President Joe Biden on Friday signed a proclamation to designate a national monument at the site of the 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois.
“This was not the only race riot in America, by any means,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, said at the event. “The difference here was, it was the home of Abraham Lincoln.”
After a July 1908 murder of a white resident, allegedly at the hands of a Black man, tensions were high in Springfield. They worsened a month after, when another Black man was accused of raping a white woman. That woman later admitted she lied to cover up a consensual affair she was having with a white man.
But the racial animus led to a white mob attacking the city’s Black residents, killing several of them, and setting fire to dozens of Black-owned homes and businesses. The riot served as a wakeup call to white Northerners and led to the creation of the NAACP.
“This is such an important part of our nation's history, what the Midwest has done … in terms of being part of the Civil Rights Movement,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois, said at the signing. “So much of what happened in the South started and was supported through places in Chicago and in Springfield. And I'm so proud that Springfield, Illinois, is home to the beginning of the NAACP. Good things can come out of bad things, as long as you don't forget what happened.”
