- [Jim] Coming up an old story, now in the history books, remembered and revived with messages for a new generation.

- "I know you got some lessons to teach us.

"Come to East St. Louis and find out what they are."

- [Jim] They show up on lawns and in windows, but this message can be found around the world.

- [Stefanie] I actually was creating a plan to talk to my students about race.

- [Jim] And we remember the man who not only turned his life around, but helped do the same for 1000s of others.

It's all next on Living Saint Louis.

(bright upbeat music) I'm, Jim Kirchherr.

And we often do stories about the past because while they're interesting, but also sometimes surprisingly relevant.

I think the best stories about the past are about people who were like us facing challenges even issues that we know.

Now, we often tie those stories to a Centennial or other anniversary, an opportunity to remember, to remind, to celebrate even commemorate.

Well, there's a one-year anniversary this year that will not go unmarked.

(people chanting) May 25th, 2020 was the day George Floyd was killed by a police officer who's been convicted of murder, but someday that too will be a distant memory than a piece of history and someday somebody who didn't live through it may well say, "This story, this man cannot, "should not be forgotten."

(people chanting) And that brings us to what happened in East St. Louis more than 100 years ago.

The Centennial in 2017 has come and gone and you may well know the story, but there's always a new generation coming up that hasn't heard it and there are those who are working hard to make sure they do.

Here's Gabrielle Hayes.

- [Gabrielle] What do you want people to know about East St. Louis in the decade that came after what happened that day?

- [Joseph] The decades that came after people carry that memory as trauma.

And I think one of the most important things we should do is to understand that what people don't wanna tell stories, it's not because they wanna forget it, it's because they don't want to relive it.

Those are two very different things.

- [Gabrielle] What Father Joseph Brown is talking about happened more than 100 years ago.

It was July of 1917.

And while accounts of how it started differ, Brown, a professor of Africana studies at SIUE and many others want you to know the whole story.

- But since my father's family was living here in East Louis at the time of the riot, I knew about it from childhood because they would talk about how they had to hide people under the front porch.

- Wow.

- So I think that was one of the... No, I don't think.

I know that was one of the motivations that forced me into calling people into a conversation about having the 1917 Centennial Commission.

(somber music) - [Gabrielle] So what happened in that first week of July?

Congressional reports show after several cars fired shots into black neighborhoods, two white police officers ended up shot.

What happened next will leave parts of the city in ruins and people dead at 11:00 pm on July 1st.

This sound, (bell ringing) a bell at True Light Baptist Church rang and violence against black East St. Louisianans was erupting everywhere.

(somber music) On July 2nd, white men and women shot and set a blaze their innocent black neighbors.

They burned down homes with people inside.

They pulled men, women, and children off of street cars and as the story goes, national guardsmen and police just watched.

- [Milton] What is unique about the pogrom or July the 2nd is the magnitude and that it all occurred at one time.

- [Gabrielle] But to tell the whole story means to tell many stories.

Judge Milton Wharton, who's also on the commission to preserve this story, recalls one.

- Yes, there was a particular story of a family that returned on the (mumbles) from a day of fishing.

A wonderful day, they were having a picnic and a fishing trip and they wound up in downtown St. Louis in the heat of the riot.

The rioters came in, shot and killed the lady's husband, shot and killed her son and then they turned on her and they beat her.

And there was one white individual who had the courage to step forward and protect her and prevent her from being killed.

That very much stands out in my mind about the horrors of this particular incident.

- [Gabrielle] So where did the massacre happen exactly?

The simple answer is a little bit of everywhere.

(somber music) It happened at McCasland in 11th street, parts of 10th and Bond, but anyone will tell you much of the violence happened in the downtown area.

At the time of St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter counted six bodies in the street at one point and we know several people were lynched.

Were there any other stories that they would talk about?

- Well, there was the one that I also knew about, and that is that corner around Collinsville Avenue in 4th street or down there where the Broadview Hotel is now or used to be.

And I can remember my father pointing out saying, "You know, they hung somebody up there."

(somber music) - [Gabrielle] To get away, people ran for their lives down the train tracks.

Entire families escaped to the municipal free bridge were white rioters tried to stop them, killing some.

(somber music) Are there any parts of it that you'll remember always or is there any story that sticks with you and your learning of what happened?

- Some of the things that stick with me are the brutality and the vicious ways that people were murdered by women.

