Biden grants National Monument status to site of 1908 Springfield race riot

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — President Joe Biden on Friday signed a proclamation designating the site of the 1908 Springfield Race Riot, one of the most egregious outbreaks of race-related violence in American history, as a national monument.

The riot has long been a calamitous symbol of the racism and intimidation that many Black Americans have endured in America. In recent years, both of Illinois’ Democratic U.S. senators, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, pushed for the legislation to prioritize the site of the riot as a national monument, and advocates have urged Biden to use his authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906, a federal law that protects cultural and natural resources of historic or scientific interest, to make that a reality.

That came to fruition on Friday, two days after the 116th anniversary of a riot that erupted just blocks from where President Abraham Lincoln once lived.

“It literally shocked the conscience of the nation,” Biden said at the Oval Office, flanked by Durbin, Duckworth, Democratic U.S. Rep. Nikki Budzinski of Springfield and others. “We have no safe harbor unless we continue reminding people of what happened.”

According to the White House, the monument will serve as a reminder of “the hateful violence targeted against Black Americans, and the power of dedicated individuals to come together across racial lines to transform shock and grief into good and action.”

The monument will protect 1.57 acres of federal land in Springfield and will be managed by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Park Service. In the coming years, the park service will work with community groups “to plan for interpretation, commemoration, and visitor experiences associated with the new park site,” the White House said, including the charred foundations of five homes that were never rebuilt.

Those homes were among dozens burned to the ground by an angry White crowd that ran amok after two Black men accused of rape and murder were spirited out of town by authorities.

The riot spurred the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which was founded on Feb 12, 1909, Lincoln’s 100th birthday, after Black leaders including Ida B. Wells-Barnett and W.E.B. DuBois called for the creation of a national organization to fight for equality and rail against racist policies.

Biden’s announcement comes as the Springfield-area has faced another reckoning in recent weeks with the police killing of 36-year-old Sonya Massey, whose death led to protests across the U.S. Massey’s family has said she was a descendent of William Donnegan, a shoemaker who was involved in the Underground Railroad and was lynched during the 1908 riot.

Walter Katz, the deputy chief of staff of public safety to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, specializing in police reform and accountability, also has a connection to Donnegan. Katz said in a Tribune op-ed last year that Donnegan was his great-great-great-granduncle, something he learned through an investigation of his ancestry and tied that to his chosen career path as a public defender and social justice advocate.

“So many Black Americans can point to someone in their family, in their extended family, who’d either been a victim of racial violence or a victim of police overreach of being an illegal stop or an illegal search or a use of force or a false arrest,” Katz said in an interview on Friday.

Teresa Haley, immediate past president for the Springfield branch of the NAACP, said the city remains racially segregated more than a century after the riot.