The East St.Louis massacre: 500 (may 28, 1917 – jul 3, 1917)

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The East St. Louis Massacre (also known as the East St. Louis Race Riot or Race War) was carried out by white mobs, white workers, Illinois National Guard soldiers (who either stood by or joined attackers), and East St. Louis police against African American residents between July 2 and July 5, 1917 (though racial violence began May 28, 1917 and continued intermittently through July), with an estimated death toll between 39 African Americans (official Congressional committee count) and 200-400 (estimates by Ida B. Wells, NAACP, and scholars, with many bodies burned or thrown in the Mississippi River never recovered), plus 8-9 white deaths.

Perpetrators engaged in drive-by shootings targeting Black people indiscriminately, beatings with clubs and fists, hangings from street lamps ("Southern negros deserve[d] a genuine lynching"—white mob statements), burning entire Black neighborhoods after cutting fire department water hoses then shooting residents as they fled flames, burning families alive in their homes, stabbing, shooting women and children, mass arson destroying 200-300 houses valued at $400,000 (equivalent to $9.82 million in 2024), forcing 6,000 African Americans (over half the Black population) to flee the city, shooting at refugees attempting to swim across Mississippi River to safety, with Illinois National Guard ordered not to shoot white rioters and some troops joining the violence, and complete collapse of civil government enabling three days of unchecked racial terrorism.

It has been labeled as a massacre by contemporary observers including Theodore Roosevelt (who called it "an appalling outbreak of savagery"), W.E.B. Du Bois (who described it as one of the bloodiest outrages against mankind), Marcus Garvey (whose speech "The Conspiracy of the East St. Louis Riots" propelled him onto national stage), the worst racial riot in American history at the time, and modern historians who characterize it as a pogrom. The Equal Justice Initiative commemorates it as a massacre. It has been classified as a"race riot" due to the intentional targeting of an entire racial community for the purposes of elimination.

Only minimal accountability followed—105 indicted but only 20 received prison sentences, with Herbert Wood and Leo Keane convicted of one murder each. The Congressional investigation concluded "civil government in East St. Louis completely collapsed" but implemented no systemic reforms. President Wilson took a full year to condemn the violence. The massacre was preserved through African American oral tradition—survivors like Samuel Kennedy (born 1910) passed down eyewitness accounts to children who "spent a lifetime...hearing these stories," with descendants reporting fathers suffering PTSD from witnessing "people's houses being set ablaze...being shot when they tried to flee, some trying to swim to the other side of the Mississippi while being shot at by white mobs with rifles, others being dragged out of street cars and beaten and hanged from street lamps."

The July 28, 1917 NAACP Silent Parade of 10,000 Black protesters marching down Fifth Avenue in New York represented one of the first mass civil rights demonstrations, but the massacre remains largely forgotten in American historical memory despite being one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history.

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