They were invited to join unions of the laborers here and they joined.
White workers and black workers struck at the aluminum works in the fall
and won higher wages and better hours; then again in the spring they
struck to make bargaining compulsory for the employer, but this time
they fronted new things. The conflagration of war had spread to America;
government and court stepped in and ordered no hesitation, no strikes;
the work must go on.

Deeper was the call for workers. Black men poured in and red anger
flamed in the hearts of the white workers. The anger was against the
wielders of the thunderbolts, but here it was impotent because employers
stood with the hand of the government before their faces; it was against
entrenched union labor, which had risen on the backs of the unskilled
and unintelligent and on the backs of those whom for any reason of race
or prejudice or chicane they could beat beyond the bars of competition;
and finally the anger of the mass of white workers was turned toward
these new black interlopers, who seemed to come to spoil their last
dream of a great monopoly of common labor.

These angers flamed and the union leaders, fearing their fury and
knowing their own guilt, not only in the larger and subtler matter of
bidding their way to power across the weakness of their less fortunate
fellows, but also conscious of their part in making East St. Louis a
miserable town of liquor and lust, leaped quickly to ward the gathering
thunder from their own heads. The thing they wanted was even at their
hands: here were black men, guilty not only of bidding for jobs which
white men could have held at war prices, even if they could not fill,
but also guilty of being black! It was at this blackness that the unions
pointed the accusing finger. It was here that they committed the
unpardonable crime. It was here that they entered the Shadow of Hell,