Good afternoon, everyone.
I'm Greg Koos, executive director of the McLean County Museum of History, and I'd like to welcome you to the
museum today for what is a very special occasion. We are packed to the gills here.
There is great interest in this topic, and this topic comes...not easily.
It comes from research that has taken place over a period of 25 to 30 years.
Resarch conducted by the Bloomington-Normal Black History Project, a group organized by Mildred Pratt,
led by Caribel Washington, and carried on my Jack Muirhead.
A very important set of understandings, very important set of discoveries,
and a very important set of relationships were created through that historical project.
The speaker today will have been
drawing upon those, and I like to say this
event is so important that my job up here is to introduce the introducer.
(crowd laughs)
(crowd claps)
Good afternoon, I'm Jack Muirhead. Like Mark,
I'm a member of the McLean County Museum of History and Bloomington-Normal Black History Project.
Our speaker this afternoon, Mark Wyman, earned a degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin in
1960, and then worked for much of the next decade as a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune.
After meeting his wife Eva in Chile, where her family had fled to escape Nazi Germany,
then began starting a family. Mark headed to the University of Washington where he earned a phD in History.
Mark joined the faculty of Illinois State University in 1971, where he developed
immigration history as his specialty.
He retired from ISU in 2004 as distinguished Professor of History Emeritus.
Mark's the author of several books including
Immigrants in the Valley: Irish, Germans, and Americans in the Upper Mississippi Country 1830-1860;
The DPs: Europe's Displaced Persons, 1945-1951;
Hoboes: Bindlestiffs, Fruit Tramps, and the Harvesting of the West; and
Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880–1930.
We're happy that Mark's family is here today to hear his talk--Segregation: Our Community's Secret.
Please welcome the Wyman family and Professor Mark Wyman.
(crowd claps)
(drowned out words and crowd laughs)
(Mark) Every community has its secrets.
They're not spoken of at first, and then future generations don't hear about them, and pretty soon
it's a community secret.
For shame, embarrassment, sometimes deliberately keeping something quiet.
Then it becomes a community secret, and this can be all kinds of tragedies:
violence, strife, a mass murder.
Or sometimes, it's something that one part of the community does to another part of the community,
and that's what we're talking about today.
Our secret is that Bloomington and Normal, in several major ways, were racially segregated communities
in a large part of our fairly recent past.
Not like areas of the Deep South, where there were laws that
blacks and whites couldn't drink from the same drinking fountain. No, no, nothing like that.
Rather, segregation came here, and
except in one important way, there was never any governmental action behind it.
It just came, and it grew, and it grew.
But let us not misunderstand. It was not a secret for the African-American community.
For its victims, the existence of segregation in Bloomington and Normal was visible,
obvious,
clear,
and it was burned, I would say, into their memory.
But it has become a huge secret among everyone else in Bloomington-Normal.
So I'll be talking about things like this.
Delegates who converged on Bloomington in 1951
for the State Association of Colored Women's Convention
found that no hotel would take them, so Illinois Wesleyan let them stay in dormitories there.
They found they could not eat in the restaurants, and so the Unitarian Church fed them.
Or how about this?
Reg Whittaker, one evening in the mid-1930s,
went to a movie at the Normal Theater, and the place was packed,
and they sent him up right away to the black section at the very, very back up front.
And he saw a white lady come in and said to the usher,
"There's a seat up there," and the other said, "No, ma'am. You can't sit there. That's the colored section."
As late as the 1960s, a few African-American college students were denied service at a dentist in
Bloomington-Normal, and several black students were forbidden to enter a bowling alley
in Bloomington-Normal, also in the 60s.
And in the mid '70s, when I was at ISU, an African-American professor left us
after a couple of years to return to the south, and his wife told someone here,
"At least in the South, we know where the line is." "At least in the south, we know where the line is."
Well, how could this happen here?
Without laws forbidding people things to eat in the restaurants, how did it change over time?
Were there attempts to stop it? By blacks? By whites?
Now, when I was a member of the Black History Project that Greg referred to here, several years ago,
our president then, Willie Tripp, exclaimed,
"People don't know how bad it was!
Black kids don't know how bad it was!"
Well, Willie Tripp is gone.
The people who knew the insults, degradation of being barred from privileges that white people had,
will soon be gone.
Their recollections are largely unvoiced today--unspoken, hidden--about our segregated past,
and so are becoming secrets here.
Let us try, today, to turn back some of the covers that have kept that part of our history a secret.
