How America Abandoned an Entire City, East St. Louis

In 1990, an American city did something almost unthinkable: it gave away its own City Hall, because it was too broke to pay a court judgment. That city was East St. Louis, Illinois — and it was not always poor. This is the story of how one of America's greatest industrial powerhouses became one of its most abandoned places. Sitting on the Mississippi River across from St. Louis, Missouri, East St. Louis rose into a titan of the Gilded Age and the twentieth century: a rail capital with twenty-seven railroads, the sprawling National Stock Yards, meatpacking empires like Armour and Swift, the aluminum works of Alcoa, steel mills, glassworks, and the chemical plants of Monsanto. At its 1950 peak it was the fourth-largest city in Illinois, home to more than eighty-two thousand people. But the wealth was a trap. Industries hid their factories inside phantom tax-haven towns — National City, Sauget, Alorton, Monsanto — siphoning the tax base away while the workers and the pollution stayed behind. This is the story of the 1917 East St. Louis Race Massacre, one of the deadliest racial attacks in American history, born of the Great Migration and labor warfare; of deindustrialization and white flight; of a tax base that collapsed, sewers that failed, schools flooded with raw sewage as documented in Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities, and a downtown left to rot. And it's the story of a community that still produced Miles Davis, Katherine Dunham, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm — a city America used, drained, and abandoned, that refused to stop producing greatness. This is the rise and tragic fall of East St. Louis, Illinois. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📍 ABOUT THIS CHANNEL We make long-form documentaries on the rise and fall of America's greatest cities and forgotten places — the booms, the disasters, the corruption, and the people left behind. From industrial titans to ghost towns, from the Gilded Age to the Rust Belt, we tell the stories of how America was built, broken, and abandoned. 🔔 New American history documentaries every week. Subscribe so you don't miss the next forgotten city. 👍 If you enjoyed this, like the video and leave a comment telling us which American city we should cover next. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Sources "East St. Louis, Illinois" and "East St. Louis massacre," Wikipedia "The East St. Louis Race Riot Left Dozens Dead," Smithsonian Magazine (smithsonianmag.com) "East Saint Louis Race Riot of 1917," Encyclopædia Britannica (britannica.com) W.E.B. Du Bois & Martha Gruening, "The Massacre of East St. Louis," The Crisis / NAACP (1917) Ida B. Wells-Barnett, "The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of the Century" (1917) Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (1991) "Illinoistown" project, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (siue.edu) U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Population of Illinois Cities, 1900–2020 "East St. Louis: One City's Story," Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (stlouisfed.org) #EastStLouis #Illinois #AmericanHistory #UrbanDecay #RustBelt #1917 #GreatMigration #CivilRights #MilesDavis #JackieJoynerKersee