Summer of Rage: The Springfield Race Riot of 1908

Foreword by Cullom Davis

Springfield and its inhabitants enjoy the distinction of having a rich sense of civic history and a generous share of attention in history books. Our prominent place in the state’s and nation’s history can be explained by the two outstanding facts of our past: Abraham Lincoln and the 1908 race riot. While both Lincoln and the riot have shared a common susceptibility to legend and mythology, the martyred president and an ugly outbreak of racial violence are an odd historical couple. Lincoln immortalized Springfield while the race riot scandalized it; Lincoln made the city famous while the race riot made it infamous.

The fact that Springfield’s two principal claims to historical recognition produced opposite reactions may explain why we have spent so much time and energy preserving the memory of Lincoln and erasing or at least slighting the memory of the riot. Our most famous resident is remembered in restored buildings, bronze tablets, statues and solemn holidays, but there are no memorials for our most famous event. it is painful, and some would say unnecessary, for a proud and progressive community to acknowledge such a tragic episode in its past. Even 65 years after the killing and pillage ended many thoughtful citizens object to public discussion of this sensitive subject.

There are, however, powerful and compelling reasons for removing the 1908 riot from Springfield’s historical closet. However embarrassing and painful its memory may be, the riot remains the most important event in the city’s history. It had powerful and lasting repercussions locally, and also important consequences in Illinois and the nation. One of its immediate effects was to spur civil rights leaders and serve as their rallying cause in founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Another reason is that young people and adults living in Springfield are entitled to a balanced and accurate account of the event. Most citizens appear either to know nothing about the riot or to have a crude impression based on hearsay rather than history. There are rumors and distortions about those violent days in August of 1908 that need to be corrected. Finally, one measure of a community’s essential strength and self-esteem is its capacity to confront the mistakes as well as the accomplishments of its past and to learn from them.

The purpose of this brief history is not to embarrass the city of Springfield or stir racial feelings, but to illuminate a dark recess in our history. The author has engaged in extensive research on the subject in preparation for a full book-length treatment. This short account covers the highlights of his findings and provides the general reading public with a factual and balanced picture of a sad but significant story.

Acknowledgements

There are a number of people without whose kind assistance the preparation of this manuscript would have been impossible. Chief among them is Cullom Davis, Associate Professor of History at Sangamon State University in Springfield. It was Mr. Davis’ contagious enthusiasm and curiosity about the 1908 riots as an historical event which originally stimulated my own research into the topic. In addition, Mr. Davis generously granted me free access to the fruits of his own considerable research—among other things, I am indebted to him for having unearthed the photographs which appear in this book and for assembling valuable background demographic and historical data relating to the black population of Sangamon County.

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I would also like to thank the staff of the Information Center of Springfield’s Lincoln Library, who endured my many questions and requests for materials with patience and courtesy. Likewise, the cooperation of Mildred Schulz, Al Von Behren, and the rest of the staff of the Illinois State Historical Library was essential to the completion of this project.

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Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to Mr. Robert Howard for his perceptive criticisms of the  manuscript.

James Krohe Jr.

Springfield, Illinois

October, 1973

Summer of Rage: The Springfield

Race Riot of 1908

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Little was left of Abraham Lincoln’s Springfield in the summer of 1908 but the memory of the great man himself. In the forty-three years since the death of its most prominent citizen, the Illinois capital had risen from a self-conscious prairie village into a bustling hub of a thriving farming and manufacturing center. Paving brick had long ago replaced the treacherous wooden plank sidewalks of the 1860 capital, and the townspeople, who not so many years before had to contend with ankle-deep mud and basking pigs as they made their way around the square, now rode in dry comfort on brand-new trolley cars. The black dirt fields just outside town were thick with the scent of ripening corn, and, far below the surface, six and a half thousand men clawed and sweated their way through some of the richest veins of soft coal to be found anywhere in the United States.

Springfield’s transformation from backwater to boom town had been managed with far more energy than grace. The elegant mansions of the city’s industrial barons gave way on Springfield’s east side to the hastily-built shacks of the factory district. It was here, in the shadow of the coal tipples and smokestacks, that the legions of laborers lived who dug the coal and forged the steel of Sangamon County. The opening of the Central Illinois coal fields in the waning years of the 19th Century had triggered an expansion of goldrush proportions. Springfield’s population, swollen by the arrival of thousands of families fleeing the still-devastated farmlands of the American South, had grown from 25,000 to more than 49,000 since 1890. Added to this domestic migration was a rising tide of European immigrants who, like their native American counterparts, had come to the Land of Lincoln to trade their labor for a chance at a new life.

