C-SPAN Cities Tour - St. Louis: Harper Barnes "Never Been a Time"

Learn about the 1917 race riot that sparked the civil rights movement from Harper Barnes, author of "Never Been a Time." In the 1910s, half a million African Americans moved from the impoverished rural South to booming industrial cities of the North in search of jobs and freedom from Jim Crow laws. But Northern whites responded with rage, attacking blacks in the streets and laying waste to black neighborhoods in a horrific series of deadly race riots that broke out in dozens of cities across the nation, including Philadelphia, Chicago, Tulsa, Houston, and Washington, D.C. In East St. Louis, Illinois, corrupt city officials and industrialists had openly courted Southern blacks, luring them North to replace striking white laborers. This tinderbox erupted on July 2, 1917 into what would become one of the bloodiest American riots of the World War era. Drawing from accounts and sources never before utilized, Harper Barnes has written the first full account of this dramatic turning point in American history