In the decades right after the Civil War, the Reconstruction Era,
African-Americans here in Bloomington-Normal were voting.
1885, an African-American was elected to a County Government position.
At the Illinois Soldiers' and Sailors' Home in Normal, there were black orphans as people residing there.
And I ran into a little evidence that the restaurants were open in that period.
Now, two reasons for this good record, I think,
are, one, Jesse Fell, and second, the Bloomington Leader newspaper.
Now most of you know a lot about Jesse Fell.
His friendship with Abraham Lincoln, his getting Illinois State Normal University established here.
But we see Fell's spirit best, I think, in 1867, so two years after the war, at an event he could not attend
because he had some out-of-town business. But he sent a letter.
And in that year, a little African-American girl entered Normal's model school,
a grade school where ISNU students practiced teaching with little kids.
And then the district school board, however, said, "No, there cannot be black students
attending this public school," so they called a community meeting,
and it was quite a big event with a lot of debate.
But they read a letter from Jesse Fell in which he opposed the "crying injustice of
excluding from our public schools any child of the district, no matter what the color of his or her skin.
Indeed, I feel deeply mortified as a citizen of Normal, a town distinguished no less for its schools,
than for its devotion the human rights, that such a meeting was even necessary."
"After all that we've been through with the Civil War," he wrote, "I am not only mortified, I'm astonished, at the
cruel and anti-Christian effort that is now making to drive a poor, defenseless girl from our public school."
So after some more debate, they took a vote.
They voted on giving colored children all the privileges of the public schools of the Normal district,
and it passed sixty-five to one.
Well, the other major factor that I think kept racial segregation from catching on here in the decades after
the Civil War was the crusading presence of the Bloomington Leader, run by E.R. Morse,
an abolitionist from New England.
The Leader's editor ripped into efforts by some delegates at the 1870 Constitutional Convention
in Springfield to insert the word "white" into the voting rights part of the Constitution.
And when the Pontiac Presbyterian Church said it welcomed everyone, irrespective of race or color,
but then it limited blacks to a certain pew in just part of that pew.
Then the editor joined the Pontiac Paper in charging that, "Once break through a great principle
of Christian action, you are out at sea without compass or rudder."
He said, "'Tis all wrong--all wrong."
Now removed from the scene, Jesse Fell who died 1887, and removed the Bloomington Leader,
which went out of existence in the 1890s, and then I think we're facing some trouble here.
And this is happening all across the nation. The anti-slavery people are dying off.
1890 is the last year that bills are introduced in Congress to protect the freed slaves,
and both of those bills failed.
And then in 1896, the Supreme Court turned against the freed slaves and said
that "separate but equal" was alright.
They said it was fine for Louisiana to forbid blacks to ride in in a white railroad car.
Meanwhile, the reformers were being drawn to other issues: women's rights, prohibition, even
anti-Immigrants were attracting a lot of the reformers of that period.
So it was a new era.
And in Bloomington-Normal, then, in the decade of the 1890s,
I found the first evidence that blacks were getting unhappy with things happening.
So in July 1895, the Colored Voters Club went with the people from three black churches
"for the purpose of taking some steps to better their condition as a people," the Pantagraph reported.
And the Bloomington Leader then reported the next day, that the crowd
unanimously backed the resolution that said,
"The colored people of Bloomington have not been united in their efforts to better their condition and
preserve their rights in all things.
In the future, they will patronize those merchants and places of business which employ colored salesmen
or sales ladies, provided such places are recognized and recommended by the Club."
Well, this is in a city that the 1900 census reported had 599 African-Americans.
The city population was 23,286.
Normal: 253 African-Americans. City population: 3,795.
Jack Muirhead has found in his studies that black housing, at that point, was pretty much scattered.
There was no ghetto where all the blacks lived. They were scattered throughout Bloomington and Normal.
Well, in 1901 came another letter to the Pantagraph.
This time from someone they ended up identified as a young colored man, and he wrote,
"Would you please inform me, if it's possible,
why the merchants of Bloomington would discriminate against colored people?
A word to the colored people--keep out of these places, save your money, start up something on your own.
Although it may not be up to date, and I assure you, the whites will think better of you.
It is now high time that the colored people were crying out against such treatment."
What I think was the only important
governmental action regarding racial segregation came during this period.
The Pantagraph reported June 27, 1908:
"It has been decided by the park commissioners
to erect some bathing houses for colored people on the eastern shores of Miller Park Lake near the long bridge."
Earlier, as I've seen in letters to the editor, they rented swimsuits,  certain ones to blacks,
certain ones to whites, but now it seems a new policy.
