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. Its impact was enormous. “There has never been a time when the riot was not alive in the oral tradition,” remarks Professor Eugene Redmond. Indeed, prominent blacks like W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Josephine Baker were forever influenced by it.

Celebrated St. Louis journalist Harper Barnes has written the first full account of this dramatic turning point in American history, decisively placing it in the continuum of racial tensions flowing from Reconstruction and as a catalyst of civil rights action in the decades to come. Drawing from accounts and sources never before utilized, Harper Barnes has crafted a compelling and definitive story that enshrines the riot as an historical rallying cry for all who deplore racial violence.

“There is a secret history of American race relations, things they never taught us in school—the wanton terrorism visited upon African-Americans by white mobs from the end of the civil war to the beginning of the modern civil rights movement. Harper Barnes takes one of the very worst episodes—the East St. Louis race riot of 1917—and uses it to illuminate and exorcise a past that we need to confront. This is a very important book, heartbreaking and riveting, history that is as fresh as today’s news.”—Joe Klein, Time Magazine columnist

“You put Never Been a Time down and think, ‘How can I imagine myself an educated American and not know this?’ A terrifying account, by a masterful writer.”—Paul Solman, economics correspondent for the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

“Never Been a Time uncovers one of those buried chapters in our country’s defining narrative of race and vividly lays out the nexus of economic desperation, corporate ruthlessness and racial antagonism that resulted in what Gunnar Myrdal called this ‘mass lynching’ in the American heartland. Harper Barnes is a natural reporter and an extremely elegant writer.”—Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home and A Dream of Freedom

“America’s worst race riots are pivotal moments in the nation’s history with a great deal to teach us. Barnes skillfully places this shocking and important story in its full historical context and conveys a powerful sense of place: the dangerous streets and vice dens of East St. Louis, the foul winds from the smokestacks and slaughterhouses, and the city’s toxic stew of greed, corruption, labor competition, and racism. Never Been a Time vividly recounts a horrifying massacre, but it is also a testament to human resilience, a celebration of a city that against all odds has produced so many famous cultural figures and drawn them back home to fight for its survival and its children’s future.”—Barnet Schecter, author of The Devil’s Own Work

“Harper Barnes has written a brilliant account of a tragic event in the American experience.  He places the bloody East St. Louis Race Riot in its historical national context—demonstrating that it was more than an explosion of local pressures, but also a violent intersection of larger societal forces.  He does a fine job synthesizing existing scholarly literature and the latest academic analyses alongside his own primary work.  This well-researched and cogently-written book makes a meaningful contribution to the understanding of the infamous 1917 riot as well as race relations generally, and deserves the attention of scholars and citizens alike.”—Andrew J. Theising, Ph.D., director of the Institute for Urban Research, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and author of Made in USA:  East St. Louis

“Barnes, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, writes of the truly senseless race riots that took place in East St. Louis, IL, in the summer of 1917, resulting in the deaths of nearly 100 people and the burning of over 200 buildings. The riots were the tragic legacy of slavery, Reconstruction, and its aftermath—compounded by circumstances of organized labor, strikes, business competition, and municipal corruption. Rioting white union members focused not on those circumstances but singled out victims on the basis of skin color. Mobs of African Americans reacted violently in self-defense. Judicial inquires in the aftermath placed blame on local businesses and union agitation. Local police and the Illinois militia were complicit and were shown to have actually spurred on violence toward those they were charged to protect. The legacy of these events is evident in the city to this day, yet among much blight there are pockets of sustained rebuilding and a community not without hope. Malcolm McLaughlin's Power, Community, and Racial Killing in East St. Louis is a dryer, more scholarly treatment than Barnes's, with more tables, maps, and citations. Barnes offers an essentially populist account, crafted with an eye on newspaper reporting and municipal politics.”—Jim Hahn, Library Journal

“With this account of the East St. Louis, Ill., race riot, ‘the deadliest of a series of devastating racial battles that swept through American cities in the World War I era,’ Barnes chronicles one of the devastating assaults on African-American communities across the nation that culminated in the Red Summer of 1919. Barnes's account of the 1917 riot is a tale of labor unrest as blacks were used as strikebreakers, of the power of rumor, of corrupt local politics, of the ineffective (when not complicit) response of police power (local and military) and of sickening savagery. Barnes is attentive to the role of the press, citing both the national and black press, but he focuses most sharply upon two St. Louis Post-Dispatch figures, Paul Y. Anderson and Carlos Hurd. Between their dispatches and the ‘military and congressional hearings in the aftermath of the riot,’ Barnes offers a nearly block-by-block, minute-by-minute account, solid in reportage, pedestrian in the telling, useful to students of American and African-American history and accessible to the general reader.”—Publishers Weekly

“St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor Barnes recreates the deadliest racial melee in American history until the Rodney King riots. The author deftly sets the stage with a brief history of racial tensions in the United States. Her chronicle of the riot that gripped East St. Louis, Ill., on July 2, 1917, relies heavily upon the contemporaneous research of W.E.B. Du Bois, newspaper reports and court documents. East St. Louis was a transit hub for Southern African-Americans as they began their migration to the North in the wake of the Civil War, seeking economic opportunity and social freedom. Many opted to settle in the industrial city, heightening competition for jobs that led to several racial skirmishes early that spring. Total anarchy erupted on the morning of July 2 after the murder of a policeman. Bloodthirsty wh...