Silence in the Streets: Mourning East St. Louis

This paper explores how the silent marches that antiracist activists organized in major cities across the country in response to the intensive anti-Black violence of the WWI era, especially the race riot that broke out in East St. Louis, Illinois, in 1917, functioned as sites of collective mourning and memorialization in service of the larger anti-lynching campaign. If a politics of self- and community defense typified the resistance that Black residents of East St. Louis mounted against their white assailants during the riot, or more accurately pogrom, then a new kind of Black politics emerged in its wake, one that did not revolve around practices of armed defense but rather embodied, performative displays of loss, vulnerability, slowness, and silence. These displays were particularly mobilized in the slew of silent marches that followed in response to East St. Louis and other anti-Black pogroms of the wartime era. This paper details how the silence of these marches had the capacity to envelop large, diverse populations of participants and spectators, how the silence’s resistance to translation enabled it to serve as a means for negotiating, and facilitating interactions across, differences that might otherwise distinguish and distance people from each other. As a corporeal political performance, silent marching denoted both loss and presence, mourning and futurity, the unspeakability of racist atrocity and an injunction to speak out against it. It appealed to both the distinct salience of racism within the African American community as well as an effort to make legible an unintelligible trauma to a wider white public—to rouse the nation’s conscience through an attempt to conjure a new structure of feeling that finally permitted the mourning of Black victims of white supremacy within the public sphere.