Springfield Race Riot National Monument
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As Biden transitions out of the presidency, expect a good part of his later legacy to be signing executive orders creating national monuments, which is something that Clinton and Obama also did late in their presidencies. I follow this stuff pretty closely and will be reporting on them here, one at a time. Some of these have been in the process for a long time and others are moving pretty quickly. One of the former has been to commemorate the 1908 Springfield, Illinois race riot. This is one of many terrible race riots in our history and there’s nothing really that unusual about it except that local leaders have done the hard work to see it as part of the National Park Service. These are well worth official commemoration and I strongly suspect Biden will also create one at some point for the more infamous Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Today, Biden is finalizing the one for the Springfield riot.
President Joe Biden is set to sign a proclamation Friday to designate a national monument at the Springfield, Illinois, site of the 1908 race riot, which later fueled the formation of the NAACP.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during a briefing with reporters on Wednesday that the ceremony will be held Friday in the Oval Office and will feature civil rights leaders and community leaders from Springfield, President Abraham Lincoln’s hometown.
The ceremony comes just 5 1/2 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. Massey’s family members and supporters gathered Wednesday for a news conference in a continuing quest to see that justice is done in prosecuting the deputy, Sean Grayson, who is charged with first-degree murder in her death.
“People are starting to take notice because it is an untold story,” Teresa Haley, former president of the Springfield NAACP, said of the riot. “It’s a deep, dark, dirty secret that Springfield is scared of.”.
“It’s tragic. It’s unfortunate that it comes on the heels of Sonya Massey, but let’s say her name — Sonya Massey — and if it takes the president, the vice president and everyone else to recognize that and make this happen, it’s about time,” continued Haley, who founded of Visions 1908, a civil rights, social and economic justice and educational advocacy group.
The other thing for me about this is personal, which is that the only time I’ve ever been to that Springfield, I was in a pizza place downtown to grab a quick slice for dinner and it is one of the only times in my entire life that the workers were openly ranting about the “fucking n…………..” I was shocked. And of course this was in the North, as so many of the race riots were. Racism is just as much a problem in Abraham Lincoln country as in Jefferson Davis country. Reminding people of that is really important.