A Black man lay half-conscious in the street after being beaten by a white mob during the East St. Louis Massacre of 1917. As the man tried to get up, a well-dressed white man standing behind him “lifted a flat stone in both hands and hurled it upon his neck,” a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote on July 3, 1917.

For an hour and 30 minutes on the evening of July 1, the reporter witnessed barbaric scenes of white mobs “destroying the life of every discoverable black man.” The gruesome displays of racial violence were among the worst the United States would ever see.

The Illinois massacre had been sparked by the fear of Black men migrating from