In Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, a brutal past colors the present
Ste. Genevieve, Missouri is one of those small towns you really want to love – if only because of its physical beauty. Located just West of the Mississippi River, the town is known for its classic French Creole colonial architecture: steeply-pitched roofs, wrap-around porches, high ceilings. It’s Missouri’s oldest permanent European settlement, first showing up on a map in 1775.
Yet to celebrate Ste. Genevieve also requires a kind of selective memory, to un-remember the events of 1930 as the U.S. plunged into the Great Depression. Back then, Ste. Genevieve was a small mining town of a little more than 2,500 people, including some 160 Black residents. This population was split into two distinct groups. Around 70 of the Black residents were long-timers who had lived for generations in Ste. Genevieve. The other group was made up of recent arrivals, mostly southern migrants looking for work in the quarry. The migrants lived on the outskirts of town in a collection of clapboard dwellings, thrown together with plywood and corrugated metal, and colloquially known as the Shacks.
THE BEGINNING: THE MURDER
It was a warm night, nearly 1a.m., in mid-October. A dance down at the Shacks was winding down and Columbus Jennings was looking for a ride. Jennings, a quarry worker, had come up from Mississippi for a job. He was soon joined by Lonnie Taylor, a quarry worker from Tennessee, and a young lady, Vera Rogers, who was from the neighboring town of Crystal City.
They were heading towards a boat dock two miles North for a craps game. But even on a warm night, two miles at 1a.m. in October is a long way to hoof. So they asked two white kiln workers at the dance, Harry Panchot and Paul Ritter, to drive them. The trio paid $1.50 for the ride or the equivalent of about $25 dollars today. Upon arrival, they headed down to the boat dock where the game was being held.
They arrived at the dock although what exactly led this night to its lethal conclusion is unclear. But in the end, Panchot was dead in the river, and Ritter was alongside him in the frigid water, paralyzed but alive. When the men on the shore realized he was alive, he alleged that they began to throw rocks at him. In the hospital, Ritter had a dent in his skull with pieces of rock lodged in his brain.
Ritter likely only survived the river due to the fact that federal prohibition agents were guarding a confiscated bootleggers boat in the area and heard his cries for help downriver.
“Two niggers shot me,” Ritter was recorded as saying after officers fished him from the river. “They held me up. They’ve throwed rocks on me.”
The story that Ritter told him was that the three migrants had robbed the two other men at gunpoint for $45 and a pocket watch. And after they’d handed over the money, Taylor shot them both at point-blank range.
Later, Taylor confirmed that he’d pulled the trigger but not during any robbery. He claims Ritter offered Vera Rogers $50 dollars to have sex with him and, in response, a fistfight broke out between the men. Taylor claims he shot the two men in self-defense. Then, thinking Ritter and Panchot were both dead, they heaved the men into the river.
What really happened on that boat dock may never be known, but Ritter’s story was the one that the residents of Ste. Genevieve believed, as it seemed to confirm what they’d always suspected about the migrants.
THE MIDDLE: THE MOB
The next day, after Sunday Mass, a crowd of 500 crowded outside of the courthouse waiting for news while inside the police grilled Taylor, Jennings and Rogers. With nearly 20% of the town at their front door and unrest growing on the courthouse steps, the sheriff quietly transferred the trio to the neighboring town of Hudson.
At nightfall, the mob turned its attention to the Black people within their reach, moving from household to household telling Black families that they needed to be out of town by the next morning. There was no distinction made between long-time residents and new arrivals. They were all told to go, and there was no question of what the consequences would be if they stayed.
The identity of exactly who was in the mob is still a mystery. The St. Louis Argus reported that it was members of the local Knights of Columbus, but no one ever publicly admitted to being part of the mob. But on Monday morning, 200 Black residents made the fearful exodus out of Ste. Genevieve and into the surrounding area. By nightfall, there were only three Black families left in Ste. Genevieve.
