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226 THE CRISIS

"And did you see any starting fires?"

"No, all we saw was niggers flying."

And they were to disarm every "nigger" of any kind of weapon - guns, razors, knives. They got everything away from them.

Miss Gruening wanted to know if they hadn't disarmed any whites at all.

They were doubtful. Yes, one remembered he had disarmed a drunken white man who was attacking a white woman.

Subsequently, Miss Gruening meet with the Military Board of Inquiry, whose members were: Brigadier General Henry R. Hill, Brigadier General James E. Stewart, Colonel M. J. Foreman, Colonel Taylor E. Brown, Major Edward B. Tollman, Colonel William D. McChesney and Major Richard J. Abbott. She told her story and offered to identify the boys.

The Board was unenthusiastic and a trifle skeptical. Didn't Miss Gruening really suppose that the boys were joking? Doubtless they merely wanted to look big in the eyes of a lady. Yes, such jesting was in bad taste, but boys will be boys. At any rate identification was impossible because the Olney troops had been withdrawn.

Miss Gruening offered to go to Olney, to go anywhere to identify the two guardsmen.

Well, that was unnecessary, it was rather late now - on the third day of the inquiry - to institute such a complaint. Why hadn't the lady gone immediately to the commandant, who was present, and made her charge.

Miss Gruening had already been to the commandant on another matter and had been rebuffed.

As she was about to leave they laid on her a solemn charge.

"Young lady, as a writer, you have a heavy responsibility. If you go away and give the world the impression that the boys of the Illinois Militia or their officers failed in their duty you will be doing a serious injustice. We have gone exhaustively into the evidence. We have followed up every accusation made against Illinois guardsmen and we find not a single instance in which they misconducted themselves. On the contrary, we have found innumerable instances of the greatest heroism on the part these young and untrained boys - instances in which Negroes were rescued from crowds of two or three hundred people. We have examined every body (Query: the burned and drowned bodies too?) and none of the wounds were made by rifles."

Miss Gruening inquired why, in the case of so much heroism, were so many Negroes killed and only eight white men. There was no answer to that.

Many white people told Miss Gruening that the militia had done remarkably well when one considered that most of them came from towns in Southern Illinois, like Olney, for instance, at whose railway stations were placards with inscription: "Nigger, don't let the sun set on you." It was impossible, it was argued, for such men to suppose that they were being called on to protect "niggers"!

And now we come to a short list of savage deeds which most of the newspapers have failed to print. Some of them though hint at them, like the St. Louis Globe-Democrat for instance, when it says "enormities of savagery which would shame the jungle were committed in the presence of policemen and militiamen." All of the following statements were related by eyewitnesses to Miss Gruening and Dr. Du Bois.

Miss Gruening writing in the Boston Journal says succintly:

"One girl was standing at a window of a white woman's house in which she worked. Her arm was shot away. A policeman and a soldier, she said, did the shooting ... An old woman, frightfully burned, dying in the hospital, was asked if the mob had done it and replied: "No, they jes' set fire to my house and I burned myself trying to get out' ... One of the St. Louis reporters said that he knew exactly how people felt who had seen atrocities abroad and were trying to 'get them across' to the rest of the world, 'although,' he added, 'not even Belgium probably has anything quite as horrible to show' ... About 10 blocks of Negro homes were burned, and the mobs stood outside and shot and stoned those who tried to escape ... The mob seized a colored woman's baby and threw it into the fire. The woman was then shot and thrown in."

One dares not dwell too long on these horrors. There are the stories too related by Mrs. Luella Cox (white) of the Volunteers of America, a St. Louis organization. Mrs. Cox had gone over to East St. Louis on that memorable day on business connected with her society. She passed through scenes that she can never forget. She realized the storm that was brewing and tried to persuade some of the colored families living in what afterwards became the burned district to flee. They were afraid to venture out but remained hidden in their houses with what results one can shudderingly surmise.

Mrs. Cox saw a Negro beheaded with a butcher's knife by someone in a crowd standing near the Free Bridge. The crowd had to have its jest. So its members laughingly threw the head over one side of the bridge and the body over the other.

A trolley-car came along. The crowd forced its inmates to put their hands out the window. Colored people thus recognized were hauled out of the car to be beaten, trampled on, shot. A little twelve-year-old colored girl fainted - her mother knelt beside her. The crowd surged in on her. When its ranks opened up again Mrs. Cox say the mother prostrate with a hole as large as one's fist in her head.

Around a corner came a group of miners, fresh from work, their pick-axes over their shoulders. They plunged joyously into the arena. Presently Mrs. Cox caught sight


227 The MASSACRE OF EAST ST. LOUIS

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St. Louis Star

LOOKING FOR BODIES OF VICTIMS. SIX WERE FOUND HERE.