And explaining this, the park board said that "Ever since the beach and changing rooms
were opened a few years ago on the western shore of Miller Park Lake,
there had been more or less effort by colored people to bathe there and this is
resented by the whites, and some friction resulted."
So blacks were staying away, and it was thought they're entitled to some rights in the premises,
and so they will be given an opportunity to bathe in the water of the lake at the opposite end."
"It was admitted that this was a delicate one to solve because the board desired to keep white patronage,
and it was feared that if both races were allowed at the one resort, the patronage would fall off."
But the board concluded, "By the new system of segregation, there will likely be no offense of friction,
and the commissioners believe that their plan is the best possible under the circumstances."
(rummaging and movement)
The "white adults' beach" is here,
"white bathhouse, white children's beach."
Over here, "negro children's beach, negro adults' beach, negro bathhouse."
So this is the new situation.
Well, they were wrong. There was offense. There was friction.
The response came immediately from the African-American community as well as from some whites.
The African Methodist Episcopal minister, Reverend James Johnson,
wrote an impassioned letter to the Pantagraph,
from which he pleaded with the white community to "draw on their Christian beliefs to call a halt
to this awful and nefarious thing of constantly segregating and discriminating against us."
He appealed to "Christians and liberty-loving white people" to
"forego the building of separate bathhouses for my people."
"Blacks ask no special privileges,"
he said, "just be treated equally with whites."
And at the close of the letter, he wondered, "Will the park commission have the kindness to go to prayer
before they build the Jim Crow Bathhouse?"
Well, in a blunt Pantagraph editorial the next day, July 2,
the park board's move was condemned as "an uncalled-for discrimination here."
"The lake is like a public drinking fountain. Anyone can use it.
If someone disagrees with mixing with someone else who's there, let them stay away.
It's strictly a public function," the editorial said, "where there is no legal authority
for exercising racial discrimination."
Well, the secretary of the park board stepped forward, and said he "had no role in this new policy."
He said there had been "no complaints made
about the two races swimming in the same way, changing in the same bathhouse."
He said whites had "other places they could go to swim, but for blacks, Miller Park Lake is it,
and installing separate facilities," he said, "would stir up race prejudice as well as an extra cost to the taxpayer."
Well the City Council, meeting on July 3, 1908 received a petition from thirteen property holders
calling for the councilmen "not to allow any discrimination
but permit conditions to remain as they were during the past year."
The Pantagraph was told that more than half of the signers of the petition were prominent whites from the community.
A man identified only as H. Carlock
then sent a letter saying he was a member of a "prominent club in Bloomington,"
and the "issue is a question of mixing of races in the water."
"When we consider that our mothers, wives, sisters, and other lady friends have to bathe in such close proximity
to the male whites, which they do not like at all, and if the colored people are there,
it will prevent their bathing in the park at all."
"The presence of blacks," he said, was "already preventing many of us from going swimming,
and soon it will stop the majority of whites."
But the council on July 17 then voted nine to four that there was not to be discrimination at Miller Park Lake,
and immediately then a group of colored citizens and taxpayers call it on the city council to
"enforce this order that you had voted."
Then came a petition signed by seventy property holders,
and they promised they could get 500 more signatures if needed,
calling for "the colored people to use their own bathhouse."
Alderman O'Neil shouted that "Politics is being played here. Someone's catering for the colored vote."
And so, it stayed right there, with more and more debate, nothing happening.
And then three weeks after this,
an event happened in another Illinois city that put the damper on everything, it seems.
This was the Springfield Race Riot.
Started less than three weeks later. Left seven dead. Block after block in the black area, up in flames.
Military occupation of Springfield for a whole month.
In Bloomington, according to the Pantagraph, horrible rumors kept circuiting. Horrible rumors.
One reason might be because the man falsely accused in Springfield of rape
was immediately brought up and put in the McLean County jail.
Also, the horrible events in Lincoln's hometown there in August 1908
led to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP.
Well, perhaps the words then, of two of Bloomington's
African-American preachers showed what was happening here.
The Reverend Johnson of the A.M.E. church, who earlier had attacked the Miller Park policy,
used the Pantagraph's columns to send "a word or two to the colored people of the city of Bloomington."
Referring to the Springfield riot, he said, "yet I would advise the thoughtless
to refrain from congregating on street corners and other public places, boasting or making threats,
and in other ways conducting ourselves in such a way as to lose our friends, who with us,
regard the deplorable condition of affairs, I believe, as much as we."
