Books
Confronting the paradox
Facing what we've forgotten about race relations
could be as important to Illinois' future
as celebrating what we remember
Review essay by Maureen Foertsch McKinney
Illustration by Daisy Juarez
Escape Betwixt Two Suns:
A True Tale of the Underground Railroad in Illinois
Carol Pirtle, Forward by Rodney O. Davis, 2000
Southern Illinois University Press
Tell Us A Story:
An African American Family in the Heartland
Shirley Motley Portwood, 2000
Southern Illinois University Press
On an unseasonably warm and sunny Sunday, a pair of flags, one American, the other Confederate, ripple on a gentle afternoon breeze. Agitators gathered at the park pavilion look overheated under the weight of hoods and robes. Some robes are white. Others are black. All carry the telltale red cross of their Klan. As the hour of the rally strikes, participants begin to spit racial epithets. Many in the crowd of 200 cheer, though others remain stoic.
A description of an ugly chapter in our nation's history? Recollections from the 1920s or '30s? A story from the South? No, this is a scene from recent history, last November, in fact. And the setting is Decatur -- Illinois, not Georgia.
Some of the locals, it seems, were outraged that the Rev. Jesse Jackson had come into town to protest the school board's two-year expulsion of seven students for fighting at a football game. So they called up the leader of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Butler, Ind., and he rounded up 15 of his members to make a public show of force in Nelson Park.
Illinois, circa 1999.
A Klan meeting in broad daylight in the middle of the Land of Lincoln is startling. We Illinoisans like to think we're above this nastiness of racism -- just look at our history.
Yes, just look at our history.
What that history tells us is that we have a troubling legacy on the question of race. And our struggle to confront this issue is at a critical stage once again.
The problem has been an inability to reconcile our paradoxical history. We choose to remember that it was favorite son Abraham Lincoln who preserved a slave-free union. And we choose to mark the route runaway slaves took to freedom along Illinois' leg of the Underground Railroad.
But there are other troubling stories about Illinois' past, a history we're less apt to recall.
Slavery. Lynching. Segregation. Cross-burning.Race-based murders. These events were not Southern phenomena; they were Illinois occurrences.
Facing what we've overlooked may be more important to Illinois' future than resting on our dubious laurels.
Perhaps it would be comforting to think such incidents happen more often somewhere else. But no longer is that the case. The Southern
Poverty Law Center, a Montgomery, Ala.-based nonprofit organization created to fight discrimination, tracks incidents of hate crimes and the existence of hate groups, and it notes that the South is by no means the sole breeding ground for hatred in the United States.
In 1999, the center counted 457 active hate groups nationwide, including the Ku Klux Klan and various factions of neo-Nazis, Skinheads and so-called Christian identity adherents. Pennsylvania had more Klan rallies than Alabama,
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and Illinois accounted for 16 of the nation's hate groups. Among them, of course, was Matt Hale's World Church of the Creator, the organ-ization that helped pump hate into Illinoisan Benjamin Smith before his July 1999 rampage.
Smith, remember, was the avowed racist who went on a two-day killing spree aimed at black, Asian and Jewish people. He killed two and wounded six before turning his gun on himself as he was about to be apprehended by police.
Victims and their families have sued Hale's organization, based on the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, which holds hate groups responsible for their members' violence on the grounds of conspiracy. Klan-related law should be archaic, but obviously it's not when a few short months ago a Klan rally drew a crowd of 200.
That the Klan can still draw a crowd sheds light on the paradox of Illinois' racial relations.
A trio of books, to be published this summer, should help put the more shameful chapters of Illinois' history into
context.
Carol Pirtle's Escape Betwixt Two Suns: A True Tale of the Underground Railroad in Illinois reminds us that it is not even accurate to say
Illinois was free of slavery. In fact, in 1825 the state's first governor, Shadrach Bond, owned 13 slaves. His lieutenant governor had a dozen slaves and the secretary of state had five. Pirtle uses this as background for her tale of William Hayes, a southern Illinoisan who helped his neighbor's escaped slave flee northward on the Underground Railroad. It's important to note that that slave was held in Randolph County, Illinois; Hayes took her north to Galesburg.
Technically, Illinois was a free state, deemed so by the Ordinance of 1787, which outlawed slavery north of the Ohio River. But in practice that was not the case.
French settlers brought 500 black West Indian slaves to the Illinois territory in 1719. And as the issue of slavery began to create divisions between the plantation-rich South and the abolitionist North, the pioneers in the "west'' had to come to terms with this unresolved issue. James Simeone in Democracy and Slavery in Frontier Illinois: The Bottomland Republic, published this year by Northern Illinois University Press, tells us that Illinois in the 1820s was the stage for one of the greatest battles between slavery and anti-slavery forces. The failed attempt to make Illinois a slave state sparked riots, arson and murder. Territorial government officials turned a blind eye to slavery, according to Pirtle, rationalizing it on the grounds that it had long been allowed here. A major reason: Southerners could choose to bypass Illinois for Missouri, where slavery was legal. And Illinois needed to attract settlers to reach the magic 60,000 population mark required for statehood.
Territorial Gov. Arthur St. Clair institutionalized this loose interpretation of the 1787 ordinance, declaring that the provision applied only to the introduction of new slaves, while slaveholders already living in the state had the right to retain their property.
