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and more than four thousand workers went out on strike. Managementannounced it would not negotiate with the strikers, and would only consider hiring them back if they left the union. “There will be no union at this plant,” said the head of one large meatpacker. The meat companies brought in strikebreakers, including between eight hundred and fifteen hundred blacks. The hard stance of management quickly broke the back of the strike. Men began deserting the fledgling union in large numbers and going back to work. The strikers, except for union organizers, were rehired, at least for the moment. 7
    In August, management began a new wave of firings and replaced experienced men, some of them with many years of seniority, with cheaper untrained workers, some of them black. Earl Jimmerson, an official of the butchers and meat-cutters union, became alarmed at the potential social cost of continually bringing in black replacement workers. Jimmerson, who had political clout as a member of the St. Clair County Board of Supervisors, told Mayor Fred Mollman that trouble lay ahead unless something was done about “employing Negroes in place of white men … and throwing these [Negroes] right amongst these foreigners … You know what a foreigner is; he will fight at the drop of a hat and if you go to take his job he’ll kill you if he gets the opportunity to do it.” The mayor told Jimmerson to calm down, things weren’t as bad as all that. 8
    Blacks were also used to break a strike against the streetcar monopoly in that period.

    On Saturday, October 7, 1916, about six hundred workers walked off the job at the Aluminum Ore Company in protest against arbitrary pay cuts. On Monday, hundreds of strikers blocked rails and roads leading into the plant. The Aluminum Ore Company easily obtained a federal injunction so the plant could operate—there was a war in Europe, and aluminum was a vital raw material. The Aluminum Ore Company Employee’s Protective Association, a local organization that was not affiliated with the American Federation of Labor—it was little more than a company union, other labor leaders charged—thrashed out an agreement with plant officials to return to work by the end of the week. As soon as the men came back, the company began getting rid of them a few at a time, laying off union men and hiring newcomers, some of them black, to replace them. By late fall two hundred men of a onceunion-friendly work force of about nineteen hundred had been replaced, and the firings continued into the winter. Workers became discouraged, or afraid, and left the union. Membership dwindled from a peak of about one thousand to a couple of hundred by the end of 1916. 9
    According to Aluminum Ore Company statistics, the number of black employees rose from a dozen in 1915 to 280 in November of 1916 and to 410 in December. Management was clearly aware of the effect black strikebreakers crossing picket lines had on white workers, and hoped that some of the anger focused on management would be redirected toward the blacks. That was part of the plan, as was evident when R. T. Rucker, assistant superintendent of the Aluminum Ore plant in St. Louis, spoke frankly of the racial attitudes of East St. Louis whites when he said that “Labor unrest … engendered bitterness against the negroes who came in here.”
    â€œThe natural antipathy of a white man to a colored man … inherent in each of us,” Rucker said, “was accentuated and exaggerated” by the arrival in East St. Louis of so many blacks.
    Also, he said, in cities farther north, “an individual Negro on a streetcar caused no comment,” but East St. Louis was more Southern in its attitudes, particularly when blacks on streetcars “voiced their privileges” and “made themselves nuisances.” Rucker explained that he was talking, in the main, about black men taking empty seats next to white women, and