Author: Nick Penning

An assassinated NAACP leader, pummeled bodies, lynchings, freedom riders’ burning bus, hooded klansmen, children battered by fire hoses, and the sound of the refrain, “We shall overcome.” All these preceded President Johnson proposing to Congress the bill which became law upon his signature, the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

With its 6-3 decision on Louisiana v. Callais on April 29th, 2026, the US Supreme Court effectively nullified the voting rights of African Americans, for whom discrimination exists in nearly every facet of their lives; so much so that one African American compared navigating a day to, “walking on eggshells.”

Nevertheless, the Court majority said, “vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, which have made great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination.” Ending racial discrimination? Seriously? Tell that to any Black person in a car, who’s been “driving while Black.”

Prior to the Voting Rights Act, many states – primarily, but not exclusively, in the South – had denied access to or imposed impossible restrictions on voting attempts by their African American citizens. The Act required those states to seek pre-approval from the Justice Department for any changes in the manner by which they carried out their elections. However, in 2013 the Supreme Court Court in Shelby v Holder ruled that those states would no longer be under federal scrutiny for any changes made to their election laws.

Within days of the Court’s 2013 Shelby decision, state after state, which had been covered by the Act, enacted “voter i.d.” laws, requiring each voter to present an identification card in order to receive a ballot, even though many voters may not have such i.d. cards or live in areas with access to acquiring such identification. The Voting Rights Act was beginning to unravel.

Before the Shelby decision, a member of the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia, had posited that Congress, by renewing the Voting Rights Act, was complicit in assuring the “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” Entitlement? The right to vote is sacred to each citizen in our democracy, whether white, black, brown, yellow or red. And, yes, we are each entitled to exercise that vote.

Justice Elana Kagan in her 2026 dissent, called the Louisiana decision “this latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.” Thus, sixty one years after its enactment, the Voting Rights Act, so vigorously and bravely fought for during the Civil Rights Era, has effectively been erased.

Just days after the Court’s April 29 decision removed the final leg of the Voting Rights Act, further attempts to deny that right again quickly surfaced, as the formerly sanctioned states began to re-adjust the geographic population boundaries set to apportion their citizens to be represented in Congress.

Because African Americans tend to be clustered in specific geographic areas – due to housing discrimination practices, such as redlining, state legislatures had been legally and morally bound to maintain this population in specific, majority minority congressional districts, where African American voters could vote with their peers on who will represent them in Congress. Slicing up this population, and pasting Black voters into areas of congressional districts where they’ve not been allowed to live, dilutes Black votes and weakens their political power. Their voices become silenced.

In Tennessee, where the legislature in May divided Memphis and its Black community into three majority white congressional districts, the sole Democratic congressman, who was supported by the Black community, will likely lose his seat. “I was here when we first fought with the Department of Justice to get this district drawn so that the African American minority could win it,” Memphis resident Fred Dorse, 81, said. “It hurts my heart, at almost 81 years old, to see us lose this again.”

“I was here in the ‘60s when (the Voting Rights Act) was passed,” Memphian Bennita Wade added. “It’s just disturbing. To me, I don’t understand why — I do understand why, though. Why is it that we have to be punished here with no district to vote (in), and we never get a representative of our choice anymore? That’s something that we have that was fought for so hard and so long. So it’s disturbing.”

At the national level, the NAACP is pushing back hard. It has targeted the flagship public university athletic programs in eight states – Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Georgia – states that have weakened or erased Black voting rights in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana decision. The preeminent civil rights organization called for Black athletes, families, fans, alumni, and consumers to withhold their support – both athletic and financial – from the leading public universities in the designated states.

“What these states have done is not a policy disagreement. It is a sprint to erase Black political power,” said Derrick Johnson, President & CEO, NAACP. “These actions happened in days, in some cases in hours, of a Supreme Court ruling that gives extremist lawmakers a playbook to erode Black representation. The NAACP will not watch the same institutions that depend on Black athletic prowess to fill their stadiums and their bank accounts remain silent while their states strip Black communities of their voice.”

Ashley Shelton, the President and CEO of The Power Coalition for Equality and Justice, a Louisiana-based community organizing group, said, “The answer has to be that voters have to turn out en masse in the fall and elect a Congress that is going to restore so many of the rights that have been lost.” And Hillary Harris Klein, senior counsel at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, added, “It (the Court’s decision) is really a call to action to Congress to step in and ensure that our elections are fair,” to “enact new statutes, via the law, in order to protect voters.”

