Nation’s long history of terrorism against Black Americans is actual ‘hidden history’

The destruction of the Greenwood community of Tulsa, Oklahoma has been much in the news recently, and for good reason. This year, 2021, marks the 100^th anniversary of the destruction of the community by a White mob and the murder of more than 300 Black Greenwood residents, all with the collusion of local governmental officials.

It was a horrific event, one that none of us ever heard about in school. I’d never heard of such a thing until I started doing research several years ago into the effect of organized racism and anti-immigrant activities that led to the recreation of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s for a column I was working on concerning the Klan’s popularity here in northern Illinois’ Fox River Valley.

That’s when I stumbled across the East St. Louis race riot of 1917, and then when I looked further into things I came across the Tulsa riot—and many, many more such outrages.

We tend to think of riots concerning race and racial issues as relatively recent things. The ones that stick in most minds were those that occurred after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in the late 1960s, during which large portions of many of our major cities were destroyed.

Race riots are nearly as old as the nation, but instead of mostly involving Black rioters attacking Whites, the opposite is by far most common in the nation’s history.

In fact, Wikipedia has a handy page where you can check out the dismayingly long list of violent racial clashes across the nation’s history beginning in the early 19^th Century.

The map at left I found on-line is a good reference tool, too, although it only includes a relatively small number instances of major U.S. racial violence. But it does illustrate one eye-opening fact—at least for me. And that is that while Louisiana seems to be the champion state for hosting racial riots targeting Black residents, Illinois comes in a distressing second.

Which, I suppose, shouldn’t really be all that much of a surprise. Illinois was initially settled by Southerners. In fact, it was originally governed as a county of the State of Virginia during and after the Revolutionary War. After the war, most of Illinois’ settlers came from Southern states, west through Kentucky and Tennessee and up into southern Illinois.

In accord with the Northwest Ordinance, Illinois was admitted as a free, non-slave state in 1818. But the state was never a friendly place for Black residents. A few years after statehood, in fact, agitation by pro-slavery politicians nearly rewrote the state’s constitution to legally permit slavery. That move was thwarted, narrowly.

But then things began to change. The Erie Canal in New York opened and the rush of settlers from New England and the Middle States (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania) began and soon the population of anti-slave Northerners in northern Illinois easily outpaced Southerners in southern Illinois. So, by the time the Civil War broke out, Illinois as a whole was firmly in the anti-slave column, although most of the southern part of the state was more or less pro-Confederate. In fact, the state had to station troops in towns including Quincy to guard against pro-Southern violence during the war. And a number of Illinois men fought on the Southern side during the war.

There was a lot of discussion about this map on line the other day, but I find it generally accurate in offering the basic mindset of the people who live in the color-coded areas.

So the seeds of racist violence had long been planted here. And as the 20^th Century dawned, the nation experienced a surge in racist and anti-immigrant violence fueled by social change. Blacks were leaving the Jim Crow South to make new lives in Northern manufacturing cities, while immigration from southern Europe—particularly Italy—was fueling anti-Catholic and anti-foreign tensions and violence, all whipped up by racist radio personalities and the reincarnation of the Ku Klux Klan.

By 1917, the 1908 Springfield riot was some years in the past and the Chicago violence was on the horizon. That July, one of the state’s most violent race riots broke out in East St. Louis. At least 50 persons were killed (the toll was undoubtedly higher) and 240 people were reported injured. Damage was set at $1,400,000—which would be $29 million in 2021 dollars.

The history of the riot and accompanying murders and destruction was not completely hidden, although it’s place in Illinois history has certainly been downplayed. In 1964, Elliott M. Rudwick, a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University, published an in-depth study of it, Race Riot at East St. Louis, July 2, 1917. And during the state’s 1968 sesquicentennial, Bob Sutton included Robert Asher’s “Documents of the Race Riot at East St. Louis,” previously published in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, in his two-volume The Prairie State: A Documentary History of Illinois. It was certainly not covered in any of our junior or senior high school history courses, nor was the general topic covered in my college U.S. History survey course at Northern Illinois University. As someone on History Twitter noted the other day, back then it was as if Black Americans completely disappeared between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the public aspects of the Civil Rights movement a century later.

