Biden to designate national monument at site of Illinois race riot

President Biden will designate a national monument this week at the site of racist mob violence in 1908 in Springfield, Ill., the White House confirmed Wednesday.

A White House official told The Hill the president will issue the designation in the Oval Office on Friday, the 116th anniversary of the end of the violence. Biden is expected to be accompanied by civil rights leaders and elected officials for the proclamation.

The Springfield Race Riot began Aug. 14, 1908, when about 5,000 white men gathered outside the local jail to demand two Black men, one accused of raping a white woman and the other of killing a white man, be turned over to them.

When they learned the police had covertly transferred the two men to the Bloomington, Ill., jail, they instead stormed the city’s Black neighborhoods and attacked Black Springfield residents, looting Black-owned businesses and the restaurant of a white business owner who aided in moving the prisoners.

Over the next 48 hours, eight Black men were killed, while five white men were killed by rioters and state militia, and more than 35 businesses were destroyed.

The riot is considered a turning point in perceptions of racist violence in the U.S., as it took place in a northern city and Abraham Lincoln’s hometown rather than in the Deep South. It presaged the “Red Summer” of 1919, when a number of U.S. cities saw outbreaks of anti-Black violence in southern cities, as well as Philadelphia, Chicago and Indianapolis.

George Richardson, the rape suspect, was later released after his accuser recanted, while Joe James, the murder suspect, was convicted and hanged.

Bicameral legislation to designate a monument at the site introduced by Illinois Sens. Tammy Duckworth (D) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Reps. Darin LaHood (R) and Nikki Budzinski (D) has failed to gain traction in the divided Congress, but the history of race relations in Illinois’s capital has come under new scrutiny after a sheriff’s deputy shot and killed Sonya Massey, an unarmed Black woman, in her home in July.