States led by Republicans seem determined to skew representation in Washington, starting with the fall congressional elections. Will a massive turnout occur? Will the president and his party twist the levers of power to assure the outcome they prefer? Only we, as voters, can give our answer in November.

The tension in the air in this country, already crackling with fear and presidentially-provoked rage, skyrocketed with his unilateral decision to attack Iran and have us enter into an unprovoked war against another nation, duly protected (as are we) under the charter of the United Nations. Who knows where this act of aggression could lead? We live in a world primed like a tinderbox awaiting a single spark, and Trump’s unilateral action could provide it.

Donald Trump telegraphed what he was about, when he talked with journalist Bob Woodward, who had asked him in October 2016 for his thoughts on power. Trump’s response, said Woodward:

“Real power is … I even don’t like to use the word … but real power is fear.”

Then Trump and his team looked for the fear in the electorate that Cambridge Analytica found in our Facebook data, which they mined on his behalf. Why? Trump’s advisors wanted to discover a way to persuade people – subtly, using knowledge of voters’ fears – to make an emotion-linked, favorable selection for their candidate. This, they proposed, would be an election centered on fears, not policy.

Now, six months after his Inauguration, fear is in the air, as President Trump has now unleashed U.S. military might against a sovereign nation – without provocation – further hinting that he may approve the assassination of that nation’s leader. Meanwhile, he has sent that same U.S. military force onto city streets in the United States! Immigration enforcement officers troll car washes, immigration courthouses, and raid businesses in search of the undocumented, using tactics akin to kidnapping.

In addition, with the unspoken blessing of the president via his angry rhetoric, a United States Senator was slammed to the ground by federal police for daring to raise his voice at a cabinet secretary, and a congresswoman was pushed away, as she tried to visit an immigrant holding facility. Meanwhile, local and state officeholders, attempting to assist powerless migrants, have been violently accosted by unidentified federal agents.

Closer to home, a Jewish colleague said he’d been planning a trip with his wife to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, but in light of the recent killings of Jews in Colorado and D.C,. and the burning of the mansion of Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor, my colleague decided the rising antisemitic atmosphere suggested a cautious holdback would be more prudent.

With his Inauguration Day pardons of all January 6 defendants convicted of crimes – even the most violent of crimes – for their participation in the attack on the United States Capitol, President Donald Trump sent a positive and unvarnished message to all planning political violence, against anyone with whom they disagree – Fight!

Judges, who had presided in trials and sentenced those now-pardoned January 6 defendants, expressed dismay at these acts of pardon by the man, who only hours before, on January 20, 2025, swore “to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” so help him God.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who had sentenced dozens of rioters wrote, “No pardon can change the tragic truth of what happened on January 6, 2021. It cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake.” And U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell wrote, in her order to dispense the pardon of two rioters, who had previously pled guilty, “No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election.”

In carrying out his role in the pardons, Judge Royce C. Lamberth, wrote,

“I have been shocked to watch some public figures try to rewrite history, claiming rioters behaved ‘in an orderly fashion’ like ordinary tourists, or martyrizing convicted January 6 defendants as ‘political prisoners’ or even, incredibly, ‘hostages,’”

adding,

“That is all preposterous. But the Court fears that such destructive, misguided rhetoric could presage further danger to our country.”

What has befallen us, America?

We were given a premonition of our government’s current, chaotic condition in October 2024, by New Yorker journalist Susan Glasser, who said on PBS Washington Week with The Atlantic, “I lived through Vladimir Putin’s rollback of Russian democracy 20 years ago … and the time to defend democratic institutions is before they’re taken away.” Her final warning that evening, “I don’t think that people have really processed how quickly this can happen and how dramatically the country’s set up can be changed in a very short amount of time, especially if Republicans win all three branches of government.”

Clearly, it’s too late now. But that doesn’t mean we have to accept the extra-legal pronouncements and corrosive, norm-bending actions Mr. Trump has attempted to put into our democracy. Nor must we accept the hateful rhetoric emanating from his mouth and his smartphone fingers.