Granted, the story’s there. But you have to dig to find it. Letters and personal accounts left by victims of the violence vividly describe the events of July 2, 1917, something that makes it all the more puzzling the East St. Louis violence, along with all the other outbreaks preceding it and following it during the next few years were virtually erased from the histories taught in Illinois schools.

Trouble had been brewing in East St. Louis for several months, fanned by the labor problems then existing in the area. On July 1, supposedly as a means to forestall violence, police and Illinois National Guard soldiers appeared at the homes of black families and demanded their weapons. Most of the families complied. But in spite of—or perhaps because of—the seizure of Black citizens’ arms, throughout the day, warnings that rioting would begin that evening spread through the Black community.

But according to the testimony of a White woman, the actual riot started about noon, when a colored man came to her house to deliver gasoline. Whites attacked the man, but the woman held the mob at bay with a revolver while the black tried to escape through the back door. The mob pursued him and killed him. Scott Clark, a black teamster, was next. He was stoned to death by women in the mob as he was dragged through the streets by a rope around his neck.

The July 3, 1917 St. Louis Globe-Democrat described the violence in lurid detail. Although U.S. Senator William Yates Sherman frantically requested U.S. troops be sent to quell the violence, President Woodrow Wilson refused.

Most Black residents felt their only hope was to get to the Municipal Free Bridge across the Mississippi to St. Louis, Missouri. Many made it, but many more did not, and were either hung, shot, or burned to death by the mob. Although the governor called out the Illinois National Guard, that seemed to have little or no effect on the destruction.

Among those who made it to safety was Daisy Westbrook. Westbrook, a young black woman at the time, was the director of music and drawing at Lincoln High School in East St. Louis. She described her experiences in a letter written on July 19, just l7 days after the riot, recounting the terror of the black residents of East St. Louis in graphic detail.

“It started early in the afternoon. We kept receiving calls over the ‘phone to pack our trunks and leave, because it was going to be awful that night. We did not heed the calls, but sent grandma and the baby on to St. Louis and said we should ‘stick’ no matter what happened. At first when the fire started, we stood on Broadway and watched it. As they neared our house we went in and went to the basement. It was too late to run then. They shot and yelled some thing awful, finally they reached our house. At first, they did not bother us (we watched from the basement window), they remarked that ‘white people live in that house, that is not a nigger house.’ Later, someone must have tipped them that it was a ‘nigger’ house, because, after leaving us for about 20 min. they returned and started shooting in the house, throwing bricks and yelling like mad ‘kill the nigger, burn that house,’

Destruction along six blocks of Walnut Street in East St. Louis caused by the race riot in July 1917.

“It seemed the whole house was falling in on us. Then some one said, ‘they must not be there; if they are they are certainly dead’. Then some one shouted ‘they are in the basement. Surround them and burn it down.’ Then they ran down our steps. Only prayer saved us, we were under tubs and any thing we could find praying and keeping as quite as possible, because if they had seen one face, we would have been shot or burned to death. Sister tipped to the door to see if the house was on fire. She saw the reflection of a soldier on the front door and pulled it open quickly and called for help. All of us ran out then and was taken to the city hall for the night. The next morning, we learned our house was not burned, so we tried to get protection to go out and get our clothes and have the rest of the things put in storage. We could not, but were sent on to St. Louis. Had to walk across the bridge with a line of soldiers on each side in the hot sun, no hats and scarcely no clothing.

“On Tuesday evening at 6 o’clock our house was burned with two soldiers on guard. So the papers stated. We were told that they looted the house before burning it.”

Things eventually calmed down in East St. Louis, only to flare up again in Chicago in 1919 and then in Tulsa in 1921. The riots could, I suppose, be seen as Jim Crow moving violently north in on-going efforts to stymie Black economic advancement. The riots and massacres destroyed millions in business and home equity that was thereby eliminated from being used to finance Black families’ generational advancement.

