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The Springfield Race Massacre, 1908
The massacre inspired the creation of the NAACP a year later.
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On August 14th 1908, a mob of about 5,000 white men in Springfield, Illinois, wanted to lynch two Black men in jail. As they moved toward the jail, they chanted, “Curse the day that Lincoln freed the n — –s.”
To prevent the lynching, authorities secreted the men out of the jail to safety. When the lynch mob discovered this, they began to terrorize Black Americans and their supporters, destroying the restaurant of a wealthy white man who had provided the car for the sheriff to transport the two inmates. Then the mob destroyed dozens of Black businesses and finally a poor Black neighborhood known as the Badlands.
, which caused more than $4 million in damages in modern dollars. Many Black citizens fled the city.
One of the two Black men was George Richardson, whom Mabel Hallam accused of raping and beating her. Richardson, whose grandfather had been Abraham Lincoln’s barber, professed his innocence: “As God is my judge, I am innocent of the crime I am charged with at Springfield. I have tried to conduct myself so as to win the respect of my white neighbors, and believe that I have done so. I was born in Springfield…