No. Now is the time for actions – by you and by me – that will resist and refuse to quietly acquiesce to this attack on all that had made us the envy of the world: freedom. The freedom of which Emma Lazarus wrote, inscribed on the Statue of Liberty,

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

That’s what drove our ancestors, yours and mine (unless you are an Indigenous American Indian or an African American) to this country – Freedom.

Ask an immigrant what they are most thankful for, after arrival here, and the answer you’ll hear most often, is one word, “Freedom.” I’ve heard it from cab drivers, and other immigrant service workers. They had lived in countries where anyone – even a family member – could report something you said or did, that was negative toward the government, leaving you to wonder, in fear, whether you’d hear a late night, punching knock on your door.

Today we’ve watched something we could never have imagined here: a young woman walking along a street, is surrounded by masked people in dark clothes and captured, then whisked away in an unmarked car. There are reports of local k-12 schools, where ICE agents are seen near the grounds to pick up, after school, suspected illegal immigrant students or their parents. And immigrants have been taken in public, some with violence.

Mothers and fathers live in fear, because, under this administration, freedom from detention, without due process of the law, without a judge to review your case, is no longer guaranteed. It’s the kind of fear one might have expected in Pinochet’s Chile or Putin’s Russia. But here? Imagine, with these actions, the United States of America is becoming just another autocracy, where the dictates of a strongman are what matter most; not the words enshrined in a two-century old founding document.

So, how do we respond to this brutality, this air of fear and unease? Accept it? Or work to emasculate it?

David Brooks, a well-known conservative intellectual and columnist, wrote in his April 17, 2025, New York Times column:

“What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.”

Brooks continued, somewhat surprisingly,

“It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.”

Brooks concluded,

“I’m really not a movement guy. I don’t naturally march in demonstrations or attend rallies that I’m not covering as a journalist. But this is what America needs right now. Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

Watch George Clooney in Good Night and Good Luck, and ask if someone can stand up to Trump as Edward R. Morrow did to Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Republican fear-peddling, anti-communist demagogue and Trump counterpart of the 1950s?

Is there a non-partisan, moral figure – someone akin to Martin Luther King – willing to step forward, publicly, and lead this nonviolent, citizen uprising? Who will it be? Cory Booker? Brooks? Clooney? Liz Cheney? Judge Luttig? You? And would you follow her or him?

What say you, America? With the White House placing soldiers onto California streets, the time seems to be upon us, now.

What is going on in Washington? The man in our White House, the President of the United States, appears to be taking over the entire government, acting by fiat, as he signs and signs and signs “executive orders” – from personnel cuts to international tariff increases – with great flare, and through which he is claiming control of nearly every sector of our federal system.

Civil service workers, the literal backbone of operations for our country, are being fired by the tens of thousands, often at the behest of a very wealthy man, Elon Musk, who – with no experience in how they operate – has said of our federal departments, “I think we do need to delete entire agencies.”

His first target, the Agency for International Development (AID), was a small, but extremely effective agency in spreading the goodwill of the United States across the globe. Over the years we’ve seen photos of huge food bags, emblazoned, “USAID”, being unloaded from aircraft and ships in small and large ports alike. Since its shuttering, our country’s glow of good is gone, as food stocks and medical supplies from AID have been, in many cases, stranded on docks and airfields, left to spoil.

Twenty semi-trailer food trucks from another agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, have been turned back, while on their way to Ohio distribution centers for transit to local food banks serving children, families and senior citizens.

In the midst of the president’s purge of the workforce, you may envision federal men and women in lush offices with cushy jobs, but, actually, they work for relatively lower wages than their counterparts in private business and take on their tasks in drab offices painted institutional green.

You also may think of these folks as just wasting your tax dollars, but consider this:

The well-oiled machine that keeps (kept?) our highways maintained, our air and water clean, our food safe to eat, our medicine safe to consume, our airways safe for planes to navigate, our weather watched and predicted, our parks pristine and accessible, our factories and workplaces free of dangerous conditions or equipment, our veterans and Social Security recipients paid, and our mail hand-delivered directly to us – six days a week – has been attacked and shrunken every day since Donald Trump was sworn in on January 20.

Consider also that your federal government even springs into action in times of physical threats and assaults by rescuing and supporting us, whenever or wherever we’re attacked by a force of nature in a hurricane or tornado or earthquake or fire or landslide or flood or severe snowstorm; or by a man made disaster in a chemical leak or refinery fire or mine explosion or dam burst or train derailment or exposure to buried hazardous material.