If that wasn’t bad enough, some years in the future when President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Alphabet Agencies” began fighting the Great Depression by pumping money into the economy, Black families were effectively barred from receiving any assistance. Black homeowners, farmers, and business owners were kept from participating, again denied the chance to build equity for the future. And yet again, after World War II with the passage of the G.I. Bills, rules created by Southern legislators effectively barred Black veterans from accessing federal housing and education loan and grant programs.

Not until passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 did some equity begin making its way into the systemic racism that was baked into the nation’s governmental and social life. And as soon as that happened, racist Southern Democrats left the party in droves, to be warmly welcomed by cynical Republicans who figured they could keep the racism parts quiet while using the old Confederacy to cement their political power.

And so here we find ourselves in 2021, observing the centennial of the horrific Tulsa race massacre at a time when overt racism is again being promoted and encouraged by politicians as shameless as those who encouraged the racism and religious bigotry of the early 20^th Century. Until the last five years, I’d assumed we’d come a lot farther along this particular road than we obviously have. It’s apparent the road’s a lot longer and more winding than I’d hoped or imagined.

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Will County’s namesake made money from salt…and slavery

It’s not an exaggeration to observe that most people are ignorant of the history of their state, county, or the town in which they live. Part of that is due to how mobile our society is these days. A vanishingly tiny number of us live our entire lives in the same town or even in the same state. As a result, the history of the places in which people find themselves living really has little meaning for them because likely as not, they expect to be moving on again fairly soon.

The recent pandemic and the massive changes in the nation’s economy it’s caused—I’ve seen it dubbed the Great Pause, which I think fits it nicely—has also paused much of the nation’s former mobility. But I’d be surprised if it didn’t resume after COVID is beaten.

Not only do people’s transient lives militate against learning about local history, but so does the modern educational system. State-mandated standardized tests, with their national norms, cannot test local historical knowledge and so unless classroom teachers think it’s important enough to take time away from teaching to the tests, local history is ignored.

But having lived in the same area virtually all my life, and having lived on the same street for 66 years, I’ve seen local issues come and go that would have been considerably smoothed out had people had any knowledge of their community’s history. Because there are reasons why things are as they are. Sometimes they aren’t necessarily good reasons, but roads were not just arbitrarily sited, school districts weren’t created at the whim of some far-away bureaucrat, and municipal boundaries are like they are because of decisions made a long time ago by people who thought they were doing the best they could for their communities.

Will County, Illinois

One of the things some may wonder about is how local places got their names. For the most part, these were not names mandated by those far-away bureaucrats, but were picked by the residents who lived there. County names, however, were indeed given by the Illinois General Assembly, whether local residents liked them or not. My own county of Kendall, for instance, was named in opposition to the one—Orange County—local residents favored in order to honor one of former President Andrew Jackson’s political operatives.

On the other hand, Will County’s name didn’t seem to raise much, if any, opposition when it was given.

Dr. Conrad Will was one of the many Pennsylvania Germans—called the Pennsylvania Dutch by their British neighbors—who came to Illinois in its earliest days and then became active in both local commerce and government.

But Will was also known for something a lot less savory than were typical Pennsylvania Dutchmen. He was not only a business owner, but also one of the few legal Illinois slave owners.

Will was born near Philadelphia, Pa. on June 3, 1779. After he studied medicine for a while, he moved west, probably traveling to Illinois via the well-traveled Virginia-Tennessee migration route. He reportedly arrived at Kaskaskia in 1814. The next year he moved to land along the Big Muddy River in what is now Jackson County, located near the southern tip of Illinois. In 1816 or thereabouts, he obtained a government lease on one of three profitable salines the U.S. Government deeded to the Illinois Territory.

This sketch portrait is the only image of Conrad Will I’ve been able to find.

Salines, or salt springs, were valuable natural resources on the frontier, and the profits from their leases provided a good chunk of early Illinois’ revenue. The water from the springs was evaporated, using a relatively elaborate process for the era, and the salt that remained was then sold.

