This year marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of Elliott M. Rudwick’s classic work “Race Riot at East St. Louis, July 2, 1917.” It was the first book written about that tragic event. Rudwick wrote this landmark work while a member of the sociology faculty at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, which he had joined in 1960.
Rudwick graduated from Temple University. He earned his master’s and doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation examined the leadership style of W.E.B. Dubois.
“Rudwick taught a variety of classes at SIUE, including Introductory Sociology, Introduction to Social Work, Social Control and Social Movements,” according to Dr. Stephen Kerber, university archivist and unique collections librarian at SIUE. “But the class he taught most frequently dealt with race and minority group relations.”
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Kerber states that Rudwick, “although unknown to the SIUE community today, was one of the most prominent scholars researching and writing about African American history in the later 1950s the 1960s, and the early 1970s.”
Rudwick’s journey to writing this book began shortly after joining the SIUE faculty. “On the first or second day of class in East St. Louis,” he wrote in the preface, “a student mentioned the 1917 race riot which had occurred here.” His reply to the student was “very brief. I knew almost nothing about the subject.”
For that matter, most Americans knew almost nothing about the 1917 violence. “Professional literature on race relations almost completely ignored the East St. Louis riot,” Rudwick wrote. “I began collecting local data about it.” A research grant from the university empowered him to locate materials related to the riot in Springfield, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and New York City.
“Originally,” Rudwick stated, “I had planned to make greater use of personal interviews with old residents, but it became apparent that interesting interviews are not always illuminating ones.” He correctly noted that “memory distorts events as well as effaces them.” Nonetheless, talks with senior citizens — referred to by Rudwick as “old-timers” — provided useful leads and historical background. Officially, 39 Blacks and nine whites were killed in the violence, but experts believe a death toll of 100 or more is more likely.
Rudwick’s painstaking research brings this horrific event to life for readers. He often quotes accounts from St. Louis newspaper reporters, including those employed by the Post-Dispatch. “At Fourth and Broadway, Paul Anderson, a Post-Dispatch correspondent, counted six negro corpses on the street. He recalled, ‘I think every one I saw had both hands above his head begging for mercy.’”
Carlos Hurd, another Post-Dispatch reporter, scooped the world press by becoming the first journalist to file a story about the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Covering the riot, Hurd witnessed white prostitutes “with last night’s paint still unwashed on their cheeks” assault Black women who were attempting to flee to safety.
Hurd saw these prostitutes “beat the negresses’ faces and breasts with fists, stones and sticks. I saw one of these furies fling herself at a militiaman who was trying to protect a negress, and wrestle with him for his bayonetted gun, while other women attacked the refugee.” Hurd also reported the hanging of a Black man from a telephone pole. “The body was left hanging there for hours,” he wrote.
Rudwick correctly noted that much of the animosity between East St. Louis white and Black residents was rooted in labor conflict. In the United States of 1917, corporations used Blacks as replacement workers, aka scabs, “to crush strikes and destroy unions.” Just a year earlier, Black replacement workers had been used to break a stockyard strike in Chicago.
“However,” Rudwick wrote, “nowhere was the relationship between labor strife and race rioting more clearly and directly evident than in East St. Louis. The July violence occurred shortly after the Aluminum Ore Company workers lost a strike that began when union sympathizers were replaced by Negroes.”
While unions were reluctant to organize Black workers, “Negro prejudice against unions” made Black workers more likely to trust “employer paternalism to protect them against the hostility of lower class whites,” Rudwick asserted. Black workers remained largely unorganized until the founding of the CIO in the 1930s.
During his eight years at SIUE, Rudwick published a total of 17 scholarly articles as well as two other books: “From Plantation to Ghetto” and “The Making of Black America,” both of which he co-authored with August Meier. He left SIUE to join the faculty of Kent State University in 1968. When he died in 1985 at age 58, his New York Times obituary described him as “an expert on the history of black Americans.”
“Race Riot at East St. Louis, July 2, 1917” remained the only full-length book on this event until the publication of Harper Barnes’ “Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked the Civil Rights Movement” and Charles Lumpkins’ “American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics,” both published in 2008. Barnes was a longtime reporter and editor at the Post-Dispatch.
In recent years, some scholars and activists have begun referring to this tragedy as a massacre or pogrom rather than a race riot. While the title of Rudwick’s work has become something of an anachronism, its contents have lost none of their relevance. “Race Riot At East St. Louis, July 2, 1917,” remains in print as a paperback published by University of Illinois Press.
John J. Dunphy is the author of “Unsung Heroes of the Dachau Trials” and owns the Second Reading book Shop in Alton.