"Such conduct," he added, "can do no good whatsoever."
"To those making big talk," he reminded, "the odds against us are a hundred to one."
"The odds against us are a hundred to one."
Mt. Pisgah Church's Reverend Ernest Hall wrote,
"It is to be hoped that the negroes will behave themselves wisely.
There is nothing to be gained by talking about fighting, getting revenge, and such like;
but there is great gain in helping to put an end to this thing by never being found guilty of the
charges of this crime that is so often laid at our door.”
And there are the Miller Park issues, rest for a decade until the first World War had come and gone.
Soldiers were coming home from the war.
The NAACP organized in Bloomington, and within a year, had 265 members.
Then in July 1919, the controversy started again here,
and some local blacks attacked the continuing segregation with a petition, and it read,
"It is the same discrimination which is being practiced throughout the south.
The Jim Crow laws in the South are supposed to afford our race the same privileges as whites, but they don't.
No reduction is made in our taxes,
yet we are not allowed to use the beach with white persons, some of whom pay no taxes at all.
Even our little children are not allowed to wade in the water with other children."
Well, this new round of complaints became complicated right away, however,
when some blacks submitted a petition that they were happy.
That they favor the facilities of their own at the lake, only asking that the beach and bathhouse be improved,
and they were sure that this will be done immediately.
Then the park board quickly hired an African-American returned soldier to be the attendant at the bathhouse.
This was Sergeant Charles Thomas. African-American, standing 6'2", weighing 195.
And the Pantagraph assured, "After going through the thickest of the fighting on the western front in France
last year, Thomas says that a little agitation like that raised over the Jim Crow bathing facilities at
Miller Park isn't going to bother him.
Most members of his race, he said, support the City Council."
Well, Bloomington's debate, then, began to build again and then, again,
something happened in another Illinois city not far away that again affected the debate here.
And this was the Chicago Race War of 1919-1919, which began on Sunday, June 27, 1919.
Not even two weeks after the agitation here had resumed.
Began at Chicago's 29th Street Beach, one of the city's segregated beaches.
On a hot, sunny afternoon, and four young blacks went over this line in this segregated beach area,
and whites began throwing stones at them, and it erupted into
an enormous race riot that went on for a full week.
Left thirty-eight dead, over 500 injured. At one point, there were 10,000 troops on the guard in Chicago.
So that riot that started on a Chicago beach snuffed out the arguments being raised here
about the Miller Park Beach.
Well, then it was into the Roaring 20s.
Really the most dismal decade in American history for African-American rights.
Jesse Fell's town of Normal got caught up in the new mood.
The McLean County Colored Children's Home in Bloomington, which was for orphans,
had trouble in the house.
It was in Bloomington, and they spotted a possible new home in Normal.
104 West Willow Street, and if that didn't work, they had some other houses in Normal picked out.
No chance.
A petition denouncing this plan, filled with signatures from Normal citizens,
was presented to the Normal town council.
And the next night, the Normal Commercial Club heard complaints that
"Normal had enough charitable institutions.
They took away taxable property.
Why should Normal become a dumping ground for such places?"
The club then named a committe to meet with trustees of the Colored Children's Home to inform them that
"practically the whole town of Normal is opposed to this."
A week later, Bloomington sponsors abandoned their plan since they said it
"was looked upon so unfavorably by Normal citizens," and that was also the '20s.
Hotels went 100% not to allow blacks to come in, and this became an extra hardship during the
Vaudeville Era because there were many, many African-American performers coming through,
as the vaudeville went in that time, of a whole series of acts, and they couldn't stay in the hotels.
So where would they stay?
Eloise Walton was not alone when she told ISU's professor Mildred Pratt, who did that famous
series of interviews with elderly blacks in the 1980s and 1990s,
"I remember entertainers staying at our house because they couldn't stay in the hotel."
"And African-American patrons in the theaters had to sit way up in the Crow's Nest,"
as Kathryn Dean recalled. "up in the third balcony. In the Irvin, it was the last two rows in the balcony."
"You could go, but they had rows in the balcony that were set aside for black patrons,"
Paul Ward remembered.
"The rest of the theater could be empty, but if those two rows were full, then you were out of luck."
And that existed for years. And let me show you a couple of...
(pages moving)
Now the minstrel shows, in the '20s was the ???? for minstrel shows.
Almost always these were white performers in blackface. So here we see sixty...
all-white person's company.
But, there were a couple of black minstrel shows that came to Bloomington.
And I want you to notice this in the ad of the Chatterton.
