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FREEDOMWAYS          THIRD QUARTER 1969

and such a fine baby!  Till the day I die I'll never forget that young couple.

"It would have gone on forever - the police, the militia, the soldiers couldn't do anything, even if they had wanted to.  The riot would have gone on forever until every one of those black people was killed, except for one thing.  They finally got back so far, down there in the valley, that they either had to stand and fight back, or go into the Mississippi.  They threw up a barricade, anything they could get their hands on, and stood ready behind it, with whatever they could find to fight with.  And the whites stopped there, in their tracks.

"Well, finally they got the street cars running again, and the inter-urban, and I managed to get home to you.

"Remember?  Remember how all the next day the Negroes came into Belleville, like the refugees in Vietnam.  They had walked all the way from East St. Louis.  The Belleville people fed them, and were decent enough to them for the time being, but they weren't welcome.  'Nigger, don't let the sun set on you here' - there were lots of places like that then.  I guess there still are.

"That was the end of East St. Louis for a time," he said, after a long pause.  "I went to work in Kansas City.  You folks went back to Terre Haute.  You were as well off there as anywhere, jobs in the glasshouses then being what they were.  You never knew from day to day whether or not you had work.
  "You cannot imagine the times I think back upon that day - and night - in East St. Louis.  Not that I want to!  God knows I don't like to think about it.  But I do - that young couple and that baby!"

"And Harris?" I interrupted.  "That man you were telling about.  Did you ever hear what happened to him?"

"No, and I didn't expect to," he answered, "but he's another I'll never forget.  The only one I ever knew in all my life who could recite the Second Inaugural Address - the greatest collection of words ever put together.  He was the only man I ever knew who could get through it."

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 12:42:19