When you hear the stories of women gathering around the street cars, pulling black women and their children off those cars and beating them to death or standing around yelling at people in their houses when they were burning the houses down, forcing the people to come out and be shot and the babies being thrown back into the houses.

And the fact that so much of that mob activity was organized in what we would now call the Red Light District of East St. Louis, where there were the bars, the gambling joints and the brothels.

And so it was gender inclusive, the mob.

And when you think about what happened in 2021, 2017 in Charlottesville, what we have seen, what we have always known about America's history, it has always been quite inclusive, the violence and the death and destruction.

(somber music) - We revisited several sacred sites where blackie St. Louisianans lost their lives and their homes, entire neighborhoods flattened, entire families gone.

That includes right here at 10th Street in Trendley Avenue.

(somber music) - They wouldn't.

It wasn't a constant conversation, but I do about it.

- Yeah.

- And I knew how ugly it was.

- So was anyone ever held accountable for these heinous acts?

In some ways, yes, in others, the injustice just continued.

- That really wasn't an isolated incident, extra judicial executions of African Americans were occurring frequently prior to what happened on July the 2nd and they've continued afterwards.

- [Gabrielle] But you can't tell the story of the East St. Louis race massacre without talking about Dr. Leroy Bundy.

Bundy was a black dentist and a community leader.

His home stood right here.

He was wrongfully charged for starting the massacre.

He stood trial and was even found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

Later, the Illinois Supreme Court exonerated him.

As for everyone else, more than 100 people were indicted, that included a number of police officers and 23 black men.

The mayor at the time, Fred Mollman, even faced the charge of malfeasance, but with whole families and neighborhoods completely wiped out, was that enough?

- [Reginald] No, not even close.

- [Gabrielle] Reginald Petty was born and raised in East St. Louis and says his family passed down the story from generation to generation.

- [Reginald] I remember my parents, my father talking about the number of relatives that disappeared.

- [Gabrielle] So in your family?

- Yeah, my family.

And he talks about, I remember him talking about that he was somebody worked in the stockyards and they were coming home and they were pulled off the train in the stockyards (mumbles) somewhere downtown and disappeared.

I remember it helping produce a fear in me of these white people, you know, be careful.

And also, and just...

But I didn't hear any more about it, I don't think, until I was maybe in college.

(somber music) - [Milton] It was like the elders of our community want to give us an upbringing free of much of the stress of brutality that many of them had experienced (mumbles) - [Gabrielle] What happened on that day in 1917 would become a difficult story to tell for generations to come.

It's a part of that because of the pain that comes with that story.

- Of course.

- [Gabrielle] Dr. Lillian Parks says it was a while before she learned the story herself.

Did you learn about it in school?

- Yes, to a certain degree.

We taught civics The story was 1917 race riot.

Very, very bad, terrible.

Hurt our children, hurt the town.

It really was something that we were not able to really get back if we wanted to, but we did, to a point we did.

And so when that comes up, I just say, "We did the best we could."

- Parks is a lifelong educator having spent more than four decades in the classroom, she'd even serve as the superintendent.

- A black woman never had that.

And I said, "There are some things we need to do."

And we did them.

- [Gabrielle] Though retelling the story is extremely hard, Father Brown says it's for that reason that it has to be told.

(somber music) - [Joseph] There were two aspects in my idea of bringing this commission together.

One was to heal the land where the blood was spilled.

We had to have some kinds of rituals to name the places, to pray over them and to honor the ancestors who died there.

The second one was to make sure that there was always gonna be a component that taught our young.

It is not about how bad and how traumatic it was, it's how we have survived and transformed the trauma into action.

- Why is it so vital that the commission exists and that the work continues?

- Because history is still not being taught well.

And part of the game that we knew was rigged against us, was that what we grew up knowing, our young people did not know.

So we've made it our highest priority.

We were not totally successful in all that we wanted to accomplish, but we made sure that Centennial Commission will always have some impact on this city, because we want our young people to know as the slogans and the posters said, "East St. Louis, the city that survives."

(somber music) - [Gabrielle] Part of that has to do with how the story is passed down, making sure that it tells the whole story.

Do we have an estimate or do we know how many people lost their lives that day or is it hard to even know?

- We will never know how many people lost their lives.

They weren't gonna be counting the people that they threw back into burning buildings, there were no bodies.

They're not gonna count the people that they threw into ditches and rivers and streams.

And they're not ever going to count the people who were buried in mass graves.

So when people say it's maybe 40 or 50 people, no, I'm gonna say 100s of people.

