|
The Mature Viewpoint Page 4 |
|
My Home Town- East St. Louis By JBo (JBohunk)
As you grow up, there are stories which you hear from family and friends about their lives and some of these stories impress you so much that they stuck with you all your life. As a child I just knew that what I was told had to be the truth, but as time passed, and some of the stories were retold with different outcomes, I have to wonder where exactly the truth was. Stories about my birthplace just happened to be one of those that tended to have different outcomes and different characters involved in them.
Not too long ago I visited a Doctor in Phoenix, AZ who had diplomas on his wall from schools in Illinois and St. Louis, Missouri. Since that was originally my neck of the woods I asked the Doc about his background. It turned out that he and I shared a lot of common childhood memories, since he was also born in the same city as me, East St. Louis, Illinois. We joked about our hometown and the fact that it went bankrupt, and that during the 90’s it was sued for police brutality, lost the suit, gave the litigious winner title to City Hall, and then subsequently foreclosed on him for non-payment of property taxes, thus regaining ownership of the City Hall. I always thought that story would best any stories told by political candidates about how poor they were in their childhoods. I can still hear John Edwards’s talk about his poor, poor mill town background. Too bad he wasn’t from East St. Louis.
I never worked with politicians, but my Father used to tell me many, many stories about his involvement in St. Clair County politics. St. Clair County has a long dubious political history which was often in cahoots with Cook County to the North. Dad told me that he carried hundred dollar bills in his pockets during the depression. It was money he claimed was given to him by the political boss of the county, and was to be used to buy favors and influence for the Democratic Party. Mom confirmed Dad’s money story, saying she was going to leave him because he came home drunk every night. Mom also said that World War II saved their marriage because the Army Corp of Engineers packed Dad off to Indiana to build air fields and camps. Dad never went back to politics.
Anyway, this Phoenix Doctor gave me a booklet entitled, “The Good Things about East Saint Louis, Illinois”. Initially, I thought the booklet was a joke, but to the contrary it actually spoke of really great times in a once great city.
At the turn of the last century, many eastern Europeans migrated to East St. Louis, Illinois to take jobs in the stockyards and packing houses there. East Saint Louis was built across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri in what was known as the Great American Bottomlands. The area these Eastern Europeans settled in was next to the packing houses and became known as Goose Hill because of the Geese all the Bohunks raised in their backyards in preparation for a holiday feast or some other special meal. Back then, men who worked at the packing houses tended to live near their jobs, because no one had cars and public transportation was in the earliest of developmental stages. My paternal grandparents and their immediate families all originally settled into the Goose Hill district of East St. Louis between 1900 and 1910. The fact that you had to walk through the Goose Hill neighborhood in order to get to the packing houses would later prove to become one of those accidents of history.
East St. Louis was an historical enigma. Here was a city in the heart of vast industrial complexes, such as Aluminum Ore (Alcoa), Monsanto, Allied Chemical, American Zinc, the biggest stockyards (National Stockyards) and packing houses (Swift, Armour, Hunter, Circle, etc.) in the country, plus vast rail road yards and many other large business enterprises, and yet the city was strapped for cash because these many large greedy businesses incorporated their own small cities and villages in order to avoid the taxes which East St. Louis desperately needed. This lack of a tax base and one of the greatest urban white flight experiences for a city in U.S. history eventually led to the reason East Saint Louis declined into a bankrupt ghetto. When I occasionally travel back to the Goose Hill area, which is now city block after city block of urban renewal leveled land, I can still detect the odors I remember from my childhood. In my youth I always thought the odor was from the packing houses, but I have detected this same odor in other cities. It is the odor of open sewers, dirt floor homes, uncollected and burned garbage, animals killed and slaughtered in backyards, sweat, and hopeless poverty. This odor is in the very dirt of the Goose Hill district of East St. Louis, Illinois.