That’s what federal workers do, or perhaps used to do, if they’re one of the thousands the president and Musk have summarily fired in the past few months. They’re a nice kicking ball, but these real people provide/(provided?) real services to you and me.

In the short span of three months our new-former president has fired tens of thousands of civil servants at the direction of Musk, who said of his handiwork, “I think we do need to delete entire agencies as opposed to leave a lot of them behind,” saying the departments are, “… kind of like a weed, if we don’t remove the roots of the weed, then it’s easy for the weed to grow back.”

A weed: your mail carrier? The TSA worker protecting you at the airport? The local FBI agents, helping police keep crime in check? The National Weather Service professional meteorologist at the airport, watching the skies to help the weather folks on local radio, tv and the newspaper let us know, when bad weather is coming? The U.S. Department of Agriculture farm extension agent who’s there to help educate local farmers and schoolchildren, alike?

And outside our borders, where we have been respected as the leading world power, will WE stand idly by, while he trashes alliances with European and Asian nations that for decades have been based on mutual trust and cooperation under the umbrella of U.S. military power and development assistance in bilateral and multilateral pacts that have kept the world safe from worldwide war throughout the past 80 years?

Today, so many Republican leaders are fearful that if they disagree with or criticize any of the president’s outrageous actions, Trump will find someone to run against them and they’ll lose their seat in Congress. These elected House and Senate Republicans tell reporters (“off the record”) that they hate the actions Trump has taken – destroying government agencies, siding with Russia (Russia!?) – but they’re afraid to speak out.

Forget about You, Congressman-Senator, what about US? What about the country you swore to preserve and protect under our Constitution? Is it all really about you? If you care about us at all, then stop this man from ruling by fiat, by “executive action,” ignoring the laws you passed and even mocking the judges and orders of the court – the third, co-equal branch of our government under the Constitution – which has the final say in governmental disputes.

Will you allow this man, acting as a dictator, actually become one?

Are you, and your job, all about you alone, and saving your seat in Congress?

We, the people, have nowhere else to turn.

Will you stand up for us, for America?

Or for You?

“I’m confident it’ll be free and fair,” the President said. “I don’t know whether it’ll be peaceful.”

If anything could shake you up 26 days before a close national election, that sure shook me up. If the President senses it, we know not only that the political atmosphere is real, but we’d best make sure we’ve pulled out all the stops and done everything we could in our own little corner of the world. We want to make sure people know the truth, so they can act confidently and safely, come Election Day, November 5th.

First of all, voting in the United States is about as fair as a nation of 336,673,595 persons should expect. The people who run your local elections are local citizens, they’re your neighbors, who work for your city, county or town, and they don’t cheat, no matter what some outside state or national candidate – who doesn’t know your neighbors or your local government – says to weaken your trust. And to those people (mostly Republicans, unfortunately) in elected office who say, “It’s rigged!” — if that’s true, how did they manage to win? They’re on the same ballot as the president, the governor, the state legislators, congressmen and senators. How can you claim “it’s rigged!” If you got elected?

Remember when Trump told a militia group to “stand by”? It was in his debate with our now-President Joe Biden, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” said the man then occupying the White House. Imagine Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, or Ronald Reagan calling out a militia, ever, let alone on national television, before any votes had been cast ahead of their elections.

Because, less than 14 weeks after his exhortation, on January 6th, the Proud Boys did just as the then-president had asked, and led the charge of a violent throng of tens of thousands for its attack of the Capitol of the United States of America. They helped lead an insurrection, an actual attempted coup meant to stop the official, constitutionally prescribed, counting of electoral votes, as a means to keep Donald Trump in office, despite his defeat in November. “We fight like hell,” he roared January 6th to his crowd on the Ellipse. “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

The Capitol, guarded by its valiant police force, soon saw an overwhelming attack for only the second time in our Nation’s history; the first was by a foreign power, the British. This time, the extremely violent assault was perpetrated by a citizen army of our own people, claiming to represent all of us with their murderous frenzy. Smashing statues and defecating in hallways, destroying equipment, the roaring frenzy of our fellow citizens prowled in search of elected members of Congress to kill or maim. It was havoc in the U.S. Capitol on that terrible day. Their goal was to keep in office a man who did not have the approval of the voters, because here, the voting majority bestow our grant of leadership in a nationwide election.