And we don't know the people who fled here and died somewhere else.

We don't know because people may have moved to Kinloch, Missouri and died there.

They may have died in the hospital in St. Louis.

So they're not gonna be reporting that because black lives did not matter.

- [Gabrielle] That also means using the right word to describe what happened in the first place.

- And one of the things that we as a commission had to choose to do was to stop calling it the East St. Louis race riot, and change it to Charles Lumpkins preferred term, that he wrote his book about, the American Pogrom, that word from Eastern Europe in which genocide was being inflicted upon Jews, for instance, wiping out a group of people, the pogrom or the massacre.

Because until the 1960s, the word riot always referred to mobs of white people going in the black communities, killing inhabitants.

And now we have large gatherings of black and other people protesting for civil rights and justice.

And if things are being destroyed, it's businesses, it's property, it's materials, they do not go into neighborhoods to kill people, but the word riot has been imposed upon them.

And we did not want that word to be here because it doesn't tell us the whole truth.

It's a pogrom, it was genocide and it was organized.

(somber) - [Gabrielle] So what makes East St. Louis, East St. Louis?

For this commission, it's not only their love for where they come from.

- [Milton] This was an (mumbles) opportunity for children to grow up.

It felt very protective, isolated.

- [Gabrielle] It's also about making sure the world knows where it's been.

All the places it has left to go and who it could be.

- [Joseph] And if you don't know your history, you will be trapped when somebody else throws it to you in a corrupted version.

(somber music) People survived it.

And instead of saying, "Oh, those poor people," we might want to say, "Could you all teach us some survival skills."

That could change America.

It could change the way we do things across cultures, gender status, economic status.

"Wait a minute.

You survived all of that.

"I know you got some lessons to teach us.

"Come to East St. Louis and find out what they are."

(somber music) - These days many of us are used to seeing black lives matter signs in front of homes and businesses, places of worship, but that simple statement has spread far and wide.

(drum music) Couple of years ago, we were invited to show our film about the North County Step Team Gentlemen of Vision in Columbia, South America.

And we saw this in the village of (mumbles) This made sense though because this place was founded 100s of years ago by escaped slaves.

More surprising to me was that the movement had spread even further, but as Brooke Butler explains, in this case, it was St. Louisianans who brought the message halfway around the world.

(upbeat music) - [Brooke] Images like these of black lives matter rallies are all familiar sites around the country right now, but if you look a little closer at these in particular, you'll probably notice some unfamiliar language.

This rally took place in the city of Taipei which is the capital city of Taiwan.

And although they were on the other side of the world, the issues hit far too close to home for the people who organized it.

Stefanie Davis and Patrick Springer, both St. Louis natives that live in Taiwan and also happened to be cousins, were two of the people who brought light to the black lives matter issues in their community abroad.

- There's a community of us on social media just brothers and sisters of Taiwan.

And that's just a safe space for black people who come here or who decide to come here to learn more about Taiwan and from an African-American or black person perspective, right?

So in this group, I just said, "Hey, what is it that we can do "to send money back to Black Lives Matter in America?"

(bright music) - [Brooke] From there as more interest grew following the death of George Floyd, it formed into a larger collective that ultimately resulted in the Black Lives Solidarity Global Initiative, advocating for black lives everywhere.

Like many similar initiatives, the first thing on their agenda was to hold a public peace rally to spread the message of the black lives matter movement in addition to supporting fundraising for similar initiatives around the world.

- [Stafanie] I really the rally was focused on more solidarity and understanding the injustices that were happening back in America and wanting to come together and saying, "We stand with stopping all of these injustices "across the globe, really."

But because we're in Taiwan, we also have to be very mindful of the Island and the political scope that we're dealing with.

So we want it to be very mindful and not call it a protest and really call it a solidarity rally to help people understand that one, this is going to be peaceful.

- [Brooke] For Patrick who's been living in Taiwan since 2011, it was an opportunity to contribute to the issues that once heavily impacted his home community of Ferguson, - [Patrick] Thankful that I'm staying down here, while we missed COVID-19 for the most part.

We don't deal with the same level of racism as we would back in America, but seeing all of these protests and like seeing all these rallies (mumbles) I felt guilty not being able to be involved because I mean, here I am a black man that's with the hopes of one day returning to America, benefiting all the hard work that everyone else is doing.

- [Brooke] What originally brought Patrick and Stefanie to Taiwan was the opportunity to teach English.

