Man with a Match

Tucked beneath the bluffs along the Mississippi on its Illinois shore, East St. Louis (pop. 80,000) is a squalid reach of crumbling brick buildings, battered frame shacks and sleazy taverns, redeemed only by a view of St. Louis' soaring Gateway Arch across the river. Poverty workers estimate that an appalling 65% of East St. Louis' housing is substandard; a full 21% of the work force is unemployed; nearly a third of the city's families--55%-60% of them Negroes--are on some form of relief. Fine kindling for riot, and last week Firebrand H. Rap Brown applied the match.

Perched on the hood of a police car and surrounded by ten club-swinging bodyguards, the bouffant-haired Black Power fanatic harangued a crowd of more than 1,000 with his customary oxymoronic oratory, advising his listeners that the U.S. has 13 concentration camps where it plans to put Negroes and that "America gave us a black astronaut just so's they could lose that nigger in space." Then came the familiar peroration: "Stop singing and start swinging, chump. Get a gun." As the crowd broke up, a Negro girl skipped down the street happily chanting "We're going to have a riot, we're going to have a riot!"

She was right. Shortly after Rap left town, a band of angry Negro youths --many of them from Impact House, a federally funded poverty agency--gathered beneath the neon sign of a liquor store and began aping Brown's agitational frenzy. Soon rocks and bottles were smashing store and car windows; a policeman was shot in the arm by a sniper; another cop blasted a 19-year-old Negro car thief, killing him. Fire bombs popped, and guttering flames silhouetted the scurrying shapes of looters carrying liquor, meat, window fans, cosmetics, even a drugstore cash register. For three days the violence flared and sputtered. Final tolls: nearly 100 fires, 49 arrests, 13 injuries, one death and some $200,000 in property damage.

Having left Illinois for Virginia, Rap Brown wound up behind bars after his white attorneys failed to convince Judge Franklin P. Backus of the Alexandria Corporation Court that he should not be held as a fugitive pending extradition to Maryland, where he is charged with inciting the July 24 Cambridge riot. Denied bail, Rap was hustled off to Richmond's escape-proof penitentiary, then to a nearby prison farm for what could be a month-long stay while the extradition battle is resolved. For light reading, he took along the little red book of Mao Tse-tung's thoughts.

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