August, Nineteen-Oh-Eight
Near Springfield, Illinois
On the night of August fourteenth, nineteen-oh-eight, a white mob of approximately five thousand people moved through the streets of Springfield, the home city of Abraham Lincoln, and burned out the Black neighborhoods of the south and north ends of town. The violence had been building for weeks. In July, a white man named Clergy Ballard was killed during a break-in, and a young Black man from Alabama named Joe James was arrested.
In August, a twenty-one-year-old white woman named Mabel Hallam accused a thirty-six-year-old Black Springfield resident named George Richardson of assault. The accusations were enough. When the sheriff transferred both accused men out of the city jail to prevent mob action, the crowd turned on the man whose automobile had been used to move them: a white restaurant owner named Harry T.
Loper. His restaurant was destroyed and his car burned. Then the mob spread outward through the Black districts, which Springfield residents called the Levee and the Badlands.
Homes and businesses were set ablaze. Two elderly Black men, Scott Burton and William Donnegan, were murdered. Donnegan was in his eighties and had known Abraham Lincoln personally.
At least seventeen people died in three days of violence. More than a hundred riot-related indictments were eventually filed. One rioter was convicted, for a lesser charge.
Mabel Hallam later admitted she had lied. George Richardson was released. The riot sent a particular shock through journalists and reformers in the North, not because racial violence was uncommon in America, but because of where it had happened.
A journalist named William English Walling wrote a magazine article asking who would stand up for the Black citizens of Lincoln's Springfield. That article reached Mary White Ovington and Henry Moskowitz in New York. The three met in January nineteen-oh-nine and began organizing.
On February twelfth, nineteen-oh-nine, the one-hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, a group of sixty founding members announced the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP was born from the ashes of what happened here.
