Gentleman's Agreement

St. Louis is a Northern town with Southern accents, where Jim Crow walks a tightrope. Negroes are not segregated on streetcars and buses, in the ballparks, or at the Municipal Opera. But in restaurants, the public schools and movie houses, they are. Last week the delicate balance, a matter of timing and tradition, was snapped. A reporter casually asked the city's new welfare director, John J. O' Toole, whether Negroes could be allowed to swim in all the city's public pools. There was no law saying they couldn't, so O' Toole answered: "If the colored people apply for admittance, my order is to admit them. I am not going to be a party to an unlawful gentleman's agreement."

On opening day at Fairgrounds Park, white swimmers drifted back to the locker room in sullen anger when the first Negroes splashed into the outdoor pool. Outside the pool fence, a mob of some 200 teen-agers collected. Police arrived in time to escort the Negroes safely from the park. But all that afternoon fist fights blazed up; Negro boys were chased and beaten by white gangs. In the gathering dusk, one grown-up rabble-rouser spoke out. "Want to know how to take care of those niggers?" he shouted. "Get bricks. Smash their heads, the dirty, filthy ----."

Swinging baseball bats, the crowd shuffled in mounting excitement. Then someone called out: "There's some niggers!"

The crowd cornered two terror-stricken Negro boys against a fence. Under a volley of fists, clubs and stones, the boys went down--but not before one of them had whipped out a knife and stabbed one of his attackers. In a surge of fury, the nearest whites kicked and pummeled the two prostrate bodies, turned angrily on rescuing police with shouts of "nigger-lover."

Within an hour the crowd had swollen to more than 5,000. In the park along bustling Grand Boulevard busy teen-age gangs hunted down Negroes. Others climbed into trucks and circled the park, looking for more targets. One Negro managed to seize a club from his attackers, flailed away in wall-eyed fear, with blood oozing through his shirt front. When police finally reached him, the crowd hooted with glee. "He must have a skull like a rock," said one 16-year-old. "I kicked him twice in the head myself."

By 2 a.m., when hard-pressed police finally cleared the streets, ten Negroes and five whites had been hospitalized, one critically injured. Next day Mayor Joseph M. Darst ordered both outdoor pools closed, and ruled that St. Louis' pools and playgrounds would stay segregated.

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