Personally, I never lived in poverty, but I saw it first hand when I spent summers in or near Goose Hill working and helping relatives who still ran businesses there and in other parts of the city. I was often packed off to live with a Great Aunt or cousin who needed help during the summer months. Dad thought honest work and an occasional whupping was good for my character. My Father was an adolescent when he lost his Father and his two older sisters to the great flu pandemic which was going on in the world prior to the 1920’s. I suppose it had to be a sobering experience to become the man of the family at such a young age. My Dad was a serious minded person, who taught me to believe that responsibility to one’s family was the most important responsibility a man could have.
The circumstances which made me recall the stories of East St. Louis was the fact that February was Black History Month, and I started recalling memories about blacks from my town of birth. When I was a little boy I asked my folks why some people were black, and I was told that God turned lazy people black. I got into a bit of trouble one day when I told this to a neighbor’s black maid. She marched me to my house and indignantly told my parents what I said to her, insisting that she was a hard worker, and I had no right to call her lazy. I was around 5 at the time, and that is how I learned that God really didn’t turn lazy folks black.
I had an Uncle who lived next door to us. My uncle was summoned to serve on a jury for a trial concerning a black man who was accused of stealing from a junk yard. My Uncle was released from the jury, because according to him, the court objected to his belief that even if the black man didn’t commit this crime, he will eventually steal, and should go to jail anyway. This same Uncle got drunk every Friday, on his payday. Whenever there was a severe electrical storm which coincided with his Friday night drunkenness, he would go out on his back porch and shake his fist at the sky shouting, “If there is a God, let Him strike me down now”. Then he would come in and tell me, “See Jimmy, there isn’t any God”. Sheesh!! No wonder I am conflicted.
I certainly don’t claim to have insight into the black experience in America, but I remember my Fathers’ and Uncles’ stories about their recollections of the infamous race riots of 1917 in East St. Louis. Those race riots are called the bloodiest in American history. In order to break the unions organizing in East St. Louis, many businesses imported blacks from the South to replace white workers who were trying to organize labor unions. Dad told me about the labor problems of the times, and the fact that the blacks had to walk through Goose Hill to get to their jobs at the packing houses. Dad said that initially the women and children gathered in the mornings and evenings to taunt the blacks as they went through Goose Hill to and from their packing house jobs. As days passed, this taunting led to rock throwing and physical confrontations from men who were affected by their job displacements from companies hiring blacks to replace white workers. All of this tension boiled over in early July of 1917. I will never forget one story I was told about this time, and that was how white men during the riots were shooting blacks who tried to escape from East Saint Louis by running down the railroad tracks which led from Goose Hill through National City. Another story my Father shared with me was about the black theater in East St. Louis, whose doors were nailed shut, and the building then set afire while people were trapped inside. Dad saw this and its aftermath. This story has carried an unimaginable lifelong effect on me.
I don’t judge those of my relatives who have shared their experiences about this time with me. Obviously it was a violent time, and a time driven by the greed of those businesses striving for total control of their capital enterprises against those individuals trying to protect their jobs and the support of their families. Personally, I loved every one of my Bohunk relatives who ever told me about this time in their lives. I originally thought that I might recap and analyze some of the events from this time, but then thought that perhaps the judgment of what happened then should not be personally affected by someone like myself, and should be left to those who care to read accounts of the 1917 East Saint Lois race riots for themselves.
Here are some selected historical recounts. Be forewarned that some of this stuff is very brutal and upsetting......
Read the historical accounts for the year 1917 from the following link.. http://www.riverweb.uiuc.edu/IBEX/nunes/timeline/19101919.htm
For the following link, scroll down to the section entitled “Packing House Workers”, which says that perhaps the riots should have been called ‘Labor Riots’ instead of ‘Race Riots’. http://www.eco-absence.org/esl/petraitis.htm
One man’s first hand account................
And finally the account of the riots from a black perspective........... http://www.exodusnews.com/HISTORY/History010.htm
|
|
A publication of the SCC Organization Publish Date: 3/15/2007
|