th bullets, Then, they went on
to destroy large sections of the Negro part of town.

In 1808 Springfield, Illinois, was the scene of the famous riot which
helped to motivate the founding of the N.A.A.C.P. There, a white woman
claimed to have been raped by a Negro. Although she admitted that she
had, in fact, been assaulted by a white man, the angry mob was only
further enraged. It ran out of control for several days, and the state's
militia was called in to restore order. Besides looting and burning, the
mob boldly and deliberately lynched two of the city's responsible Negro
citizens. The leaders of the mob, as usual, went unpunished.

Although DuBois had urged the Negroes to close ranks with white America
during the war, white racists did not reciprocate. An even worse race
riot occurred in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917. The white community
was afraid that a mass influx of Negroes from the South was about to
occur. On one hand, Illinois Democrats played on racial prejudice to
further their political interests. They accused Republicans of intending
to colonize large numbers of Negroes from the South in order to enlarge
the Republican vote.

On the other hand, labor unions feared that Negroes would be imported as
strike breakers. During an attempt to organize a union at the Aluminum
Ore Company which led to a strike in April 1917 this atmosphere increased
racial tensions. In 1913, the company had hired no Negro workers at all.
By 1916, there were two hundred Afro-American employees. Within three
months at the end of 1916 and the beginning of 1917, the company fired
some two hundred whites while, at the same time, hiring approximately the
same number of Negroes. The city had been totally segregated, and the
white citizens intended to keep it that way. The school system had been
segregated in spite of a state law of 1874 which forbade segregation in
education. Jim Crow was also standard in theaters, restaurants, and
hotels in opposition to the 1885 law that had outlawed segregation in
public accommodations. Local citizens were afraid that the rumored influx
of Negroes would drastically alter the situation. Later investigation
showed that the size of the migration had been vastly exaggerated.

Tension surrounding the racial and labor conflict in East St. Louis
exploded into a minor riot in May. A Negro had accidentally wounded a
white man during a liquor-store holdup but the story that was circulated
was that an inn