Silent Parade, East Saint Louis Riots and Civil Rights | Time.com

Silent Parade, East Saint Louis Riots and Civil Rights | Time.com

When many Americans think of the birth of the civil-rights movement, they may think of event in the mid-1960s or just before that decade. But in fact, one of the earliest headline-grabbing demonstrations for civil rights took place a century ago this Friday.

The story had begun weeks earlier, when two plainclothes detectives in an unmarked Model T in East St. Louis, Ill., were shot by black citizens. In the aftermath, on July 2, 1917, a mob of white residents went after African Americans in the city, resulting in the deaths of at least 48 residents — 38 of them black men, women and children — and injury to hundreds more, as people were clubbed and pulled off streetcars. Buildings were set on fire, racking up $373,000 in damages (which would be almost $7 million in 2016) by some counts.

As it turned out, the people who shot at the undercover cops had mistaken their car for one of the many Model Ts driven by whites who had been going through black neighborhoods throughout that springtime, shooting at the windows of their homes and stores. Around that time, fake news stories were running in local newspapers, containing inaccurate reports of African Americans committing crimes including rape says Harper Barnes, a former critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and author of Never Been A Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked The Civil Rights Movement. As a result of those events, African Americans had been armed out of self defense.