Springfield in 1908 was a proud, confident, dirty, growing—and corrupt city. The problem centered in the “Levee” district along Washington Street between Seventh and Tenth Streets. Frequented by what one indignant editorialist called a “dissolute and criminally-inclined” class of blacks, the Levee was a more or less permanent scandal which visitors always deplored and local people usually overlooked. Washington Street was the place where the local sporting element (and not a few visiting politicians and conventioneers) could, for a price, satisfy their less respectable appetites in no fewer than twenty-two saloons, a dozen back-room brothels, and unnumbered gambling parlors. Outbreaks of violence among the Levee’s citizens were commonplace—local police refused to enter the area alone—and most Springfieldians were forced to agree with the editor of the Joliet Weekly News, who called the place a “disgrace and stench to the civilized world.”

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The moral corruption of the Levee was matched by the political rottenness that flourished there. Local grafters presided over a political machine whose wickedness had earned it a reputation that was as widespread as it was unsavory. The Levee’s gamblers and saloon keepers ruled their fiefdom with little interference from the city fathers, many of whom had joined the bosses in a mutually profitable alliance cemented by the bonds of graft. Their joint control of the city’s election machinery further guaranteed that any unnaturally ethical challengers could be easily, if not always legally, eliminated at the polls. The Levee weighed heavily on the conscience of Springfield’s upright majority, and reformers (led by a wrathful local clergy) railed against the evils of the machine at every opportunity. But the preachers’ hellfire and brimstone was no match for the cold cash of the ward bosses, and the Levee remained impervious to reform.

Ultimately, the Levee’s survival depended on the bosses’ ability to deliver the vote in local aldermanic contests, and for that they needed the black vote. As one critic noted, “The Negro vote is large enough to be of importance in the (city) elections, and the Negro vote can be bought.” The fact that most of Springfield’s nearly 3000 black citizens shared the whites’ bitter outrage at this state of public affairs did little to influence prevailing opinion on the issue. The conspicuous role played by some blacks in the unholy pageant of life on the Levee lent an ominously racist tone to the complaints of the city’s whites, and aggravated race feeling that was already dangerously strained.

For, beneath the soot and grime of a Northern factory town, Springfield wore a Southern face. Her social and professional elite, like many of the farmers and laborers living in the surrounding county, had come to the capital from border states like Kentucky and Missouri. In everything from her stately homes and the grand manner of her private entertainments to her murky political intrigues, Springfield had more in common with Birmingham than with Albany.

The Southern heritage of her people was also reflected in her racial attitudes. Although slavery had always been illegal in antebellum Illinois, the practice of hiring blacks as indentured servants had been common among the city’s prominent families until it was outlawed in the mid-1800’s. During the Civil War, Southern sympathizers had been numerous and outspoken, and abolitionism was considered a dangerous, almost treasonous sentiment in Mr. Lincoln’s Springfield. Race relations in the Capital City retained their Southern flavor nearly a generation after the war, and whites regarded the city’s small black population with a smugly tolerant paternalism until the end of the 19th Century. It was a period later wistfully referred to as the “golden age of Springfield race relations.”

By the dawn of the 20th Century, however, the great migration of Southern blacks to Illinois industrial centers like Chicago, Peoria, and Springfield was well underway. In the minds of many of Springfield’s whites, this influx of blacks brought with it a threatened end to white social and economic dominance. Accustomed patterns of race relations became strained and were eventually torn by the pressures of rapid social change. One local writer bemoaned the fact that “the Negro of Springfield is not the Negro of the South. He is usually ready to open up an argument that he is as good as a white man.” This aggressive attitude appalled ex-Southerners used to the comfortable days when blacks knew their “place” without being told. In less than twenty years, the pendulum of public opinion on the race issue swung from tolerance to open hostility.

It was not only transplanted Southerners, however, who felt a deepening aversion to blacks. The recent flood of white workers into Sangamon County had been matched by a proportional increase in the local black population. Census reports for the year 1900 had shown what most nervous whites already knew, that Springfield had a higher percentage of black residents than any other major Illinois city. (According to the U.S. Census reports for the years 1900, 6.5 percent of Springfield’s population was Negro, 79.9 percent was native white, and another 13.6 percent was foreign-born white. By comparison, East St. Louis was 6.1 percent black, Chicago 1.8 percent, Decatur 3.0 percent, and Peoria 2.5 percent.) All three groups—native whites, European immigrants, and blacks—vied in direct and often heated competition for precious jobs in the mines and factories around Springfield.

This competition had once before led to the spilling of blood. Just ten years earlier, in the tiny town of Virden twenty miles to the south of Springfield, owners of the Chicago-Virden Coal Company had attempted to break a six-month strike by importing a train-load of job-hungry black laborers from the South. An armed clash between striking miners and company guards left ten men dead and dozens wounded. And Virden was not an isolated incident. In Pana and Carterville, as they had in Virden, mine owners tried to break strikes by recruiting black workers as scabs. It was a practice whose significance was not lost on the mining men of Sangamon County. Such incidents added the heat of labor strife to smoldering cultural conflicts, until, by the summer of 1908, the melting pot was coming to a boil.

