American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot and Black Politics (Law Society & Politics in the Midwest)

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Description

On July 2 and 3, 1917, race riots rocked the small industrial city of East St. Louis, Illinois. American Pogrom takes the reader beyond that pivotal time within the city’s history to explore black other folks’s activism from the antebellum era to the eve of the post–World War II civil rights movement.

Charles Lumpkins shows that black residents of East St. Louis had engaged in formal politics because the 1870s, exerting influence in the course of the ballot and thru patronage in a city dominated by powerful real estate interests at the same time as many African Americans in other places experienced setbacks in exercising their political and economic rights.

While Lumpkins asserts that the race riots were a pogrom—an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group—orchestrated by certain businessmen intent on preventing black residents from attaining political power and on turning town into a “sundown” the city permanently cleared of African Americans, he also demonstrates how the African American community survived. He situates the activities of the black citizens of East St. Louis within the context of the bigger story of the African American quest for freedom, citizenship, and equality.

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