Circled by Democratic lawmakers, civil rights leaders, and community members from behind the White House Resolute desk, President Joe Biden designated a national monument on Aug. 16 in memory of a 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois.
“Over 100 years ago, this week, a mob not far from Lincoln’s home unleashed a race riot in Springfield, and that really shocked the conscience of the nation,” Biden said while signing the proclamation.
The White House said in a statement that the monument will “tell the story of a horrific attack by a white mob on a Black community that was representative of the racism, intimidation, and violence that Black Americans experienced across the country.”
The riot—which resulted in multiple deaths, hundreds of injuries, and dozens of destroyed black-owned businesses and homes—occurred in August 1908 when mobs of white residents pooled into Illinois’s capital city in response to a black man who was jailed on a sexual assault charge involving a white woman, and another jailed for the murder of a white man.
The mob rioted through Springfield and directed its frustration at the local black population after authorities secretly moved the jailed men to another location miles away. Chaos ensued, resulting in the hangings of two innocent black men, and dozens of homes and businesses in the city’s majority-black neighborhoods burned and reduced to rubble, forcing families to flee and triggering a response from the National Guard.
In the end, rioters were charged but later acquitted for their part in the lynchings and property damage. There were at least eight deaths in total, and more than 100 were injured, including some from the state’s militia.
The event sparked the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) on the centennial of former President Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, Feb. 12, 1909. The original NAACP board included scholar and writer W.E.B. DuBois.
Biden was joined by Interior Department Secretary Deb Haaland, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Rep. Nikki Budzinski (D-Ill.), and leaders from the NAACP, ACLU, and other organizations.
“I just want to thank everybody here who came together to work so hard because this is such an important part of our nation’s history,” Duckworth said.
The senator said she is proud of the Midwest’s role in the civil rights movement, particularly in cities like Chicago and Springfield.
“Good things can come out of bad things, as long as you don’t forget what happened,” she said.
Biden’s designation does not create a marker on the site, but there is a memorial in downtown Union Square Park. In 2020, the location was also added to the National Park Service’s African American Civil Rights Network, a group of locations and programs that exemplify the history of the Civil Rights Movement.
Budzinski, who urged Biden to sign the proclamation, said the monument is a reminder of black Americans’ “strength and resilience” due to the riot sparking the creation of the NAACP.
“Today’s announcement is a critical step forward to honor those who were killed in the 1908 attack and acknowledge the impact this tragedy had,” she said.
Biden, in June 2021, was the first sitting U.S. president to visit a site in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where hundreds of black residents were killed by a white mob in 1921.
He and Vice President Kamala Harris also signed a bill that month to make June 19, also known as Juneteenth, a federal holiday to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States.
