Definition
The East St. Louis Riot of 1917 was a two-day attack by white mobs on Black residents of East St. Louis, Illinois that peaked on July 2, 1917. White workers and their families burned Black homes, shot Black workers in the street, and lynched several individuals as they fled the fires.
The official death toll listed 39 Black and 9 white residents; the NAACP and contemporary observers placed the Black death toll between 100 and 200, with several thousand Black residents driven from the city. It was among the earliest large-scale anti-migrant pogroms of the World War I-era Great Migration and remains one of the deadliest acts of racial violence in U.S. history outside the South.
Why it matters
How it works
The economic setup was a textbook strike-breaking play. The Aluminum Ore Company, like other East St. Louis war-industry employers, recruited Black workers from the South to replace striking white workers. By 1917, the city's Black population had roughly doubled in two years. White union members, already alarmed by wage competition, organized rallies and demanded that "race trouble" be stopped — meaning, in practice, that Black workers be expelled.
The trigger was a drive-by shooting on the night of July 1: a car carrying white men fired into Black homes; a second car, mistakenly believed to be the first, was met with return fire by Black residents, killing two plainclothes police officers. By morning, white crowds were attacking any Black person on the street. Mobs torched whole blocks of Black homes and shot residents as they ran from the flames; some who tried to swim across the Mississippi to escape were drowned by gunfire from the bridges. Local police largely participated or stood aside. The Illinois National Guard arrived but their effectiveness was disputed; some Black survivors later testified that Guardsmen had joined the mob.
The aftermath was both quietly transformative and damningly familiar. A House Select Committee on East St. Louis took testimony in 1918 and produced a scathing report. No East St. Louis official was prosecuted; only nine white rioters served any significant prison time. The Black population that remained rebuilt, and the city remained tense and segregated. Most importantly for the broader story, the violence did not slow the migration — within two years Black Americans were boarding trains for Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh in greater numbers than before.