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and “women of the night.” They were often arrested, as were the pimps and muggers and gunmen who worked the Valley and adjoining areas of downtown East St. Louis. But those who hired the right lawyers and paid the requisite bribes to the police and the low-level city courts run by justices of the peace were soon released and working again after paying fines. Indeed, the East St. Louis political system depended upon bribes and fines to supplement the earnings of badly paid police and unsalaried justices of the peace, whose income came from court fees.
    Most of the prostitutes and pimps and thugs in East St. Louis were white, even if much of the citizenry was led to believe otherwise. The
East St. Louis Daily Journal
emphasized and sensationalized black crime, particularly black on white crime. As a result, many East St. Louis whites came to feel as if they were under invasion, particularly on weekends when hundreds of blacks, coming and going, packed the downtown railroad station and roamed the nearby streets looking for food, drink, and amusement.
    Despite the long-standing reputation of the state of Illinois as a haven for persecuted blacks, and despite a considerable body of nineteenth-century legislation forbidding discrimination in the state, much of public life in southern Illinois was segregated. In factories, blacks had separate washrooms and lunch rooms and were given the most menial jobs. Schools had legally been desegregated in the state of Illinois since 1874, but white children in East St. Louis and environs were assigned to all-white schools, and black kids to all-black schools. Although the Illinois legislature in 1885 had passed one of the nation’s first laws forbidding discrimination in public accommodation, bars, restaurants, hotels, and boardinghouses were strictly segregated in the southern half of the state, as were all but the lowest whorehouses. 3
    Still, in the years before the Great War, many blacks and whites had lived very close to one another in East St. Louis—and sometimes worked side by side—without a great deal of trouble. Years later, at the height of the Depression but before the Second World War once again ripped the social fabric apart—with the memories of the riot somewhat dimmed, although certainly not forgotten—East St. Louis was again a city where a mixed population lived together in relative tolerance. Musician Miles Davis, the son of a dentist, grew up in the 1930s in East St. Louis near Fifteenth Street and Bond Avenue, where blacks and whites lived and worked very close to one another and racial incidents were rare.
    The Davis family lived above a drugstore in their early years, as the father was establishing his practice, and next door was a tavern owned by a black man who played saxophone. Nearby was a soul food restaurant, but next to it was a white-owned dry goods store. “It was run by a German lady,” Davis recalled. “All along 15th paralleling the river toward Bond street were all kinds of stores … owned by blacks, or Jews, or Germans, or Greeks, or Armenians, who had most of the cleaning places. Over on 16th and Broadway this Greek family owned a fish market and made the best jack salmon sandwiches in East St. Louis. I was friends with the son of the guy who owned it.” But even as a boy growing up in a neighborhood where black and white kids played together, Davis, with the paradoxical “double-consciousness” that W. E. B. Du Bois identified as a necessary and crucial aspect of African American thinking, also understood that most East St. Louis whites were, as he put it, “racist to the bone.” 4

    The sensationalist
East St. Louis Daily Journal
, an evening paper that was closely tied to the Democratic Party on racial and other issues, was East St. Louis’s principal newspaper. But the five mainstream daily newspapers in St. Louis—the
Post-Dispatch
, the
Globe-Democrat
, the
Republic
,