Later, another car containing police officers drove through the same area and residents, assuming it was the first car, opened fire, killing two police officers. A car occupied by white men drove through the Black area of the city and passengers fired into a group on the street, according to news reports of the time. Frank Lowden activated the National Guard, but troops were dispersed weeks later. Mobs began attacking Black residents, pulling them off streetcars. Louis to work in the meat packing plants and factories that were gearing up for World War I. The death certificates detail the violence that began May 28, 1917, after a city council meeting during which angry white workers formally complained about black migrants who came from the south to East St.

That’s how I will think of them,” Petty said. All of our fathers, grandfathers, uncles. Petty said he considers them stitches in the fabric of East St. Without those records, if they ever existed, there is no way to know the location of the John Does in their new gravesite in Sunset Gardens, further deepening the mystery of who these five men were who died at the hands of a riotous mob. Clair County clerk and the Illinois comptroller’s office, who regulates cemeteries, failed to turn up any records for the formerly county-run St. Clair Cemetery didn’t make the move with them.Ĭhecks with the St. Clair Cemetery – the day after they were discovered in Cahokia Creek.ĭecades later, they were disinterred and moved about seven miles to Sunset Gardens of Memory Cemetery in Millstadt to make way for the construction of Interstate 64. The five unidentified men were buried on July 3, 1917, in St. “My grandparents would tell me about 30 or 40 men killed and thrown in the creek during the riots,” Petty said. Clair County coroner’s records from the time period contained death certificates of five Black men, each identified only as “John Doe,” who were found in Cahokia Creek during and in the days after the massive riot.įour were shot. “Everyone I talked to had a story, but this is the first time I have heard proof,” Petty said.Ĭapitol News Illinois discovered the death certificates in the Illinois State Archives earlier this year. His elders told the children that 20 or 30 men were shot and thrown in Cahokia Creek. Louis Historical Society, said he heard it. Reginald Petty, the founder of the East St. That tale was carried across the Mississippi River by those trying to escape the violence and through the generations of African American families who lived in East St. It was a tale told by older generations to the younger generations, of men shot and killed and their bodies tossed into a creek during one of the fiercest race riots in the country.

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