On the frontier, salt was used for everything from seasoning food to preserving meat and hides. In inland areas away from the coast, salt springs like those that bubbled to the surface in Saline County or in the Illinois Territory’s Randolph County were prime sources for the indispensable material.

In order to make sure speculators didn’t buy up the leases and hold them to drive up prices, the federal leases required the holders to produce a set amount of salt each year or pay a penalty.

In the spring of 1816, the year Jackson County was formed by breaking off a portion of Randolph County, Will traveled back to Pittsburgh to buy a batch of giant cast iron evaporating kettles. Each of the big kettles could hold about 60 gallons and they weighed about 400 lbs. each. The kettles were floated down the Ohio River to the Mississippi on a flatboat, and then transported up the Mississippi to the mouth of the Big Muddy River, and from there up to Will’s saline operation.

To increase productivity, Will deepened the saline spring and installed a horse-powered pump to raise the salt water into a large basin. From there, the salt-laden water it ran via wooden pipes to the kettles, which were lined up side-by-side resting on a long brick firebox. The first kettle was filled with salt water, a fire lit under it, and the evaporation process began. In turn, the increasingly salty water was ladled into each kettle down the row where it was further evaporated until only a salt paste remained. The paste was then dug out of the last kettle and allowed to air dry. After it dried, the raw salt was crushed, shoveled into sacks, and shipped down the Mississippi to Kaskaskia, St. Louis, and beyond.

Jackson County, Illinois

As you might imagine, the labor to manufacture the salt was hard, hot, grueling work, something with which the federal government assisted by allowing slaves to be imported into Illinois for the purpose of its manufacture. Although the Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery in the territory north and west of the Ohio River, special territorial laws and constitutional provisions permitted exceptions at the salines.

Illinois’ first constitution, approved by Congress in 1818, continued to allow slaves to be leased for use in the state’s salt works, and it also allowed a form of indentured servitude that was virtually indistinguishable from slavery.

So with slaves and government lease in hand, Will continued his operation. Generally, one bushel of salt could be extracted for every 2.5 to 5.5 gallons of water from the saline. But sufficient salt water to evaporate wasn’t the problem; fuel to keep the evaporation process going was. At first, wood fires were used (a large plot of surrounding woods was part of the saline lease). As the nearby supply of wood was exhausted, the evaporation operation was moved farther and farther away from the saline spring. Ever-lengthening spans of wooden pipe, made by splitting logs in half, length-wise, hollowing out the interior, and then strapping them back together, were used to keep the salt water flowing into the evaporation kettles.

As Jacob Myers wrote of the saline operation in Gallatin County in the October 1921 issue of the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society: “The problem of securing fuel was a great one, because of the distance it had to be hauled. As the timber was cleared away the furnaces were moved back farther and farther from the wells and the brine was piped by means of hollow logs or pipes made by boring four-inch holes through the log lengthwise. These were joined end to end, but the joints were not always tight and there was much loss from leakage. It has been estimated that over one hundred miles of such piping was laid from 1800 to 1873.”

Section of original log pipe uncovered at the salines by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

With the scarcity of wood, salt manufacturers turned to the use of coal to keep the brine boiling, and as luck would have it coal was close to the surface in the area of the saline springs and could be reached by drift and slope mines.

The salt business was a hard one, and Will apparently decided politics might be a better way to make money. He was one of Illinois’ first state senators when the state was established in 1818 and in 1820 he was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives. He died in office on June 11, 1835.

With their colleague’s death still fresh in their minds, when a brand new county was formed by partitioning Cook, Iroquois, and Vermilion counties in January 1836, the General Assembly voted to name it after Conrad Will.

Will was just one of a group of salt manufacturers who imported slaves into Illinois, and who later imported even more slaves while calling them “indentured servants.” This form of slavery was not completely banned in Illinois until 15 years before the Civil War began.

Today, we remember Conrad Will as a politician and namesake for Will County. But like many historical characters, it turns out he’s carrying a lot more baggage under the surface than he appears to be.