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The mounting racial tension was heightened on July 4, 1908 by the murder of Clergy Ballard. Ballard was a respected mining engineer, a white man, who had died from razor wounds inflicted when he grappled with a late-night intruder in his home. His assailant was a black vagrant named Joe James. The killing was the tragic outcome of what was probably a common burglary, but Ballard’s young daughter had been sleeping in the room in which James was discovered, and the press concluded that the crime had been an attempted sexual assault. The Illinois State Journal, the town’s largest morning daily, maintained that the unfortunate Ballard had “given his life in defense of his child,” and stated editorially that, “.. .concerning (the Negro) and the questions which arise from his presence in the community, it is well to preserve silence at this time. The state of the public mind,” the paper hinted darkly, “is such that comment can only add fuel to the feeling that has burst forth with general knowledge of the crime.”

The “state of the public mind” in mid-July was bitterly anti-black. The hangman was almost cheated of a commission when James was caught by a band of irate whites and beaten senseless—the suspect would have been killed had not law officers rescued him by hauling him off to jail. James was to have been tried shortly after his arrest, but the presiding judge, well aware of the emotions stirred by the case, postponed the trial until autumn, when tempers would be cooler. But the delay only sparked more rumors. James was a familiar figure on the Levee, and the postponement was widely thought to have been arranged by the bosses. Justice, said many an angry white, was being cheated.

The festering resentment over the James case had not yet begun to subside when Springfield was jolted again. On August 13, Mabel Hallam, the twenty-one year old wife of a city streetcar conductor, was the victim of a midnight assault in the bedroom of her home. The culprit, according to the distraught victim, was a black man. The press reacted to this latest incident with a passion that bordered on the pathological. DRAGGED FROM HER BED AND OUTRAGED BY NEGRO screamed a Journal headline, while the Illinois State Register called the crime “one of the greatest outrages that ever happened in Springfield.” The Register went on to urge that “no effort be spared to find the black viper and to force appropriate punishment.” In a piece published the day after the assault, one editor asked, “Is there any way to relieve the community of this fear?”

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The answer to that question was not long in coming.

All during the afternoon of Friday, August 14, men had been gathering in the dusty street in front of the Sangamon County jail at Seventh and Jefferson. Inside, under the nervous eye of sheriffs deputies, sat George Richardson, a thirty-six year old black hod carrier arrested on his way to work that morning arid later identified by Mabel Hallam as the man who had assaulted her the night before. With him was Joe James, accused killer of Clergy Ballard. The shriek of the factory whistles at quitting time marked the arrival of dozens of miners, plant hands, and streetcar workers coming into town for a weekend’s diversion. They joined a sizable retinue of weekend shoppers, curious tourists, and young rowdies, until, by suppertime, the crowd numbered several thousand.

During the early hours of its vigil, the crowd had shown no signs of bad temper. But as the day dragged on and the thermometer crept past the 90 degree mark, the crowd’s mood changed. They wanted Richardson, and they wanted him soon.

Inside the brick, barracks-like jailhouse, Sheriff Charles Werner began to worry. He knew that his deputies would not be able to withstand a determined assault on the jail, and the talk outside hinted at violence. At 4 o’clock he had stationed deputies at the jailhouse windows, each armed with a rifle and a fresh box of cartridges. Their orders were simple—at the first sign of an attack, they were to shoot to kill. Werner was determined to prevent a lynching even if he had to litter the street with dead men, but by 5 o’clock he realized that his meager force could not hold their ground for long. At the request of Sheriff Werner, Springfield Mayor Roy Reece had called up local units of the state militia at 4:15 P.M. to aid in the defense of the jailhouse. The company was not assembled until nearly 7 P.M., however, and even then was unable to offer the mobs any real resistance. The chances of getting George Richardson to trial alive were growing slimmer by the minute. The prisoners would have to be moved.

Shortly after five, the sheriff put his plan into action. A false fire alarm was phoned into the fire station next door. The exit of the clanging fire engine did what Werner hoped it would do—it distracted the crowd long enough to allow him and his men to slip both Richardson and James out a rear entrance and into a waiting car. The prisoners were then driven to a rail siding on the outskirts of town, where they were put on a train headed for Bloomington and safety, sixty miles away.

Back at the jail, the crowd had reassembled after their futile chase. They were hot and winded and in no mood to take Werner’s word that Richardson and James were no longer in the jail. Leaders of the group insisted that they be allowed to enter the building and see for themselves. Werner admitted a committee of five, who emerged minutes later with the news that the cells were empty.