Sheriff Ziegler called to request the National Guard to try and curb any mob violence. The governor dispatched two companies to nearby towns, but they withdrew the next day, thinking the worst had already come to pass. But when Ritter died in the hospital that evening, the mob reformed, and it was ready to make good on its threat.
At 10:30 p.m. three cars worth of white men with shotguns attempted to kidnap Louis “Cap” Ribeau, a local mailman and one of the few remaining Black citizens of Ste. Genevieve in town. They grabbed him on the street, just blocks from his house.
Ribeau was saved, but only narrowly and with no help from police or the National Guard. A passing car accidentally rammed one of the mob’s parked cars and then continued into the mob itself; nobody in the mob was hurt. Ribeau managed to escape in the chaos and was sheltered by a white family for the night.
THE END: THE AFTERMATH
In the end, six men were arrested in connection to the mob kidnapping. The six, a pitiful fraction, of 500, were charged with unlawful assembly which held the punishment of $300 fine, six months in jail or both. But in the end, the judge stayed their sentences and the men were released without fines and without sentencing.
It wasn’t until the federal government stepped in on a mere technicality that the men from the mob were arrested on federal warrants. Cap Ribeau was a mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service and, by kidnapping him, they had committed conspiracy to prevent a federal employee from performing his duties, which is punishable by six years in jail, a $5000 fine or both. In March of the following year, all six pleaded guilty in federal court and all were paroled.
Taylor and Jennings were both convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to life in prison. The prosecutor is quoted from the trial as saying:
“The eyes of the people of Ste. Genevieve County are on you, the eyes of the people of St. Francois County are on you, and the eyes of the people of Missouri are on you — whether it will be necessary to resort to mob rule or whether the majesty of the law is sufficient.”
He was cut off before being able to finish telling the jury that if they didn’t recommend the death penalty, the people of Ste. Genevieve would.
Cap Ribeau never returned to Ste. Genevieve. The next morning he boarded a train to St. Louis and never came back. According to an article in the St. Louis Argus, Ribeau left in “a highly nervous state” after the encounter and was later admitted to a sanitarium for recovery.
The town was sympathetic to the six mob members, and with rumors of an attempted jailbreak swirling, Sheriff Ziegler again called in the National Guard. After having only been dismissed hours earlier, the National Guard returned, and the next morning they mounted machine guns in front of the jail and on Cap Ribeau’s porch. Ste. Genevieve residents and National Guardsman later had a shared mass.
That evening Ste. Genevieve civic leaders met at the courthouse to discuss how to stop any further racial violence, and the local chapter of the American Legionnaires volunteered to serve as sheriff’s deputies to help stop any further mob violence.
However, they all agreed that this protection would only extend to “certain native, property-owning Blacks.” No other Black people, including the migrants, would be allowed to return.
There’s a prescient line in Zora Neal Hurston’s dialect-heavy classic, Their Eyes Were Watching God, which came out seven years after this riot: “Ah done watched it time and time again; each and every white man think he know all de GOOD darkies already. He don’t need tuh know no mo’.”
And there comes the blade-sharp bisection of race and class. It’s never been easy to be Black in America but it’s certainly worse to be Black and poor.
By the following day, the riot had subsided, but the decisions made by city leaders remained firm. Some 70 Black individuals were invited back and although nearly all of them returned, the migrants were never allowed back.
In public consciousness, the riot is little remembered. Information is scattered across the internet in the form of an academic talk, a semi-fictional novel and a 35-word paragraph on the town’s Wikipedia page. But if you ask the average Missourian what they know about it, it would likely be very little, if anything at all.
But the census data in Ste. Genevieve also tells the story. By 1940, the number of Black residents had dropped to 45, and in 1960, it had dwindled to just 16, in a town of 4,400. And in 2010, there are now roughly 70 Black citizens of Ste. Genevieve, only half of what there was in 1930, but now in a town that’s twice as big.
This story was originally published June 10, 2022 at 9:00 AM with the headline "In Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, a brutal past colors the present."