EAST ST. LOUIS

2nd July 2011.   It is Ladies Finals Day at Wimbledon. A happy day in London, UK, but 94 years ago in East St. Louis, on July 2 1917, a car occupied by white males had driven through a black area of the city and fired several shots into a standing group. An hour later police detectives were driving through the same area and black residents, assuming they were the original suspects, opened fire on their car, killing both detectives. On July 2, thousands of white spectators who assembled to view the detectives' bloodstained automobile marched into the black section of town and started rioting. After cutting the hoses of the fire department, the rioters burned entire sections of the city and shot inhabitants as they escaped the flames. Claiming that "Southern niggers deserve a genuine lynching," they lynched several blacks. Guardsmen were called in but accounts exist that they joined in the rioting rather than stopping it. More joined in, including allegedly "ten or fifteen young girls about 18 years old, [who] chased a negro woman at the Relay Depot at about 5 o'clock. The girls were brandishing clubs and calling upon the men to kill the woman."

The police chief estimated that 200 blacks had been killed. The renowned journalist Ida B. Wells reported in The Chicago Defender that 40-150 black people were killed during July in the rioting in East St. Louis. Six thousand blacks were left homeless after their neighborhood was burned. The ferocious brutality of the attacks and the failure of the authorities to protect innocent lives contributed to the radicalization of many blacks in St. Louis and the nation.

It should also be noted that on the 2nd July 1777, Vermont became the first American Territory to abolish slavery and on the 2nd July 1839, twenty miles off the coast of Cuba, 53 rebelling African slaves led by Joseph Cinqué, took over the slave ship Amistad.
During the formation of the United States, on the 2nd of July 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the resolution severing ties with Great Britain, although the formal Declaration of Independence was ot approved until two days later on the 4th July, of which more anon.