This is a city that takes great pains to recognize its history.
For Abe, there is the Lincoln Home and a plethora of bronze likenesses. For farmers and steel workers, there are glossy picture books and murals in the Capitol Rotunda.
But nothing in Springfield commemorates the town’s infamous race riots of 1908, which spawned the birth of the NAACP. There is no memorial for the seven people, black and white, who died in the bloody rampage.
“It seems that the race riot was something that Springfield wanted to forget for many, many years,” said Rudy Davenport, president of the Springfield NAACP.
On Aug. 14 and 15, 1908, some 500 whites raged through Springfield, burning and looting homes, dragging shop owners from their businesses, shooting bystanders and lynching at least two black men.
The reason? Newspaper reports that one black man had killed a white man and that another had raped a white woman.
A few weeks later, the woman recanted her story and committed suicide. There also were some questions about the guilt of the white man’s alleged attacker who, according to some written accounts, was a law-abiding property owner until his arrest.
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But the damage had been done.
Rioters destroyed 40 black-owned homes and more than 15 businesses owned by blacks and “Negro sympathizers.” Some of Springfield’s 2,000 blacks fled the city and never returned.
And while a grand jury returned 107 indictments against more than 60 people, only a few were convicted, according to Springfield public library records.
Though the legal system did not fully respond to the incident, some abolitionists across the country who heard the story did.
According to NAACP historian Gloster B. Current, Mary White Ovington, a white socialist who lived in New York, gathered local abolitionists in January 1909 after she had obtained a newspaper editorial about the riots. They formed a national organization to address problems facing blacks.
“We mark (the Springfield riots) as the final indignity which aroused the nation,” said Mildred Roxborough, director of development for the NAACP’s national office. “This reporting of the riots was spread across the country. . . . As a result of this, the people who were involved in the abolition movement were able to attract more attention to the problem.”
NAACP members such as Roxborough look to the Springfield riots as a catalyst for progress. They said the event opened the eyes of many Americans to the plight of former slaves.
Historians said the riots were an eruption of long-held fears of whites about the large number of blacks migrating to the North.
But for Springfield residents, the riots are a baneful reminder that their past is about more than lawmaking and Lincoln.
Whites are likely to downplay the riots’ significance or to decline to speak about it at all. Blacks are inclined to discuss it only behind closed doors.
The city’s newcomers, black or white, probably have never heard of it.
Bob Church, a white Springfield native who is the city’s deputy mayor, said his grandfather told him stories about the heated racial battle.
“He told of the white people pushing the black people from the east side toward the southeast along the railroad track,” Church said. “He said they were just gathering them and herding them to that area.”
Springfield native John Wilson, who is black, said he also remembers hearing his family talk about the rampage.
His mother said she took her younger siblings to a remote park on the first day. His father, however, rarely discussed the riots, preferring to talk about his response-joining the newly formed NAACP.
“My dad was constantly fighting for the rights of people,” said Wilson, whose father helped establish the Springfield chapter in 1921.
At a major NAACP banquet every year, a historian reminds members that the attack was the impetus for the organization’s formation.
Davenport said, “Many of the blacks in Springfield have heard stories about the riots and that has affected, I think, the commitment of many Springfield NAACP members.”
But some young people in the state’s capital, whose population is about 14 percent black, said the riots are something they, and others, know too little about.
Lindsay Harney, 14, and her schoolmate Amanda Staab, 14, brought attention to the riots three years ago when they asked the mayor and council to erect a memorial.
In response, the city formed the 1908 Race Riot Memorial Marker Committee. The committee is working to create a nine-marker walking tour of the major riot sites, a historical videotape on the incident, a traveling display for schools and civic groups, and a large memorial to the victims.
Mayor Ossie Langfelder acknowledged that he was a little uncomfortable with the students’ proposal to resurrect memories of the riots. But he eventually decided it was something Springfield needed to acknowledge.
“I think the girls drew attention to a subject matter that no one wants to discuss,” said Langfelder, who migrated to Springfield in 1940 from Austria because of Jewish persecution. “Whether good or bad I think there are things that should be remembered. It’s part of our history.”
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