‘Black skin was a death warrant’: how the East St Louis race massacre was an omen for racial violence to come

Four year before the Tulsa race massacre, white mobs firebombed homes and decimated a Black community in Illinois

The racial violence in East St Louis, Illinois, on 2 July 1917 holds a special place in US history. It's not the white brutality against Black people that sets the incident apart - official counts claim that 39 Black residents were killed, though estimates range to the hundreds, and 7,000 were forced to flee the city. It's not the silent march on New York City's Fifth Avenue weeks later in support of the victims.

East St Louis is notable because it was the first of a series of race riots that happened during and after the first world war, a period of peril and progress for Black Americans. The city, which sits across the Mississippi River from St Louis, Missouri, is a fitting place to end the Red Summers series, which began with the commemoration of the centennial of the Tulsa massacre of 1921.