Illinois Mobs Kill and Burn<\/p>\n
Foiled in Attempt to Lynch Two Negroes, Angry Whites Start Destructive Raid<\/p>\n
Troops Bring Gatling Gun<\/p>\n
Mob Sets Fire to Negro District and Refuses to Allow Fire Department to Work<\/p>\n
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. Aug. 15 \u2014 Race riots are raging here as the result of an attempt to lynch two negro prisoners in the county jail. [ New York Times ]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Who could have imagined it? A \u2018race riot\u2019 in Lincoln\u2019s home town?<\/p>\n
This was no Watts or Detroit. No, this was a white man\u2019s riot. At one point, according to the New York Times\u2019 account, \u201cthe sky over the east end of Springfield was aglow.\u201d<\/p>\n
I know that \u2018east end\u2019 of Springfield \u2014 the \u2018end\u2019 Springfield residents now call the East Side \u2014 because I was born and raised in Springfield. For as long as I can remember, the East Side was \u2018the black side\u2019 of Springfield, the \u2018other side of the tracks\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
How did this all begin?<\/p>\n
On the hot summer evening of August 13, 1908, a white woman, Mabel Hallam, who lived on Springfield\u2019s north side, claimed she\u2019d been raped by a black man. Subsequently an African-American construction worker, George Richardson, was identified by Hallam, whom she told \u201cI believe that you are the man and that you will have to prove that you are not.\u201d [ Something So Horrible<\/a>, by Carole Merritt, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation, 2008 ]<\/p>\n
Richardson said, \u201cBefore 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
According to the Lincoln Presidential Library account, \u201cRichardson was a handsome, dark-skinned man, the well-spoken grandson one of Springfield\u2019s most prominent Blacks, William Florville, who had been Abraham Lincoln\u2019s barber.\u201d<\/p>\n
Richardson was taken to the county jail, where another black prisoner, arrested a month earlier in a different case, resided.<\/p>\n
The next morning the city opened its newspaper, The Illinois State Journal, to find this screaming headline: \u201cDRAGGED FROM HER BED AND OUTRAGED BY NEGRO.\u201d<\/p>\n
Aflame with the alleged \u2018violation of a white woman by a black man\u2019 \u2014 the ruse concocted to lynch untold numbers of black men over the history of this nation \u2014 an angry mob formed at the jail, demanding the sheriff to release his two black prisoners, so the mob could lynch them both.<\/p>\n
Instead the sheriff spirited the two out of town for their protection, and the riot began in full force.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cand his body was paraded from his porch to a place several blocks away where it was hanged from a tree outside a saloon. Burton\u2019s corpse became the symbol of the mob\u2019s hatred of blacks and was riddled by bullets.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s life.<\/p>\n
And how did State Journal, Springfield\u2019s 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: \u201cFrenzied Mob Sweeps City, Wreaking Bloody Vengeance For Negro\u2019s Heinous Crime.\u201d<\/p>\n
A \u2018crime\u2019 that had never occurred.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwo weeks after the riot, Mabel Hallam would confess to the grand jury that her story of rape by a Black man was a lie. \u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n