Brigitte Bowers: NAACP born of strife and adversity

On a warm July night in 1908, Clergy Ballard, a well-known and popular railroad engineer in the town of Springfield, Ill., heard some commotion coming from his teenage daughter Blanche’s bedroom.

He investigated, and found a stranger looming over Blanche’s bed. Ballard chased the man out of his home and into the front yard. There, he caught up with the intruder, who stabbed Ballard repeatedly during the ensuing struggle. His assailant escaped, and as Ballard lay dying, he identified his attacker as a young black man.

Early the next morning, a young black man named Joe James was found passed out drunk not far from Ballard’s home and, after enduring a beating from local white men, was arrested and taken to the Springfield jail.

Townspeople were sure that James’ intent had been to rape Ballard’s white daughter, and the incident added fuel to what had already been a simmering tension between the white immigrants working industrial jobs in Springfield and the black residents who sometimes crossed union picket lines during labor protests.

Weeks later, as racial unrest continued to divide the black and immigrant white communities of Springfield, a local white woman named Mabel Hallam accused black laborer George Richardson of rape. He was arrested and housed in the same jail where Joe James had been awaiting trial since July.

Word of Richardson’s arrest spread quickly, and later that same day, on Aug. 14, at least 5,000 white men showed up at the Springfield jail and demanded that James and Richardson be released into their custody.

But Sheriff Charles Werner, having anticipated the danger the two prisoners might face if he kept them in the local jail, had already transferred them to a town about 65 miles northeast of Springfield. He’d enlisted the help of a local wealthy restaurateur, Harry Loper, who had a fast car and drove the prisoners to a train station, where they boarded with several deputies.

The mob grew to 12,000 as it moved through town to Loper’s restaurant, where it destroyed just about everything in and outside the restaurant, and proceeded to a predominantly black neighborhood, stopping along the way to plunder John Olberman’s pawn shop.

Now armed with guns and ammunition stolen from the pawn shop, the crowd began to enact a Kristallnacht, bashing windows and setting fire to more than 35 black-owned businesses.

As the Springfield Fire Department attempted to save buildings, rioters cut their hoses and stood in their way. Before 5,000 members of the state militia were able to quell the riot, seven men were dead. Of the seven, five were white, including one teenage boy shot and trampled at Loper’s restaurant. Two were black men hanged by the mob.

On the morning of Aug. 16, four blocks of Springfield lay in ruin.

As news of the riots that had devastated the final resting place of Abraham Lincoln spread throughout the country, a small and eclectic assortment of civic activists in New York City pondered an appropriate reaction. They knew about a group that had formed a few years before in Canada, near Niagara Falls, in reaction to recent legislation in the South designed to disenfranchise black voters.

The group had included Mary White Ovington, who had been born to abolitionist parents during the last year of the Civil War and was inspired to work for civil rights after hearing Frederick Douglas give a speech. Henry Moskowitz, a social worker and avid theater-goer, had also been involved in the Niagara Group.

On Lincoln’s birthday in 1909, this group joined with other social reformers to create the National Negro committee. One year later, the NNC would change its name to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

NAACP members and officers in 1910 were an eclectic assortment of citizens, though they all shared similar interests in women’s suffrage and other social causes.

They included Jane Adams, the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize; educational reformer John Dewey; Charles Darrow, who would later become famous as one of the inventors of the popular board game, Monopoly; eminent writer and scholar W.E.B. DuBois, the first African American to earn a doctorate degree and the editor of The Crisis, the NAACP journal that is still published today; and Lincoln Steffens, a reporter raised in San Francisco and educated at Stanford.

Another member was George Henry White, an African American educator and politician who had defeated a white incumbent to become a U.S. congressman from, of all places, North Carolina.

He served from 1897 to 1901 until amendments to former Confederate states’ constitutions, such as provisions requiring literacy tests and poll taxes for voters, disenfranchised African American southerners, making it impossible for a black politician in the South to get elected. Voters in North Carolina, where 22 percent of the population is black, would not send another African American leader to Congress until 1992.

Thus, the NAACP was born out of concern about basic constitutional guarantees, such as voting rights, but also out of a desire to find common ground among all Americans in order to avoid the kind of senseless violence that occurred in Springfield on that awful summer night in 1908.

By the way, Joe James was convicted of murdering Ballard and hanged in October with the kind of efficiency that would make a modern-day death penalty advocate from Texas green with envy.

Mabel Hallam later retracted her accusation against George Richardson. She and her husband packed up and left town, presumably leaving few friends behind. Richardson was released from jail and went on to live a quiet life, working as a janitor in Springfield.

This story was originally published January 23, 2015 at 4:00 PM with the headline "Brigitte Bowers: NAACP born of strife and adversity."