Harlem's Socrates: Race First in Jim Crow America
are to kill unoffending Negroes, Negroes must kill white men in defense of their lives and property.” Furthermore, the Voice advocated a boycott of white businesses, ending with the hope that as atrocious as the East St. Louis Riot was, perhaps more blacks would now join the Liberty League. Harrison emphasized that the League “was organized to take practical steps to help our people all over the land in protection of their lives and liberties.”98 Estimates for the number of African-American men, women and children who died in the riots range from a low of one hundred to a high of three hundred. Seven thousand were forced to flee East St. Louis by swimming across the Missouri River with the clothes on their backs to escape for their lives.99 Perhaps the most controversial act of the Liberty League, prefiguring Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, was the call for armed self defense in light of race riots. During these violent clashes, blacks were disproportionately killed and injured by white rioters. In the July 10th edition of the Voice, the paper reprinted an article initially published in the New York Times entitled, “Urges Negroes to Get Arms, Liberty League President Advises His Race to ‘Defend Their Lives.’” The article concerned a rally following the East St. Louis Riots which took place at the Metropolitan Baptist Church on 138th and Lenox in Harlem, where a thousand African-Americans gathered to hear Harrison speak. The paper ran a powerful clip from Harrison’s speech: We intend to fight if we must … for the things dearest to us, for our hearths and homes. Certainly I would encourage the Negeoes [sic] in the South, or in East St. Louis, or anywhere else who do not enjoy the protection of the law, to arm for their own defense, to hide those arms, and to learn how to use them, and I would gladly encourage the collection of funds to buy rifles for those who cannot obtain them for themselves. We Negroes in New York cannot afford to lie down in the face of this proposition. This thing
The University of Oregon McNair Research Journal [51]