Biden designates Springfield race riot site a national monument
(Gray News) - President Joe Biden designated a new national monument on Friday to mark the site of a race riot in Springfield, Illinois.
He was joined in the Oval Office by civil rights leaders, community members and elected officials as he signed a proclamation to designate the Springfield 1908 Race Riot National Monument.
“We can’t let these things fade,” Biden said before signing the order, the Associated Press reported. The monument designation was announced less than six weeks after the shooting death of Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old Black woman, by a white sheriff’s deputy in her Springfield home after she called 911 for help.
The site is the second national monument Biden has preserved under the Antiquities Act and includes 1.57 acres of federal land in Springfield and will be managed by the National Park Service.
The new national monument is part of the National Park Service’s African American Civil Rights Network. It also joins an extensive network of park sites dedicated to commemorating historic places integral to civil rights and the fight for equality.
The race riot, which happened from Aug. 14 to Aug. 16, 1908, happened “just blocks away from President Abraham Lincoln’s home” and was representative of the racism, intimidation, and violence that Black Americans experienced across the country,” a White House fact sheet said.
The race riot drew national outrage and spurred the creation of civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, the White House said.
The violence happened because a white mob wanted the release of two men from the county jail to be lynched. The men were being held based on the claims of two white accusers, one of whom later recanted.
Authorities moved the two men to a jail 60 miles away in Bloomington in hopes of defusing the situation, but the move ended up touching off violence that lasted two days.
Despite the efforts of officials to protect the neighborhoods, the two men were lynched, and dozens of Black and Jewish businesses and homes were looted and destroyed.
According to accounts from that period, at least eight white people were killed in the violence and more than 100 were injured, mostly by members of the state’s militia or each other, the Associated Press reported. It’s not known how many Black people were injured and killed.
White rioters were charged, but later acquitted for their roles in the lynching and destruction.
The NAACP was created months later, in 1909, on the centennial of Lincoln’s birthday, Feb. 12.
“Good things can come out of bad things as long as you don’t forget what happened,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., who was on hand for the signing.
Over the course of his presidency, Biden has signed into law legislation codifying lynching as a federal hate crime, established Juneteenth as a federal holiday, and signed a proclamation establishing the national monument across three sites in Illinois and Mississippi honoring Emmett Till, and his mother Mamie Till-Mobley, the Associated Press reported.
Copyright 2024 Gray Local Media, Inc. All rights reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