Today, in October 2024, he’s spouting outlandish, horrible lies about immigrants, “they’re poisoning the blood of our country.”

In the 1930s Adolph Hitler, as he sought total power, similarly attacked Jews for “poisoning” German blood, and even got his legislature to pass The Law for the Protection of the Blood to restrict the marriage rights of Jews, who numbered only 505,000, or less than 0.75 percent, in a nation of 67 million. That’s how authoritarians gain power: You pick an enemy, preferably small and relatively defenseless, and make them your scapegoat, as a way to consolidate power. That’s how they act to get the job done.

Trump’s wild and hysterical assertion, that immigrants in an Ohio city are eating pets, is a knowingly despicable lie, which he continues to spread in his speeches, even as reporters inform him that such claims are untrue, and have been debunked by the Ohio woman who began the lie. She said it started when she wrote an online post about a rumor – which she had heard from a neighbor, who’d heard it from a friend – and the originator now regrets ever writing that false pet-eating claim.

Trump consistently uses these over-the-top lies, including the “stolen” 2020 election, in speeches that rage against immigrants. Such “Big Lies” are said to be big, because they’re told by an important person who we don’t expect would lie, in a claim that’s beyond what we could imagine. But this famous person keeps repeating the lie, over and over; such that, over time, many will come to believe that the lie must be true.

He has said the main focus of his campaign is to compel “retribution” for his self-claimed persecution. The campaign uses violent rhetoric against immigrants and Black people and Jews. Words matter, and when a person or a race is blamed by Trump for committing any of his lies, that individual or person of color or member of an ethnic group begins to receive frightening death threats. The future will be dark and dangerous, if this man is elected again.

A man whose campaign speeches are full of hatred and threats of violence should not regain our presidency. He incited the worst attack on our center of government in U.S. history. It was a hand-to-hand mass war on those defending our nation’s citadel – the U.S. Capitol – and the Congress members inside. It was a violent scene, which Trump found pleasure watching take place on television, instead of doing something to stop it. He’s a man fuming, boiling with hatred; when what we need is calm and kindness to bind our nation’s wounds.

Please emphasize the truth, be calm when confronting lies, so we’ll have peace among us these final weeks. And make sure you vote, and that those in your family and all around you vote.

Springfield, Illinois, the capital city and hometown of Abraham Lincoln, is now also notorious for the unconscionable July slaying of young Sonya Massey – an innocent, Black mother – by a white law enforcement officer, who shot her in the face, as he had threatened to do.

Ironically, Springfield is also the city President Biden on August 16 proclaimed the establishment of the Springfield 1908 Race Riot National Monument. It will mark the 1908 atrocity in Springfield that had shocked the nation and during which white mobs of local citizens lynched two Black men and torched dozens of Black homes and businesses.

Six months later on Lincoln’s 100th birthday, as a direct result of this white race attack in Lincoln’s hometown, the NAACP was established in New York City.

The “riot” (actually a massacre of Black people) occurred 116 years ago this month in the city Abraham Lincoln called home, and from which he traveled to take the oath of office in 1861.

On August 17, 1908, however, Springfield was engulfed in the smoldering aftermath of two days and nights of white racist rage, lynching a 65 year old Black barber and a disabled 80 year-old Black entrepreneur, while other African Americans were pulled from street cars and shops and beaten. Unchecked mob arson burned dozens of Black-owned homes and businesses; while hundreds fled the city In terror, but faced rejection and violence in towns where they sought refuge.

News of Springfield’s racial destruction spread across the country, as seen in these newspaper headlines:

ILLINOIS MOBS KILL AND BURN
– Race riots are raging here as the result of an attempt to lynch two negro prisoners in the county jail. … “The sky over the east end of Springfield was aglow … “

— The New York Times reported, page 1, August 15, 1908

SECOND LYNCHING IN SPRINGFIELD’S RIOTS
…Brigade of Militia Fails to Check Mob – “Lincoln’s city scene of the Bitterest Race War seen in Years”

