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FREEDOMWAYS          THIRD QUARTER 1969

of the big companies sent down South to get them to come North.  Jobs, that's what they were promised.
 
"They lived in the worst possible conditions, down there along the river front.  Just shacks, that's all they had.  All you can know about Mississippi then (where they came from), is that it must have been pretty bad if what they had in East St. Louis was an improvement.  On the other hand, maybe they hadn't known what they were getting into, and were just caught there, with no way to get home.

"Those I knew worked around the glasshouse for $1.50 a day for hard dirty work.

"They were a cut above the average human being, white or black, for did you ever think of the gumption it would take for a black man to leave everything he knew behind and come North, just on the promise of a job, and a factory job at that?  Like the pioneers they were, and the early settlers, and then the foreigners.  Ever think about the gumption they had?  Well, I have, and those Negroes who came up from Mississippi to East St. Louis-well, I take off my hat to them.

"They sure ran into trouble, and it wasn't long in coming.  They couldn't have imagined the feeling against them.  The hatred.  The fear.  They couldn't have imagined it."

congressional report

Here I interpose facts about what happened taken from the report of a Special Committee of Congress set up to investigate the riot.  That report was published July 15, 1918, after the taking of testimony of many witnesses and participants.  Curiously, the excuse given for making the investigation was that the riots had interfered with inter-state commerce.  East St. Louis was being abandoned and the factories were having trouble getting workers, black or white.

As the Congressional committee tells the story, in 1917, between 10,000 and 12,000 Negroes came up from the South to seek work at promised high wages.  They came believing, too, that they would have the political and social liberty "Illinois guaranteed all its citizens."  They had "scarcely enough to defray traveling expenses."  They stood around street corners in "homesick huddles," seeking shelter and hunting work.  A great number found no employment, and were considered "a menace to property, and the safety of the community." 

Others, though, at the factory gates, were "chosen in preference to white men."  The Aluminum Ore Company-this is from the record

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 11:33:18