Biden to designate 1908 Springfield race riot site as national monument

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) — President Joe Biden is scheduled to sign a proclamation Friday establishing a national monument in Springfield, Illinois, site of a 1908 race riot that later helped found the NAACP.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Wednesday that the ceremony will happen Friday within the Oval Office and will probably be attended by civil rights and community leaders from Springfield, the hometown of President Abraham Lincoln.

The ceremony comes just 5 1/2 weeks after Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old black woman, was shot and killed by a white sheriff’s deputy in her Springfield home after she called 911 for help. Massey’s relations and supporters gathered for a news conference Wednesday as a part of an ongoing push for justice within the prosecution of Deputy Sean Grayson, who has been charged with first-degree murder in her death.

“People are starting to pay attention because it’s an untold story,” Teresa Haley, former president of the Springfield NAACP, said of the riots. “It’s a deep, dark, dirty secret that Springfield is afraid of.”

“It’s tragic. It’s sad that it’s happening right after Sonya Massey, but let’s say her name — Sonya Massey — and if the president, the vice president and everybody else has to recognize that and make it happen, then it’s high time,” continued Haley, founding father of Visions 1908, a civil rights, social and economic justice, and education group.

Biden’s designation doesn’t create a marker, although a memorial to the centennial stands in Union Square Park downtown. But Haley has promoted a big, reflective, walk-through memorial on the site of the foundations of 5 original homes burned in the course of the riots, which were excavated during rail work in 2014. That project is awaiting funding.

In August 1908, crowds of white residents marched through the Illinois capital on the pretext of executing two black men—one who had been imprisoned on charges of sexually assaulting a white woman, the opposite convicted of a separate murder of a white man.

After authorities secretly moved the prisoners out of the jail and sent them to one other jail many miles away, the mob took its anger out on town’s black population. Over the following few days, two innocent black men were hanged, dozens of homes and businesses in majority-black neighborhoods in Springfield were burned to the bottom, and families were forced to flee.

The National Guard was called in to restore order. White rioters were charged but later acquitted of their role within the lynching and destruction.

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According to newspaper accounts from the time, at the least eight white people were killed and greater than 100 were injured within the violence, mostly by members of the state militia or one another. It shouldn’t be known what number of blacks were injured or killed.

Frustrated civil rights leaders met in New York and selected the centennial of Lincoln’s birth, February 12, 1909, for the formation of the NAACP, whose first board of directors was scholar W. E. B. DuBois.

Sontae Massey, who was very close to his cousin Sonya Massey, said the family descends from William Donegan, an 84-year-old shoemaker who was married to a white woman who was lynched on the primary night of the riots. Now, the present generation is coping with the tragic lack of one other member of the family.

“It’s ironic that we’re now at the very foundation of what this family has stood for for hundreds of years. We’re going to continue to make a difference across America. This is just the beginning,” Massey said. “It’s only right. We’ve been catalysts for change since 1908. We’re carrying on the tradition.”

The Springfield attack occurred greater than a decade before at the least 25 documented attacks by whites on blacks that occurred in the summertime of 1919, an event that later became known as the “Red Summer” for the bloodshed that followed.

Two years later, a white mob ransacked and set fire to Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, killing as many as 300 black residents. Biden traveled to Tulsa in 2021 to mark the a hundredth anniversary of the massacre.

Jean-Pierre called the Springfield riots “a horrific attack by a white mob on a black community” and said civil rights leaders were working to publicize what happened “to spark a nationwide civil rights movement.” She promised the White House would supply more details before an official announcement Friday.

In 2020, the riot site near downtown Springfield was added to the National Park Service’s African American Civil Rights Network, a group of web sites and programs that tell the story of the civil rights movement. The sites can be found through federal grants.

“While the 1908 Springfield race riots illustrate our country’s deep history of racial violence, they also sparked the founding of the NAACP — reflecting the strength and resilience of black Americans in their tireless fight for civil rights,” said U.S. Rep. Nikki Budzinski, whose office said she urged Biden to designate the monument. “Today’s announcement is a crucial step forward to honor the memory of those killed in the 1908 attack and recognize the impact of that tragedy.”