1908 Race Riot Led to NAACP

CHICAGO - Two days of bloody race riots that shook Abraham Lincoln's hometown a century ago led to a critical development in the struggle for racial equality: the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

While racially motivated crimes were common in the South, the 1908 riots stood out because they happened in Springfield, Ill. -- a northern city and Lincoln's resting place.

"It wasn't in Mississippi, it was in Illinois. That jarred people," said Roger Wilkins, publisher of the NAACP's The Crisis magazine. "Add the fact that it's where Lincoln is buried. You have a lot of symbolism. Lincoln was a live memory to a lot of people."

The NAACP, which formed in 1909, has played a role in nearly every major civil rights victory including the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case of 1954, the Montgomery bus boycotts and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The organization also has fought lesser-known battles against lynchings, police brutality and discrimination in the military.

"The NAACP really made the civil rights movement, as we know it, possible," said Patricia Sullivan, a professor at the University of South Carolina who is writing a history of the organization. "It creates the infrastructure through organization, through branches, through litigation, education, through Washington and the talent of extraordinary people."

The organization, which claims around 300,000 members and has branches in every state, started with a meeting of three people in New York, months after the Springfield riots.

At the time, there was little opposition in Springfield to the violence and city leaders essentially ignored the riots.

"It was swept under the rug for many many years," said Kathryn Harris, a director at The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, which has a major exhibit on the riots.

But for activists, both black and white, outside of Springfield, the Illinois riot was the final straw.

"It wasn't new that blacks were lynched in America. That was not uncommon," said Kenneth Page, head of the NAACP branch in Springfield. "But it happened in Abraham Lincoln's hometown, that's what made the headlines."

After all, it's Lincoln's image and signature that grace the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves.

"A gasp runs through the important power holders in the North and the realization that what had been said to be largely a Southern problem was now in fact being nationalized," said historian David Levering Lewis, who won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize for his biography on W.E.B. Du Bois.

Following the riots, journalist William English Walling penned an article for The Independent deeming the violence the "Race War of The North." He challenged people of all races to do something about it. The article prompted activist Mary White Ovington to meet with two other activists to discuss solutions.

The NAACP grew out of that first meeting.

And on Feb. 12, 1909, the anniversary of Lincoln's 100th birthday, journalist and activist Oswald Garrison Villard drafted "a call," signed by an interracial coalition.

It appealed to "all believers in democracy to join in a national conference for the discussion of the present evils the voicing of protests and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty."

The next year Du Bois launched The Crisis magazine, which rallied people nationwide. From his first article on school segregation to those that followed on lynchings, police brutality and voting, the organization became what an NAACP secretary described as "a mirror on America."

Today's leaders say that mirror should reflect on the successes too.

"We have made enormous progress, if you think in 1909, there were parts of the country where people could not vote. Literally blacks had no rights as citizens," said NAACP chairman Julian Bond. "All that has changed and changed dramatically."

But there is still a long way to go, he said.

By SOPHIA TAREEN | Associated Press Writer