This summer, in a project for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, Historic Sites Division, I produced three videos to promote the department’s new history tours in Springfield. They include a bicycling tour of the city that stops at some lesser known historic sites, hikes through Oak Ridge Cemetery where Abraham Lincoln is buried, and a walking tour through downtown that focuses on the 1908 Springfield Race Riot. During the riot, a violent white mob destroyed dozens of black owned homes and looted their businesses, and lynched two African American men. It prompted the founding of the NAACP the following year.
The race riot tour was conducted by Doris Bailey, a site interpreter with the IDNR, and as she says here, a horrific story that’s not easy to tell, but she adds, it's one that has to be told.
Listen to what it means for Doris to tell people about what happened here in Springfield in 1908.
