President Biden signed a proclamation that ensures the Springfield race riots of 1908 are never forgotten by declaring the site a national monument, reports CNN.
In August 1908, a white mob burned, looted and destroyed Black businesses and homes in Springfield, Illinois, and two Black men were lynched. The impetus for the riots was a white woman’s claim that a Black man had raped her; the woman later admitted she lied, according to NPR. The men’s deaths galvanized calls for the creation of an organization to fight for racial and political justice, which led to the creation of the NAACP.
Teresa Haley, the former president of the Springfield chapter of the NAACP, played an integral part in keeping the memory of the Springfield riots alive through the Visions 1908 project.
That effort was bolstered in 2014 by the discovery of the foundations of multiple homes that were razed during the riots. Haley believes President Biden’s recognition of the site as a national landmark will help the community heal.
“The people in Springfield can truly begin to heal because it’s been a deep, dark secret that no one wanted to talk about except for those of us in the Black community who were directly impacted by the 1908 riots,” Haley said to CNN. She also revealed plans to build a physical monument on land that the city donated, which will further preserve the riots’ legacy.
“It’s going to allow people to say, ‘Oh my God, this happened right here in Springfield on the ground in which I’m standing.’” Haley continued, “This is Springfield’s history, it’s Illinois history and it’s American history.”
It’s a history that’s being erased by the conservative movement to limit the teaching of the country’s racist underpinnings, President Biden emphasized.
The president hoped the new national monument would bring these shameful events out of the shadows “so our children, our grandchildren, everybody, understands what happened – and what can still happen.”
“Over 100 years ago this week, a mob not far from Lincoln’s home unleashed a race riot in Springfield that literally shocked the conscience of the nation,” Biden said during the signing of the proclamation. “A lot of people forgot it…We can’t let these things fade.”
The 1908 riot in Springfield was one of many that terrorized Black communities at the turn of the 20th century. For example, in the summer of 1919, white mobs across the nation attacked Black veterans returning home from WWI who had gotten a taste of equal treatment in Europe. According to the National Archives, France had even bestowed upon a regiment of Black soldiers, nicknamed the “Harlem Hellfighters,” the Croix de Guerre, the nation’s highest honor for their bravery in battle. The riots were a way to re-establish white supremacy and were so vicious in scope that NAACP field secretary James Weldon Johnson called the season “Red Summer,” Time reported.
Just two years later, in 1921, during The Tulsa Race Massacre, white mobs burned the prosperous community known as Black Wall Street to the ground. A bipartisan Senate bill was recently introduced that, if passed, would also designate that site as a national monument, as Essence previously reported.
The location of the Springfield, Illinois riot, just blocks away from the home of Abraham Lincoln, dubbed “The Great Emancipator,” laid bare the lie that the North was a bastion of racial equality for Black people.
The declaration of the site of the Springfield riots as a national monument comes just six weeks after Sonya Massey, a Black woman, was shot to death in her Springfield home by a white deputy after calling the police for help