Thus, in the first decades of the 19th century, Illinois had three classes of African Americans: indentured servants, French slaves and free "colored" people. But none of them had the right to claim citizenship or attend school or hold property or public office.
Racism ran to the core of Illinois. In 1819, the year after Illinois won statehood, the legislature adopted the Black Code. Under the code, men could be kept as slaves until the age of 35, women until the age of 32. The code allowed for the whipping of lazy slaves. It denied blacks the right to serve in the state militia, to post bail when arrested or to gather in assemblies. The ultimate threat of the code was its stipulation that slaves who refused to work could be sold south in slave states.
Illinois' post-slavery record is not much better. Should we regard it as a source of pride that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was born in Springfield? Perhaps, but the paradox is that the creation of the NAACP was instigated by the brutal 1908 race riot in the city the Great Emancipator loved.
The riots broke out in the wake of a pair of complaints: the accusation that a black drifter had killed a white man and a white woman's charge that she had been raped by a black man. On the night of the rape charge, an angry crowed gathered outside the jail where the two men were held. Fearing for the safety of the prisoners, the sheriff moved the men to Bloomington. Incensed, the crowd began to riot, loot and burn the city.
By the time the white mob had ended its two-day rampage throughout the black section of Springfield, six people were dead -- two of them
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had been lynched -- and more than 50 others had been hurt.
The riot was emblematic of worsening race relations in the state, where at least 15 lynchings took place in the first 15 years of the 20th century.
Nevertheless, seeking relief from Southern prejudice and economic oppression, blacks headed north in great numbers. Between 1890 and 1920 the number of blacks living in the state grew from 57,000 to 182,200. Many migrated to Springfield, believing that, as the city Lincoln loved, it was surely a bastion of equality. But they faced much the same discrimination. And for the same reasons.
The Springfield riot was an outlet for whites who were fearful the migrating blacks meant competition for jobs. There was another assumption: that an increase in the black population meant an increase in crime.
Illinois proved a hostile environment for blacks, "as it had hitherto been in Georgia," noted anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
In the wake of the Springfield race riot, the Illinois State Journal of Springfield wrote that the "Negro's misconduct, general inferiority or unfitness for free institutions'' was to blame for the outbreak.
Liberal reformers met on Lincoln's birthday in 1909 to talk about the formation of a national biracial organization to come to the aid of blacks.
Despite unfriendly conditions in the North, the migration of African Americans intensified in 1915. This was the result of a confluence of several factors. Chief among them were the outbreak of World War I, which spurred a demand for labor in the industrial North, and the devastation of Southern cotton fields by the boll weevil.
There were other obstacles in the North. Blacks found there were jobs to be had, but they were the last to be hired. And often they were used as strikebreakers, which stirred already simmering white hostilities.
Even at that, there were not enough jobs to go around. And many blacks, consigned to poverty, were crowded into crime-ridden slums, especially in the large cities. The black population of Chicago, for example, reached 109,000 in 1920; about 20 percent of them were unemployed.
Shirley Motley Portwood's memoir, Tell Us a Story: An African American Family in the Heartland, paints a grim picture of life for blacks in Illinois in the middle part of the century. Here is her description of life for African Americans in Pulaski County, the far-southern Illinois area where she was raised: "A rigid system of de facto segregation permeated Pulaski County and southern Illinois until the mid-1960s, when the Civil Rights movement finally ushered in a few changes. Meanwhile the Jim Crow system caused tremendous disadvantages for blacks and conferred privileges upon whites. Blacks and whites had very limited social contact with each other. Blacks attended separate and unequal schools, sat in the balcony of the local movie theater, and ate only in black-owned restaurants.''
Portwood remembers going to the Roxy Movie Theater in Mounds, where blacks were required to sit in the balcony -- except on rare occasions when there was an
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overflow crowd of blacks. "Then we were permitted to sit in a roped off section on the main floor. Here, the white folks made a big mistake because they allowed us to see that they had nice, plush seats that weren't ripped like many of the older ones in the balcony."
Nor was the northern end of the state free of prejudice.
Dempsey Travis, the former president of the Chicago branch of the NAACP, wrote in An Autobiography of Black Chicago that he remembers the now-defunct Riverview Amusement Park had a dunk-tank game called "Dunk the Darky" at least until 1942. And when a black man tried to move to the suburb of Cicero in 1951, Cicero police were on hand to try to stop him. A white crowd gathered and rioting erupted. Flash forward. In 1999, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that a cross was burned at the home of a biracial couple in Wonder Lake, a town not far from the Wisconsin border.
Such occasions remind us not to be lulled into complacency by the improvements that resulted from the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. We are at a critical point in race relations in Illinois when the Klan can draw 200 people to a public park. To ignore the warning signs would be dangerous, even deadly, as history tells us.
At the same time, we can take note of our better angels. Hate is waged often in the name of religion, so it was encouraging that the Catholic bishops of Illinois issued a well-timed letter this spring denouncing racism. And Democratic state Sen. Donne Trotter of Chicago wants a commission to look into Illinois' history of prejudice and violence against African Americans with an eye to the possibility of reparations.
The proposal stalled early in the spring legislative session. But that's not surprising. To reconcile history on the question of racial relations, Illinoisans will have to come to terms with history's paradox. Illinois was a free state, a free state whose soil has been worked by slaves.
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