Read Online Josephine Baker by Jean-Claude Baker, Chris Chase - Free Book Online

matter of great importance. The heat came early that summer, and on sultry nights, excursion boats offering the hope of cool air plied their way up and down the Mississippi. Sometimes the young Martins would go to the pier at the foot of Olive Street and watch the steamers set out in the moonlight. Departure time: 9 P.M . Admission: thirty-five cents. They could hear the music, and see people dancing on the lower deck.
The St. Louis Argus
touted a “Family Boat Excursion” to take place on Monday, July 2; it would feature entertainment by the Ragtime Steppers, and it promised to leave on schedule, “rain or shine.”
    As it turned out, rain or shine didn’t signify. July 2, 1917, would be memorialized in blood.
    RACE RIOTERS FIRE EAST ST. LOUIS AND SHOOT OR HANG MANY NEGROES. DEAD ESTIMATED AT FROM 20 TO 76 ran the headline in
The New York Times
. The details were ugly.
    â€œA mob of more than 100 men, led by ten or fifteen young girls about 18 years old, chased a negro woman at the Relay depot about 5 P.M . The girls were brandishing clubs and calling upon the men to kill the woman. A lone negro man appeared in the railroad yards. The mob immediately gave up the charge of the woman and turned upon the man. He was shot to death. . . .”
    Whites had attacked streetcars, taken blacks off them and beaten them, militiamen were helpless against the crowds, white men who tried to give blacks medical attention were prevented at gunpoint from doing so, policemen in patrol wagons were bombarded with bricks. Martial law was finally declared, and the killing stopped, but
The African American
, a Baltimore newspaper, compared the riots to “the ruthless, devastating German drive through Belgium.”
    Hundreds of blacks abandoned their burnt-out homes; they fled by way of the Eads Bridge and the Free Bridge to St. Louis proper, and many of them found refuge in the neighborhood where the Martins lived. “We kept a couple of families who came over cross the river, came over in St. Louis,” Richard said. “We had two, three families; we got them on the street.”
    Josephine, of course, always claimed to have been smack in the heart of East St. Louis when it blew up, and insisted she remembered being shaken from sleep by her mother, who told the children, “It’s the whites. Hurry!”
    The reality was that she had learned about the riots by listening to people who had escaped them; it was from the safe side of the bridge that she and Richard watched the flames. “We could see the houses burning and the sky red with fire, smoke,” he told me. “I was not afraid, because it was on the other side.” Even so, years later, she would still be describing herself as an eyewitness. “I never forget my people screaming. . . . I see them running to get to the bridge. I have been running ever since.” But the stories she told of escaping the mobs, her mother crossing the bridge like Marianne, symbol of France, pulling her children with her, were somebody else’s stories.
    It was a bloody time—thirty-eight lynchings were recorded in 1917—and it would get worse. (The following year would bring sixty-two lynchings; of these, fifty-eight victims were black, four were white.)
    In New York City, under the auspices of the NAACP, thousands of black men and women and children responded to the East St. Louis riots by taking part in a “Silent Protest Parade” along Fifth Avenue. Children dressed in white marched in formation, one carrying a banner inscribed “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” and on the sidelines, a little girl was holding a sign: MOTHER, DO LYNCHERS GO TO HEAVEN ?
    By fall, America was in the war. The black population of St. Louis, though offended by government questionnaires—each carried the words, “If person is of African descent, tear off left-hand corner”—was still willing to do its bit. In early November