SPRINGFIELD — President Joe Biden signed a proclamation Friday designating the site of the 1908 Springfield race riots, one of the most egregious outbreaks of racial violence in American history, as a national monument.
The riot has long been a grim symbol of the racism and intimidation many Black Americans face in the United States. In recent years, both Illinois Democratic senators, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, have pushed for legislation to prioritize the riot site as a national monument, and advocates have urged Biden to use his authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906, a federal law that protects cultural and natural resources of historical or scientific interest, to make that idea a reality.
It came to fruition Friday, two days after the 116th anniversary of a riot that broke out just blocks from where President Abraham Lincoln once lived.
“This has literally shocked the conscience of the nation,” Biden said in the Oval Office, flanked by Durbin, Duckworth, Democratic U.S. Rep. Nikki Budzinski of Springfield and others. “We have no refuge if we don’t continue to remind people what happened.”
According to the White House, the monument will serve as a reminder of “the hateful violence directed against Black Americans and the power of dedicated individuals to come together across racial lines to transform shock and grief into good and action.”
The monument will protect 1.57 acres of federal land in Springfield and will be managed by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Park Service. In the coming years, the park service will work with community groups “to plan the interpretation, commemoration and visitor experiences associated with the new park site,” the White House said, including the charred foundations of five homes that were never rebuilt.
The homes were among dozens set ablaze by an angry white mob that went on the rampage after two black men accused of rape and murder were taken out of town by authorities.
The riot led to the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded on February 12, 1909, Lincoln’s 100th birthday, after black leaders including Ida B. Wells-Barnett and W. E. B. DuBois called for a national organization to fight for equality and denounce racist policies.
Biden’s announcement comes as the Springfield area has faced a new challenge in recent weeks with the police killing of Sonya Massey, 36, whose death sparked protests across the United States. Massey’s family said she was a descendant of William Donnegan, a shoemaker involved in the Underground Railroad who was lynched in the 1908 riots.
Walter Katz, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s deputy chief of staff for public safety, who specializes in police reform and accountability, also has a connection to Donnegan. Katz said in a Tribune op-ed last year that Donnegan was his great-great-great-great uncle, something he learned while researching his ancestry and linked that to his career choice as a public defender and social justice advocate.
“Many African Americans can point to someone in their family, in their extended family, who has been the victim of racial violence or police overreach, an unlawful stop, an unlawful search, an unlawful use of force or an unlawful arrest,” Katz said in an interview Friday.
Teresa Haley, former president of the Springfield branch of the NAACP, said the city remains racially segregated more than a century after the riots. Haley said she lobbied to have the site of the riots designated a national monument, working with elected officials, and that Biden’s announcement meant a lot to her because it’s important for people to understand the negative impact the riots had on Black residents.
“What we hope now and what I want to see is that when people come to Springfield and they come to where the memorial and the monument are going up, it will be an opportunity to reflect,” Haley said. “It’s an opportunity to reflect and put yourself in someone’s shoes, to imagine living in that time, living through those race riots. And black and white people lost their lives.”
The chain of events that led to the riot began on August 14, 1908, when two black men, Joe James and George Richardson, were jailed. Richardson was accused of raping a white woman and James of killing a white man.
A large crowd of whites gathered outside the jail demanding the release of the two men so the mob could lynch them. To prevent this, the county sheriff and a white merchant secretly took the two men out of the jail and put them on a train that took them to another jail about 60 miles away in Bloomington.
When the mob learned of the news, it escalated into violence, setting fire to black-owned homes and businesses in Springfield and attacking residents and business owners. Within days, about 30 businesses in one neighborhood—half owned by blacks and most by Jews—were looted and vandalized. Several dozen homes belonging to black residents of the city were also destroyed.
Illinois Governor Charles Deneen called in the Illinois National Guard to help control the riots.
Ultimately, James was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by an all-white jury. Richardson was freed after the woman who had accused him of rape recanted her conviction.
In a statement released earlier this week, Sen. Durbin, who has a home in Springfield, said the race riot was “a violent and hateful tragedy” that “we cannot turn a blind eye to.”
“Together, we can honor the lives lost in the deadly riot and reaffirm our commitment to combating bias in Illinois and across the country,” he said.
At the annual Democratic political rally at the Illinois State Fair in Springfield on Wednesday, Budzinski stressed the importance of creating the monument to educate future generations of residents and visitors to the capital about the riot and to ensure it is not forgotten.
“We come out of the murder of Sonya Massey, being able to acknowledge our history in Springfield and tell the honest truth and the history of our city and our community, and how we can look forward, how much progress we still have to make,” Budzinski said.
Katz called the proclamation “an important and long-overdue step,” calling the riot “a little-told story that still reverberates today.”
“We still have these vestiges, like the vestiges of redlining, where people of color, black people, were not allowed to live in many places in cities in the North,” he said. “So today, the commemoration recognizes the importance of history and the importance of the black experience in the fabric of America, and especially since we’ve seen such a surge in recent years, this backlash against the teaching of history.”