— The Washington Post, page 1, August 16,1908

ANOTHER NEGRO LYNCHED BY MOB IN SPRINGFIELD

— St Louis Post-Dispatch, Page 1, August 16, 1908

RACE HATRED FLAMES IN ILLINOIS CAPITAL; MOB LAW ENTHRONED

— The Pensecola Journal, Page 1, Aug 16, 1908

Bayonets of 3,000 Troops Hold Springfield Mobs at Bay

— The San Francisco Call, Page 1, August 17, 1908

SMOLDERING VOLCANO OF RACE HATRED ON VERGE OF ANOTHER ERUPTION
Springfield Apprehends More Trouble

— The Pittsburg Post, page 1, August 17, 1908

Wild Work of Mobs in Race Rioting Which for Three Days Has Gripped Springfield, Illinois

— The Philadelphia Inquirer, page 1, August 18, 1908

How did the conflagration begin?

On the hot summer evening of August 14, 1908, a white woman, Mabel Hallam, who lived on Springfield’s north side, claimed she’d been raped by a Black man. Subsequently, an African-American construction worker, George Richardson, was identified by Hallam, who told him he would have to prove he wasn’t her attacker. Richardson, in response, pleaded to those who held him, “Before God, I am innocent of this crime.”

But then a local newspaper – the Illinois State Journal – inflamed the populace the following day with its one-quarter page, banner headline,

Frenzied Mob Sweeps City, Wreaking Bloody Vengeance for Negro’s Heinous Crime

— Illinois State Journal, page 1, August 15, 1908

thus striking the match to light the riot fuse. However, some time after the two day mayhem, Hallam admitted her charge was a lie, a lie so often used against Black men, that had set in motion white terror on Springfield’s Black population.

But what of the lives and livelihoods wiped out in Springfield by the killings and arson? An archeological investigation, on land being readied for a construction project, revealed the scarred remains of several of the houses burned and destroyed by the mob. As archeologists sifted through the embers, they were able to reconstruct and expose some of what each home held and what those objects revealed about the lives of the families who lived there.

What of their household wealth, never accrued nor recovered by those and dozens of other stricken families, lost to successive generations? And today, in 2024, what is the real impact of racism on the life of an African American?

Listen to Springfield physician, Dr. Wesley Robinson-McNeese, standing atop the ashen remains of those homes destroyed in 1908, and consider those questions, as he recites his powerful poem, Face to Face. A dear friend, who is African American, called the doctor’s recitation “an incredible expression of what those of us who grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s (and beyond) have felt and experienced all of our lives!”

Springfield is working to improve its image, and the 1908 Springfield Race Riot National Monument site is evidence of that progress. Another example of Springfield’s change is a bold, colorful 1908 mural – painted by Barbara Mason – on the exterior brick wall of a building that stands not far from the path of the 1908 mob.

While you’re thinking of your choices for the November election, please take time to find and read the January/February 2024 issue of The Atlantic. I don’t normally read magazines, but this one is too important to ignore.

Please, go to a book store or your local library and read this issue of The Atlantic magazine, whose title – “If Trump Wins” – is the subject of the entire issue, which offers answers to that question. After we vote and the votes are tallied, if Donald Trump should win, what will become of us, our neighbors, our nation, our freedom, our world and our democracy; if Donald Trump regains the presidency??

This magazine offers extensive answers to questions every voter should consider; because Trump has shown, with disturbing frankness, what path he intends to take.

You’ve seen the pictures – the Taliban, the extremist group that has taken over Afghanistan, maintains its grip on that country by posting young men on almost every street corner, riding in trucks, holding/brandishing assault rifles, wearing atypical clothes that stand out, letting the public know who’s in power, and will stay in power, by the power of openly brandished guns and fear.

How can we think our future under a government backed by the hate-filled, gun-carrying white supremacists could be any different?

What would an America with a Second Amendment “rights”, extremist-controlled government look like? Remember how the militia types – Proud Boys, the ones an ex-president told to “Stand Back and Stand By,” and others of like mind – appeared at the Capitol January 6th in Washington? Similar shows of gun-force were on display at state capitols:

Richmond,
Lansing,
Helena,
Indianapolis,
Harrisburg,
Austin,
Olympia (Washington),
Salem (Oregon),
Salt Lake City

And recall how Al Quaeda stormed our skies, tore into the Pentagon and slaughtered our citizens with anti U.S. furor on 9/11.