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The sun had set by then, and the crowd, many of whom had been standing in the scorching sun since before noon, was frustrated and irate. Their vengeance had been thwarted by a schoolboy trick, and the knowledge of the ruse did nothing to improve their disposition. Most of the men did not leave the jail, but stayed in the street, milling around, each man as uncertain as the next about what to do next. Then, at dusk, word flashed through the crowd that the automobile used to carry Richardson and James beyond their grasp belonged to Harry Loper, a local restaurateur. The crowd, “hooting and threatening,” headed south toward the downtown business district five blocks away.

Their destination was Loper’s Restaurant at 223 South Fifth Street. A spacious eatery decked out in what, in turn-of-the-century Springfield, was considered elegant style, Loper’s stood barely 200 feet from the county courthouse. The marchers from the jailhouse came to a halt just short of Loper’s door, their enthusiasm for a row cooled by the sight of Loper himself standing in the doorway brandishing a rifle. It was a standoff, and for more than an hour nothing more lethal than insults were hurled at Richardson’s offending benefactor.

Then, just before 8:30 P.M, the menace that had hung in the muggy air all afternoon finally erupted into violence. Loper’s car, which was parked in the street in front of the restaurant, was overturned. The move triggered a general assault by the mob. A plate ~ass window was sent crashing to the sidewalk when an unknown marksman shattered it with a brick. The mob (quite a few of which had been quenching their summer thirst in nearby taverns) responded with a hail of bricks, stones, and empty beer bottles. Cries of “Curse the day that Lincoln freed the niggers!” and “Abe Lincoln brought ‘em to Springfield and we’ll run ‘em out” were heard as the front of the building was reduced to shambles. Those not actively engaged in the riot stood on the sidelines shouting encouragements to those who were.

City policemen, refusing to act out of either fear or an unspoken approval, did nothing to halt the attack. (Four city policemen were later indicted by a special grand jury for their failure to suppress the riot. The police force as a whole was commended by that same body for their efforts to stem the violence, and it was generally conceded that it was a lack of manpower, rather than cowardice, that prevented the police from putting an early stop to the trouble.)

After the building’s front had been wrecked, the mob hesitated for a moment until Kate Howard stepped to the front of the crowd. A well-known rooming house proprietress whose physical bulk was as formidable as her oft-stated hatred of black people, Howard taunted the weak-willed among them with a challenge. “What the hell are you fellows afraid of?” she demanded. “Women want protection and this seems the only way to get it.” With the redoubtable Kate leading the way, the mob stormed into the interior of the restaurant, smashing furniture, mirrors, glassware, plates, chandeliers—anything within reach. What couldn’t be wrecked by hand was hauled outside and piled in the street, where it was set afire. Loper’s car was also put to the torch. The mob, by now thoroughly drunk on liquor guzzled from Loper’s bar stock, greeted the sight in a frenzy of destructive glee.

Roy Reece, Springfield’s young mayor, arrived at the scene at about 10 o’clock. The mob had begun to shoot up the remains of the building when Reece stood before the crowd and appealed for calm. He was greeted by a barrage of threats, and Reece, his escort vastly outnumbered, prudently sought refuge in the back room of a nearby cigar store.

Having laid waste to Loper’s the mob turned east toward the Levee. Thousands of people, most of them onlookers attracted to the scene by the commotion at Loper’s, streamed down Washington Street. Osburne’s Colored Barber Shop was ransacked and its fixtures destroyed. Chester Johnson’s saloon across the street was wrecked and its contents eagerly consumed. Dandy Jim Steele’s Delmonico Restaurant was left a total loss, and the nearby Star Theatre was ravaged. At Fishman’s Pawn Shop, looters stole guns and ammunition from display windows, and the rioters, now armed and in a mean .mood, went on a shooting rampage through the Levee. Stray bullets sliced through the air in all directions—some thirty rioters and bystanders would be wounded by gunfire before the night was over—and the cries of stricken men mixed with the noise of breaking glass and splintering wood. By the time they were through, twelve places of business had been totally destroyed, and another eleven damaged.

From the Levee the mob veered in the direction of the “Badlands,” the black residential district that straddled the Madison Street railroad tracks five blocks to the north. The home of several hundred poor black workers and their families, the Badlands was a tinderbox of one-room hovels and rough board shacks. Houses along the mob’s route were systematically set afire, and by 1 A.M. whole blocks were in flames. Attempts by the fire department to save the blazing shacks were stymied by the rioters, who cut through the firemen’s hoses as soon as they were laid down. White-owned homes and businesses in the district were marked by white handkerchiefs, and were spared the torch. The glare of the fires against the night sky attracted even more spectators, until an estimated quarter of the city’s 49,000 residents were gathered to watch the Badlands burn to ashes.