EAST ST. LOUIS Site — East St. Louis, Illinois Status: Operating · Access: Open to public Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/east-st-louis-east-st-louis-illinois/ July 2, 1917—the riot that burned the city. East St. Louis is a site in East St. Louis, Illinois. July 2, 1917—the riot that burned the city. Its accounts name only a collective — the 1917 dead. The dossier holds 2 reported claims, 1 legend, 2 documented facts and 1 named or described presence — documented record and retelling kept side by side. The site is open to visitors. For HauntHunt it is exactly the kind of file the archive exists for: a real place, a real record, and a story still being told. On the evening of July 1, 1917, a black Ford Model T carrying white men drove through a Black neighborhood of East St. Louis and its passengers fired into the crowd on the street. An hour later a second Model T came through — this one carrying a journalist and two detectives, Samuel Coppedge and Frank Wadley. Residents, likely mistaking it for the first car, opened fire. One officer died instantly; the other was mortally wounded. The next morning, thousands of white residents gathered to view the detectives' bloodstained automobile — and then turned on the city. What followed on July 2, 1917, was among the worst racial massacres in American history, and the event the entire file is built on. THE DOCUMENTED RECORD The city in 1917 was an industrial hotbed — meatpacking, manufacturing, rail — running hot with labor unrest after the Aluminum Ore Company strike, in which Black migrants from the South had been recruited as strikebreakers. A smaller riot had already burned through on May 28. On July 2, crowds numbering in the thousands beat, shot and hanged Black residents in the streets; people were driven back into burning houses, and whole blocks of the Black community were razed. The official count recorded 39 Black and 9 white dead, though estimates in the aftermath ran far higher — some accounts claimed well over a hundred. Roughly 6,000 Black citizens fled the city, and property damage approached $400,000. Elliott Rudwick's 1964 study Race Riot remains the standard account; Robert Fitch called it the worst case of labor-related violence in twentieth-century America. WHAT THE AFTERMATH FILED The response reshaped Black public life. Marcus Garvey's July 8 address in Harlem — 'a massacre that will go down in history as one of the bloodiest outrages against mankind' — made his name; the NAACP answered on July 28 with the Silent Protest Parade, some 10,000 marchers down Fifth Avenue, the first demonstration of its kind. The trials that followed convicted a scattering of rioters and, notoriously, Black defendants as well. The haunting layer here is thin and collective, as it tends to be where the documented violence is communal: local lore holds that the dead of July 1917 are felt in the neighborhoods the violence burned — the blocks around 4th and Division where the worst of it ran — and witnesses file presences rather than named apparitions. The claim rides entirely on the history beneath it. THE RECKONING The aftermath ran both directions through the courts. Trials followed, and a scattering of convictions — including, notoriously, Black defendants convicted for the defense of their own neighborhoods. Garvey's pamphlet The Conspiracy of the East St. Louis Riots kept the case in print, and the Silent Parade's marchers carried signs naming the city. A congressional investigation documented the pogrom's mechanics — the recruitment of Black labor as strikebreakers, the police who stood down or joined in — and the official toll was left deliberately fuzzy, as if the arithmetic itself could be dispersed. The file's geography stays precise where the record does not: the blocks around 4th and Division are where the lore keeps its markers. WHAT REMAINS East St. Louis never recovered its pre-1917 shape; the century that followed compounded the loss into the familiar ledger of disinvestment. Commemorations at the centennial put the massacre back in the record the way Rosewood's marker did its town — late, partial, official. The file is honest about its structure: one of the country's worst-documented massacres underneath, and above it a folklore of presence that asks only that the streets remember what the grand jury-era record tried to file quietly. Whatever walks the blocks around 4th and Division, the witnesses agree it answers to history, not to a name. FILED CLAIMS — 2 on record, reported not verified · [Documented legend] named ghost legend: East St. Louis lore holds that the 1917 massacre's dead are remembered — and reportedly felt — in the neighborhoods where the violence burned: the blocks around 4th and Division where the worst of it happened. The 'haunting' here is grief with an address, attached to one of America's worst racial massacres. source: East St. Louis 1917 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_St._Louis_massacre) · [Media reported] historical legend: The East St. Louis massacre is documented history — the July 1917 violence that killed scores of Black residents and burned their neighborhoods. The claim is the history itself: whatever presences the lore reports, the ground they're reported on holds documented dead. The ground holds documented dead. source: East St. Louis 1917 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_St._Louis_massacre) HISTORY — 2 documented facts · The July 2, 1917 massacre is documented. A documented history gives the file real substance; this entry is part of that spine. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. Sources including 'East St. Louis 1917' carry the record. The entry's timeline holds it; the lore holds the rest. The claim holds its place in the ledger. · The 1917 massacre is documented. The site's documented history is the record the rest of the file stands on. It's verified history: the dossier's load-bearing detail. The detail is preserved in 'East St. Louis'. It anchors the timeline the rest of the file hangs from. The report keeps its place in the record. SOURCES — 2 cited · East St. Louis 1917 — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_St._Louis_massacre · East St. Louis — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Saint_Louis,_Illinois — HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not. Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/