Now, think of the rage of the mob who attempted to conquer our Capitol and stop our republic from functioning. Their actions were as vile and filled with every bit of rage against our country, their own country, as the foreign suicide terrorists had for us on 9/11.

Do we really believe the behavior of U.S. rifle-bearers – should they achieve power – would be any different than that of the Afghan Taliban? Who would be on our street corners? Who would be standing outside our state capitol buildings? Our local government buildings? Outside our U.S. Capitol in Washington? And would we still live free, enjoying our lives? Or would we live in fear? Fear of our fellow citizens, openly brandishing arms?

This is the future that stands before us.

You have the mightiest power on our earth, your Vote. Make sure you exercise it, every election day. Because democracies are not guaranteed, and can disappear, when good people decide to walk away from their right to cast their ballot.

Please, vote.

#

— For a look at the militia movement and the entities most prone to violence, see this report by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), “a disaggregated data collection, analysis, and crisis mapping project, [which] collects information on the dates, actors, locations, fatalities, and types of all reported political violence and protest events around the world.”)

Now see how a previous militia behaved: The District of Columbia militia Protecting the Capitol on May 13, 1861.

Illinois Mobs Kill and Burn

Foiled in Attempt to Lynch Two Negroes, Angry Whites Start Destructive Raid

Troops Bring Gatling Gun

Mob Sets Fire to Negro District and Refuses to Allow Fire Department to Work

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. Aug. 15 — Race riots are raging here as the result of an attempt to lynch two negro prisoners in the county jail. [ New York Times ]

Those are the headlines and opening sentence of a New York Times account published on August 15, 1908, of a race riot in the home town of Abraham Lincoln, the sainted president who practiced law in an office that overlooked the Old Statehouse. It was at that same building, 100 years later, where Lincoln’s would-be successor, a young Barack Obama, announced his campaign for the presidency. But, in 1908 that very area had been full of a seething white mob.

Who could have imagined it? A ‘race riot’ in Lincoln’s home town?

This was no Watts or Detroit. No, this was a white man’s riot. At one point, according to the New York Times’ account, “the sky over the east end of Springfield was aglow.”

I know that ‘east end’ of Springfield — the ‘end’ Springfield residents now call the East Side — because I was born and raised in Springfield. For as long as I can remember, the East Side was ‘the black side’ of Springfield, the ‘other side of the tracks’ just beyond Ninth Street. And it was in that part of town, the Times reporter wrote 101 years ago, where a white mob roared, killing blacks and destroying their homes and businesses.

How did this all begin?

On the hot summer evening of August 13, 1908, a white woman, Mabel Hallam, who lived on Springfield’s north side, claimed she’d been raped by a black man. Subsequently an African-American construction worker, George Richardson, was identified by Hallam, whom she told “I believe that you are the man and that you will have to prove that you are not.” [ Something So Horrible, by Carole Merritt, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation, 2008 ]

Richardson said, “Before God, I am innocent of this crime. I can explain her identification of me only by the theory that all coons look alike to her.”

According to the Lincoln Presidential Library account, “Richardson was a handsome, dark-skinned man, the well-spoken grandson one of Springfield’s most prominent Blacks, William Florville, who had been Abraham Lincoln’s barber.”

Richardson was taken to the county jail, where another black prisoner, arrested a month earlier in a different case, resided.

The next morning the city opened its newspaper, The Illinois State Journal, to find this screaming headline: “DRAGGED FROM HER BED AND OUTRAGED BY NEGRO.”

Aflame with the alleged ‘violation of a white woman by a black man’ — the ruse concocted to lynch untold numbers of black men over the history of this nation — an angry mob formed at the jail, demanding the sheriff to release his two black prisoners, so the mob could lynch them both.

Instead the sheriff spirited the two out of town for their protection, and the riot began in full force.

One of those killed in the furious mayhem was a black barber named Scott Burton, who faced the mob in his shop doorway. Someone shot and killed Burton “and his body was paraded from his porch to a place several blocks away where it was hanged from a tree outside a saloon. Burton’s corpse became the symbol of the mob’s hatred of blacks and was riddled by bullets.”

