Acts of Intolerance

In August 1908, during two sweltering days in Springfield, Illinois, an angry white mob attacked Black residents after learning that two Black men, one accused of raping a white woman and the other of killing a white man, had been secretly transported out of town by the sheriff for their protection. White rioters looted and burned many Black homes and businesses, lynched two innocent Black men, murdered five other citizens, and injured many more before state troops quelled the violence. Afterward, Mabel Hallam admitted she had been having an affair with a white lover and had lied about being assaulted by George Richardson, the accused Black man. The other Black prisoner, seventeen-year-old Joe James, was eventually convicted by a jury for murder and executed. The riot in Abraham Lincoln's hometown, only blocks from the Lincoln homestead, shocked the nation and helped catalyze the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in New York City in 1909 on Lincoln's birthday.

Springfield, Illinois · United States