custom rather than by law. if you go to my church on sunday, you may find a few white people, not very many at all, probably can count them on one hand. if you go to other churches who are white, maybe you would find just a few black people. if you go to certain neighborhoods, birmingham is now about 75% african-american. out to theu go suburbs you see predominantly whites. we still have it, but it is of a different stripe now. look at the people and places in the struggle for civil rights as part of the c-span cities to her. we travel across the country highlighting the literary life and history of the cities. the seymour, visit our website www.c-span.org. c-spann "series" then " cities tour." c-span's american history

toward now looks at the 1917 race riot in east st. louis, illinois, just across the mississippi river from st. louis. black workers were hired to replace white factory workers who had gone on strike. my book about the 1917 east st. louis race riot had its start really in the early 1990's when i was working at the st. louis post dispatch writing an obituary of miles davis, the great trumpet player, from east st. louis, just across the river. riot were ine race his ears as a child. he talked about how horrible it was to learn that white people had massacred black people in this small city in illinois.

he thought that it had affected him for the rest of his life and in fact, it might have well. it might well have affected his attitude toward white people until the day he died, really. gosh, miles davis was born in 1926. years old when the race riot occurred. for something like that to be so prevalent, so persistent in the stories he heard as a child seemed to me to be a powerful indication that the story needed to be told. i asked around and black people in general who grew up here knew about the riot but her parents had not really discussed it. people did not know about it at all. yet, by the number, it was the deadliest race riot in american history until the rodney king riots in los angeles.

congressionalhat hearings have been held six months after the riots and those who had participated in the riot, black-and-white, , a variety of people in east st. louis had been interviewed by this .ongressional committee they had told the story of the riot in incredible narrative detail and i thought it was a great head start. starting with that, i tried interviewing people. this would have been in the latter years of the 20th century in the very beginning of the 21st-century of people in their 's and i discovered their memories were not as good as i thought they might be. not particularly their age but the distance from the events. people tend to embellish their memories as they go along. i decided i would go with the

written record. much of it was published. w.e.b. du bois wrote about it. front page of every paper in the country for about a week or so. that long was not ago. the fact that whites were and america had just entered world war i. the factories across america geared up and there were many jobs available. it was the same time the bowl weevil was destroying the cotton crop. so blacks were moving in large numbers north to industrial cities.

east st. louis was an industrial city. there were inevitable clashes between blacks and whites that took place over these jobs it just evolved into a riot that took place in july. july of 1917, the night of july 1. a black model t ford drove through a black neighborhood, people shooting out of their windows. one hour later, a black model t ford moved through a black neighborhood with people shooting out of the windows. no one was killed, but the third time a black model t ford went through with people shooting out of the windows, lacks had assembled young black men with guns and they shot back. two police detectives were killed and that triggered the riot. then chaos broke out the next morning. it started out, as riots often do, with fistfights in the

streets and so forth but they quickly escalated. one of the reasons they escalated was there was a probablyob of men who had been in the bars drinking all my, which you could do any st. louis in those days -- drinking all night. there were soon atrocities with black men hung from telephone poles. one man's scalp was ripped loose. a mother and her baby were shot as they were trying to escape from a burning building. much of the downtown area was burned down. people were killed, 39 of them black. at least three of the white people killed were accidentally killed by white people. finally the national guard came in and restored peace but by that time, much of the city was

just devastated. instructed they did not want a record of this. did not want east st. louis to be known as a place of this terrible riot. the mayor instructed the police to confiscate cameras and destroy film. very few photographs actually emerges from the riot. some of those that did, and fact all of those that did, as far as i was able to discern, were thrown away when one of the newspapers cleaned out its reference library in the 1920's. frommagery comes mainly drawings in newspapers of which there were several. i suppose the thing i learned that stuck with me most strongly when writing the book was the fact that the civil rights movement did not begin in the 1950's with the decision in the

topeka school system case. it began the day after slavery ended. it persists until this day. i, i don't think i and i know most people i've spoken to are not -- thatducated people america erected in these race inhts across the country 1917, 1918, 1919. 1919 was known as the red summer. the chicago race riot was the worst of many that took lace that summer. what made the riot different is that it was the first and probably the deadliest of two dozen riots that took place in world war i. it was the first one. it was probably the deadliest.

it sort of set the pattern for those that followed. whites would attack blacks and accuse them of taking their jobs. in some cases, white industrialists were in part guilty for flooding the market with blacks. they were advertising in southern newspapers for help wanted when there were no jobs out also that they would have a large goal of workers to draw from so the unions could not organize against them. ithink it was the first and set the pattern. it was followed by what i consider to be the first major civil rights demonstration. there was a march 2 weeks after the riot among mid july of 1917. there were between 8000 and 10,000 people marching from toth avenue down the harlem

protest the east st. louis race riot and protest racism across america. the east st. louis race riot was the spark for the first civil rights march. i think what i want a reader to take away from the book is that it ain't over. i just think that we need to be conscious -- very conscious -- is our forget that this racial history and all grew out of slavery. slaverydeadly legacy of and we still see its results around us. c-span's american history tour continues with a look at martin luther king's 1963 letter from birmingham jail. then the reverend's work who cofounded the southern christian leadership conference with reverend king. after that, the 1963 bombing of , church thatlabama killed four african-american girls.