At the end of the second day of rioting, the mob, frustrated in its attempt to roust other black Springfieldians from under militia protection at the state arsenal, marched across the Capitol grounds, where the militia was encamped, to the home of 80 year-old William Donnegan, a successful businessman. Donnegan came out of his house – two blocks from the Capitol – to confront the crowd of a dozen men, who attacked him, cut his throat and used clothesline rope to lynch Donnegan to a small tree standing in a school yard across the street from his home. He was cut down, still alive, by members of the militia, whose act proved too late to save Donnegan’s life.

And how did State Journal, Springfield’s leading newspaper, headline its day-after, post-riot account? Well, it tells you a lot about what Springfield was in 1908, and what, eerily, still lurks there today: “Frenzied Mob Sweeps City, Wreaking Bloody Vengeance For Negro’s Heinous Crime.”

A ‘crime’ that had never occurred.

“Two weeks after the riot, Mabel Hallam would confess to the grand jury that her story of rape by a Black man was a lie. … But that Friday morning, August 14, her cry set the mob in motion and evoked death, destruction and untold hardship for which Hallam was never held accountable.”

Something positive did come of this horrific event: the NAACP was founded less than six months later in New York on the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, February 12, 1909. Last year at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, the Association commemorated its link to that terrible summer of 1908, and included a copy of William English Walling’s chilling, on-the-scene account. [ The Independent – 1908 ]

And what of Springfield today, 100 years after the founding of the NAACP, 101 years after the riot itself?

The State Journal-Register (successor to the State Journal) produced a special edition to commemorate the riot’s 100th anniversary on August 14, 2008. But below the online story in the ‘comments’ section, the ugliness of 1908 raised its head in the form of two anonymous comments:

‘tweetybird’ wrote:

“this is a total waste 0f time why keep bringing up the bad stuff? Nobody living now was involved in that. Its past. Leave it there. The article states its not forgotten. Well its not forgotten because this paper keeps shoving it down our throats. I’m tired of hearing about it. drop the subject and leave it in the past where it belongs.”

Following tweety’s comment, ‘Iremember’ wrote:

I am in my 70’s. I was born and raised in a small town outside of Springfield. When the riot was still fresh on the minds of many, I recall folks stating that one of main reasons for the riot was the black’s ‘push day.’ On one day of the week (I think it was Thursday, but am not sure), groups of blacks would literally walk down the sidewalk in mass pushing everybody — in this instance, whites — out of their way. That tactic and the supposed rape I guess set the white folks off. Whether ‘push day’ is true or not, and I am of the belief it occurred, it is part of local lore, and I am disappointed the JR didn’t do a better job of researching and reporting the complete story of the riot.”

Has the election of Barack Obama changed the thinking of these two? You have to wonder. Springfield remains a racially tense town.

Just a little more than two months ago in Springfield, a noose was hung in the work area used by a black employee of the city’s power and light utility.

The apparent target of the noose hanging, Mike Williams, an African-American, pleaded to the Springfield City Council,

“So, I beg of you, as this ground starts to shake and the rumble is coming, to please don’t just ignore this, don’t sweep this under the rug,” Williams said. “Adopt a no-tolerance policy immediately that says if you are caught or if you admit jokingly, unintentionally or whatever it may be that you committed such acts, that you will be terminated immediately.”

After Williams spoke, Archie Lawrence, president of the Springfield Branch of the NAACP, said that hanging a noose is “the ultimate insult.”

“The only thing that’s worse than hanging a noose is hanging itself,” he said, adding that he finds it impossible “to believe that anyone would hang a noose did not have the intent to send a message that black people are not welcome in this town, that black people did not deserve to perform their job without any type of threat or intimidation.”

Following a ‘review’ of the incident by the Mayor of Springfield and the Sangamon County State’s Attorney, the names of those who placed the noose were made public: one was the brother of the mayor’s former wife, and the other a nephew of the city human resource director, himself a well-known former high school coach.

The punishment – meted two months later – for the heinous act committed by these well-connected city employees in Abraham Lincoln’s home town: 60-day unpaid suspensions in scheduled five-day increments. This unusual method of discipline was taken, according to the city utility’s spokesperson, “in order to not adversely affect the operations of those departments and avoid overtime.”

At an October 7 secret meeting, the city’s civil service commission declined to intervene, yet one member questioned the suspensions as a “a new level of discipline … that basically keeps people from being terminated.”

And so it goes in the Land of Lincoln.

[ Also at Springfield 1908 ]