President Joe Biden on Friday signed a proclamation establishing a site in Springfield, Illinois where mobs ripped through the city’s majority-Black neighborhoods in a violent race riot in 1908, helping spur the creation of the NAACP, as a national monument.
“I know this may not seem significant to most Americans but it's important, it's important, important, important,” Biden said, slamming his hands on the Resolute Desk during briefing remarks in the Oval Office on Friday. “I want everybody to walk by this area to know what happened because it could happen again.”
The president on Friday was joined by Illinois Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, other Illinois elected officials and civil rights and community leaders, including the presidents of the NAACP, ACLU Springfield Chapter and Sierra Club, in the Oval Office to mark the occasion.
“We have no safe harbor unless we continue to remind people what happened, what happened,” Biden said, adding that in his decades as an elected official he never thought he would see efforts to try to erase history, a potential, indirect criticism of some on the other side of the aisle from the president who are pushing for policies such as book bans.
Emerging from the signing in the Oval Office, Leon Russell, Chairman of the Board of the NAACP also noted the significance of making sure the nation is taught about its history.
“What the president did this morning by making the Springfield riot location as a monument, says to us we are not going to forget our history and we are going to let our history guide us to a better future,” he told reporters outside the West Wing.
Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund echoed the importance of remembering the nation’s history, noting the connection to the death just over a month ago of Sonya Massey, a Black woman who was shot and killed in her home in Springfield by a white sheriff’s deputy.
“There is a direct link between the violence of the past and the violence that we experience today which is why it is so important for us to continue to recognize and honor that history,” she said.
This week marks the 116th anniversary of the riot, which was spurred when two Black men being held in a Springfield jail were secretly moved to a different one about 60 miles away amid concerns over violence as crowds demanded the two be released and lynched, according to the White House. Over the next few days, mobs stormed the city, looting and burning down Black-owned homes and businesses and hanging two innocent Black men.
Just months later, civil rights leaders came together to form a national organization that would become the NAACP to fight for equality, choosing what would have been the 100th birthday of President Abraham Lincoln – whose hometown was Springfield – as its formation date.
The 1.57 acres of federal land in Springfield marks Biden’s second new national monument protecting a site of significance to the Civil Rights Movement, the White House noted. Last year, the president created the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Mississippi and Illinois. He has also established Juneteenth as a federal holiday and signed legislation establishing lynching as a federal hate crime.