Speaker 1: Massacre Mondays, the city East Saint Louis. The year nineteen seventeen.
Speaker 1: I didn't know. Maybe I didn't know. Maybe no, I
Speaker 1: didn't know. Maybe you didn't I didn't know. I didn't know.
Speaker 1: I didn't know. All right, let's go back to nineteen seventeen.
Speaker 1: The United States has an active economy. It's boosted by
Speaker 1: the World War One. A lot of people that would
Speaker 1: be working has been drafted into military service. Black folcus
Speaker 1: started the Great Migration, which was moving from the South
Speaker 1: to the North, you know, trying to get away from
Speaker 1: the lyncheons and at Jim Crow South. During the spring
Speaker 1: of eighteen seventy, blacks was arriving in Saint Louis at
Speaker 1: the rate of two thousand per week, and of course
Speaker 1: the white folks was mad at black folks. Black folks
Speaker 1: were moving. They're willing to work a lot more for
Speaker 1: a lot less. Insert July first, nineteen seventeen. It was
Speaker 1: a black Ford model t as some white boys in it.
Speaker 1: They drove through a black area in the city. It's
Speaker 1: a group of black folks on the street. White boys
Speaker 1: get the shooting in the crowd. An hour later, another
Speaker 1: four comes through, looking similarly. They had four people in
Speaker 1: the vehicle, a journalist, two police officers. Winning they came
Speaker 1: into the same area now the black folk there, possibly
Speaker 1: assuming that the car was the same folk that just
Speaker 1: came through earlier, shooting up the place. They opened fire
Speaker 1: on the car. In that shooting, they killed an officer instantly,
Speaker 1: and they mortally wounded another. That set it off. The
Speaker 1: next day, thousands of white folks went down there to
Speaker 1: look at that dog on car with all the detectives
Speaker 1: blood in there. From there they rushed the black sections
Speaker 1: of the city, beating and shooting blacks on the streets. Women,
Speaker 1: children didn't matter. They cut the water hoses at the
Speaker 1: fire department and then went and burned entire sections of
Speaker 1: the city. Then they would stand outside and shoot any
Speaker 1: black folks that was trying to escape the fires. The
Speaker 1: following day, on July third, nineteen seventeen, a reporter from
Speaker 1: the Saint Louis Dispatch road for an hour and a
Speaker 1: half last evening, I saw the massacre of helpless negros
Speaker 1: in downtown East Saint Louis, where black skin was a
Speaker 1: death warrant. The New York Times reported one of the interactions,
Speaker 1: ten or fifteen young girls were about eighteen years old,
Speaker 1: chased a Negro woman at the relay depot at about
Speaker 1: five o'clock. The girls were brandishing clubs and calling upon
Speaker 1: the men to kill the woman. The NAACP says between
Speaker 1: one hundred and two hundred black people died that weekend.
Speaker 1: Six thousand black folks were left homeless after their neighborhoods
Speaker 1: were burned. They said it was about four hundred thousand
Speaker 1: dollars worth of total property damage. That's about nine million
Speaker 1: dollars a day. One of the silliest stories I saw
Speaker 1: was Lina Cook. She survived and she testified against three
Speaker 1: white men who've killed her husband and her fourteen year
Speaker 1: old son. Now John Charles Hannah and Harry Robinson weren't
Speaker 1: charged with the death of her family, but they were
Speaker 1: tried for the murder of William Kaiser. Now William Kaiser
Speaker 1: was a white merchant who had been killed by a
Speaker 1: bullet that passed through the body of Larisa years They
Speaker 1: both got found guilty of murder and sentenced to fifteen
Speaker 1: years in prison. If you don't understand what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: I'm saying these white men weren't on trial for killing
Speaker 1: her son. The bullet that went through her son and
Speaker 1: killed a white man. They was on trial for that,
Speaker 1: and I didn't know. Maybe you didn't either. I