- [Stafanie] I actually was creating a plan to talk to my students about race, nationality and ethnicity.

So the same day my boss came into my room and said, "Hey, that idea is great."

She also said, "Hey, I want you to teach the kids about race."

And I said, "Oh, I'm getting ready.

"I was ready to bring it to you, "but now that you're telling me, "how soon can I do it?"

And she's like, "Do it today."

- [Brooke] Patrick also used the time he was teaching to explain the importance of understanding the complexities of race.

- [Patrick] When the Ferguson protests were going on, it was the same time as the Palestinian protest.

It was around the same time as the students' protest in Taiwan.

And you have the Umbrella Revolution that was going on in Hong Kong.

And so, yeah, I discussed all of these things and we talked about how they were linked or how these things could be linked and how they were all revolutions that were being led by young people.

So, absolutely anytime that these things pop up, I think it's important to address them with the students and let the kids know as honest as possible to answer any questions.

- [Brooke] Investing nearly 10 years and even earning his residency in Taiwan, Patrick still hopes to eventually return to his home community of St. Louis, maybe just for a visit, but with the current state of the pandemic, his travels might be put off for a while.

Meanwhile, at least he has a sense of home with his cousin.

- [Patrick] Wait, we still have a meeting.

Can I just tell you the (mumbles) thing real quick?

- [Stafanie] No, I'll talk to you offline.

- It's okay.

Look, so you just need... - Finally, we remember a man who faced a lot of troubles early in his life, drugs, arrests, time in prison, absentee father.

He didn't though just turn his life around, he helped others do the same, 1000s of others.

- [Slaughter] Man.

If Halbert Sullivan could be remembered, it would be the man, the myth, the legend.

- [Jim] Halbert Sullivan died in April at the age of 69.

In 1997, he started the Fathers and Family Support Center in St. Louis, a program Anne-Marie Berger reported on a few years back.

(audience applauding) - [Man] (mumbles) we have the graduates, class 104.

(audience clapping) - [Brooke] This graduation is a big deal to these men and to their families.

And while they aren't walking out of here with some kind of degree, that's going to move them up the corporate ladder, they do now have the skills to be successful in their most important job, dad.

- [Man] I'm just at a point in my life where I'm trying to do better for my son.

(audience applauding) It's all about him.

- [Brooke] These men are the 104th graduating class of Father Support Center, a program providing men with skills to be responsible fathers.

- [Halbert] The need to start (mumbles) was to impact outcomes for children.

In America, there are a little over 24 million children growing up in homes without their dads.

That has a huge psychological and emotional impact on that child.

There are a variety of negatives that impact a child's wellbeing directly related to not growing up in a home with his father.

- [Unique] And my father would definitely want to be remembered as being an intricate part of rebuilding and bridging the gap between fathers, mothers, children, family, that central core.

You know, there is no family without a father, honestly.

- I was being released from being incarcerated... - [Jim] Before coming to work for the center, Reginald Slaughter himself went through the Father's Support Program.

- He said, you ain't gonna have no family if you ain't got no finance to take care of 'em and you ain't gonna have no finance if you ain't got no God.

He came back to me one day and he said, "Hey, you either gonna do this or you're not."

- [Man] Say no more and be around them... - [Man] You see, I would love that to happen.

- [Brooke] These dads have come to Father Support Center for various reasons.

Some are here because they recognize their need for help and guidance.

Others may be required by the courts, but they all follow the same rule, no excuses.

- I will not waiver from that.

- [Jim] Charles Barnes also went from the program and now is the center's director of community outreach.

- He gave you something to use in order for you to do the best that you can be.

He didn't believe in trying, he believed in doing it.

(audience clapping) - [Halbert] Dads loved their children.

Once they get a chance to get involved, they get a chance to bond with your child, then you don't have to be concerned about his financial support, he gonna take care of his child.

And then he will begin to see what the impact is for the child wellbeing.

(somber music) - I'm very proud of my father.

Very proud of him.

- [Jim] Halbert Sullivan left us in the age of 69, but the work he began, it's still very much alive.

- [Slaughter] And his legacy shall live on forever because he is a legend.

(gentle music) - And that's Living St. Louis.

Thanks for joining us.

I'm Jim Kirchherr and we'll see you next time.

(bright music) - [Announcer] Living St. Louis is made possible by the support of the Betsy and Thomas Patterson Foundation, Mary Ranken Jordan and Ettie A. Jordan Charitable Trust, and by the members of Nine PBS.

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