Cairo Illinois Riot of 1967

Cairo Illinois Riot of 1967

Cairo Illinois Riot of 1967

With rapid growth of the black population in the World War I period came increasing clout for the women's clubs. By 1930, blacks made up one-fifth of the Republican Party primary vote in Chicago, a time when Republicans were still a force in the city, and Materson could write, The CWRCI's [Colored Women's Republican Club of Illinois] resources and networks for mobilizing black voters could actually help make or break a candidate in the Republican primaries. They showed this power in the 1928 primary, in which Ruth Hanna McCormick, the black women's candidate (even though she was evasive on racial issues), defeated former governor Charles Deneen three to one in the black wards. Blacks began to turn to the Democratic Party in Chicago even before Franklin D. Roosevelt's transforming election in 1932 (Evening, 2011 Pp. 22-23).

And weary from their seemingly fruitless policy battles; black women activists shifted their emphasis from the selfless policy activism of the nineteenth century to more job-oriented patronage objectives during the frightful Depression. The political scientist in this reviewer would have appreciated a history of voting in the 2nd Ward in Chicago, over the course of the book's chronology, to see if the efforts of the black women could be discerned. And an economist might have found some analysis of the economics of black middle-class women's clubs to be of value. But these are quibbles for an author who has admirably mined the historical materials available across the country to provide us valuable insights into how black women leaders in early Chicago struggled for the dignity and progress of their race against an aggressively hostile environment (Michael, 2012 Pp. 69-71).

Description of Event

These forces were mobilized by the political and economic urban elite to break the emergent political influence of black political power in urban governance. The riot therefore was “a profoundly political event,” and as a result, it was more than just a violent conflagration that scholars have typically characterized as a “race riot”. Urban politics made the violence in East St. Louis—as in the title—an “American pogrom.” East St. Louis's anti-Black violence on May 28-29, 1917, was “relatively benign when compared to the July massacre”; however, its foci “revolved not around social strain between black and white workers but around politicized interactions between black residents and various white groups” competing for political and economic dominance in the city. African American political leaders had been mobilizing the black populace politically since the 1890s to acquire their share of local patronage. They organized the growing black electorate increased by the Great Migration in hopes of creating not only a political power base for blacks in East St. Louis but an autonomous political machine beholden to its African American constituency (Evansville, 1998 Pp. 1-2).

Limpkins do not isolate the East St. Louis pogrom, Northern white supremacy, and black power to the East St. Louis metropolitan area. He places each story in a national context and compares black ...