skills." That could change America. It could change the way we
do things across cultures, gender status, economic status. "Wait a minute. You
survived all of that. "I know you got some
lessons to teach us. "Come to East St. Louis and
find out what they are." (somber music)
