Springfield’s secret

Our memory of the unpleasant chapters in our nation’s history is usually shorter than we imagine, especially where race is concerned. Few Americans could even tell you “who” Jim Crow was. Only mostly older Americans remember the racial history of the Deep South and of the big cities -- Detroit, Newark, Watts.

Still fewer would include in the roster of riot-torn cities the hometown of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. But 100 years ago this summer, white mobs rampaged through the streets of this city for weeks, setting fire to black businesses, beating up blacks wherever they found them and demanding that two black inmates -- both accused of crimes against whites -- be handed over to them by the county sheriff. Not until 5,000 federal troops were deployed was calm restored. Afterward, the Chamber of Commerce and others tried their best to paint the episode over, saying the mobs were local lowlifes who did not reflect the city or its people. “The inception of the destruction of lives and property in Springfield came from the lawless, indolent and vagrant portion of the community,” Maj. Gen. E.C. Young said on declaring an end to military occupation of the city.

FOR THE RECORD:
History: A headline in the July 6 Opinion section describing racial riots in Springfield, Ill., said that the city was Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace. He was born in Kentucky. —

The archives tell a different story, one in which respectable citizens and even local newspapers played their parts. The Illinois State Register began its Aug. 14 story reporting the alleged rape of a white woman by a black man this way: “One of the greatest outrages that ever happened in Springfield took place ... last night. There is no doubt the case is one of premeditated assault. ... No effort should be spared to find the black viper.” A month later, the woman, Mabel Hallam, would confess to making the story up.

Tensions had begun more than two months earlier. On June 1, an intruder broke into the home of a mining engineer named Clergy Ballard and frightened Ballard’s 16-year-old daughter in her bed. Hearing her screams, Ballard gave chase, eventually catching the intruder. But the man pulled a knife and Ballard was mortally wounded. After Ballard died, his son and two other men scoured the neighborhood for suspects. The three came upon a 17-year-old black drifter named Joe James, who was sleeping on the street, and, apparently, convinced themselves he was the likely killer. They were beating James to a pulp when police arrived. According to one account, shreds of clothing matching James’ were found at Ballard’s home. For his part, James said he had been drunk and couldn’t remember that night. His guilt has never been conclusively established, but he was tried that September and hanged Oct. 23.

In the months between Clergy Ballard’s death and James’ hanging, tension among Springfield residents spilled over, fueled by rumors of alleged assaults on white women by black men and imminent lynchings. Bands of white vigilantes roamed the city at will. It was Mabel Hallam’s allegation of assault by George Richardson that brought tensions to the point of riot. Scores of black-owned homes and businesses were torched. Before it was over, half a dozen people would be killed and more than 100, white and black, would be injured. One of those who died was 84-year-old William Donnegan, a retired cobbler whose only crime was to be married to a white woman. When a mob moved on Donnegan’s house, the old man came to his door. The mob pulled Donnegan from his home, cut his throat and strung him up in a schoolyard across the street.

The city’s riots were instrumental in the founding, in New York City the next year, of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

Last month, Springfield’s local newspaper, the Illinois State Journal-Register, ran a special supplement recounting the horrors of that summer a century ago. For many, it was an awakening to something in their city’s past they had known nothing about. “I was born and raised here, and this is the first I’ve ever heard of it,” a 53-year-old man said at a Barnes & Noble bookstore.

I had heard nothing about it myself until taking a history course at a university in the South. Growing up in Springfield in the 1950s and 1960s, I had made school trips to Lincoln’s home at 8th and Jackson streets and once took an out-of-town girlfriend to visit his tomb at Oak Ridge Cemetery. But the riots of 1908 went unmentioned in the schools I attended, the city held no commemorations, and no truth-and-reconciliation commissions sought to reconcile past and present. The city was residentially segregated, and it remains so today. The west side sparkles with neatly kept lawns and new businesses; the east side is in abysmal decay.

The contrast between white and black in Springfield is a grim reflection of the words of Alexis de Tocqueville in “Democracy in America,” written 25 years before the Civil War and almost 75 years before the riots of 1908.

“These two races,” he said, “are fastened to each other without intermingling; and they are alike unable to separate entirely or to combine.” Tocqueville saw slavery as an ancient evil that had mutated in a pernicious way in the New World. He saw no hope of assimilation.

A mere six months after the riots, he would not have been surprised by the city’s centennial celebration of Lincoln’s birth. It was the grandest ever held in the city, with a sumptuous menu that, as the Journal-Register’s retrospective reports, included “five barrels of oysters, hundreds of pounds of fowl, beef tenderloin and crab meat, more than a ton of ice cream and gallons of turtle soup, all part of a four-course meal for the roughly 750 invited.”

The city’s two newspapers at the time covered it as the gala it was, with scarcely a word about the violence of the previous summer. Almost buried in its coverage was a smaller story reporting that local black leaders had held a separate celebration in a church on the east side. Theirs was separate because they were not invited to the grander celebration downtown. There was no interest on the city’s part in their assimilating.

Long before Malcolm X preached separatism, assimilation is all black Americans ever wanted -- assimilation not in the sense of losing racial identity but only of wanting a place at the nation’s table. Symbolically, it is what they and many whites today want in the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. In the city where he once served as state senator, Obama surely knew what had happened in 1908. If whites had long since forgotten, memory of it would have been passed down through oral tradition in the black community. It would have understood what William Faulkner meant. “The past,” he said, “is not dead. It is not even past.”

And yet hope of a better future, even more than change, has been the wellspring of Obama’s presidential campaign. In the face of a past so implacable, it requires an uncommon optimism to believe tomorrow is not only a new day but a better one.

Michael Skube teaches journalism at Elon University in North Carolina.