"Entire center and right sections balcony reserved for colored people."
Well, they didn't want them to have any idea that they could sit anywhere else when this happened.
Blacks fought back in different ways, especially as the movie era came, and entered these theaters,
and several people said that they
would sit in the black area at the beginning, and then move down from later on.
(rustling sounds)
If the theater had become a center for segregation,
many by comparison sometimes went even beyond this.
A letter in 1921 from two white doctors to the Pantagraph
pointed toward a great injustice then occurring in the community.
Here's what they say.
"Several days ago, a very worthy colored man, who has beginning tuberculosis,
was refused admission to the Fairview Sanitarium.
The reasons assigned were that 'there is no provision made for the care of the negro,' and
that 'the institution is full anyway.'"
But the doctors noted a report that "another person had been
admitted," and they said, "We presume that this man was white, and he had made reservations in advance."
But he asked, "How was this possible?
A public institution, paid by public taxation,
but almost a dozen non-residents of the county are being cared for."
They noted that the sanitarium authorities offered this African-American a sort of open-air shelter,
and a quart of milk a day.
And yet," they wrote, "in such condition, he will surely die."
"He will surely die, but TB experts say that with proper care, such a case can be cured."
Interviewed several decades later, Elaine Gaines Williams recalled her father's TB treatment,
when "they never allowed a black patient in the main building at the hospital.
Instead, they were always put in a little shed out back."
Several other persons interviewed by Professor Pratt reported that it was their experience that,
"for many years, only St. Joseph Hospital served blacks."
Only St. Joseph Hospital.
Marguerite Jackson called hospitalization here
"very prejudiced. Even when you had children, there were just certain rooms they put you in at St. Joseph.
They put all the black people in those two rooms."
Lucinda Posey said, "In the old days of St. Joseph's, regardless of how much moving around it took,
a black person never was put in a room with a white person."
There was more in the '20s.
The years from 1922 to 1925 were the most active years around here for the Ku Klux Klan.
So strong in the midwest that it was said that in Indiana--
I think later, historians had documented--one-in-three white males belong to the Ku Klux Klan.
Dawn, a Klan state newspaper, reported meetings held in almost every town throughout this district.
"Big Growth Shown by Klan in Bloomington" was Dawn's headline in November 3, 1923.
And the newspaper soon announced that a klavern had been established at Illinois Wesleyan,
but I should add there's no evidence that the klavern at Wesleyan ever did anything,
and they were in very good company because
University of Illinois and University of Wisconsin had student Klan klaverns at that time.
Let me show...
(rustling sounds)
There's the headline from the Pantagraph of the Ku Klux holding a rally.
Now a frequent feature of the Klan was to march into a church and make a donation.
And this happened in Normal in October 1922, and they alerted the Pantagraph, the Klan, and let me show...
(pages turning)
The went to the First Baptist Church,
south end of School Street near where Mulberry comes in. Most of you know where that was.
And they marched up front and put a envelope with $20 in the front.
And it had a letter in it, and the letter said,
"We want you to know that we, as an organization,
are for tenants of the Christian religion and all Protestant churches."
They were for "the protection of pure womanhood,
just laws and liberty, closer relationship of pure Americanism, white supremacy,
the upholding of the Constitution, separation of church and state, freedom of speech and press,
preventing the causes of mob violence and lynching."
What did all this mean? They marched around here. They burned some crosses.
They didn't attack any blacks that I ever found evidence of.
So why mention it?
Does it merit mentioning? According to the memories of many African-Americans here, yes, it does.
And this is because of the Klan's reputation for doing horrible violence elsewhere.
Reginald Whittaker and his sister Josephine Whittaker-Samuels remembered seeing cross burnings
in Normal on Jersey Avenue near Linden there.
They suspect that some of their neighbors were involved.
Caribel Washington watched a Klan parade out of Oakland Avenue in the late '20s,
and her stepfather stepped forward and pulled the hood off of one of the marchers,
and it was the son of one of their friends, and he said, "Why are you doing this?"
And the man just put it back on and marched on.
I think the very presence of the Klan, even though it did nothing here,
the very presence of the Klan was important.
Paul Ward's father pulled him out of bed in 1926 one night and took him to Main Street in Bloomington,
and the Klan was parading down the street holding a burning cross,
and he said, "Just be aware of the type of condition existing."
And Paul remembered, "He wanted me to go over there and see it, and let me know what could happen."
"And let me know what could happen."
So that's the '20s and the Klan.
By the end of the '20s, almost all the restaurants in Bloomington-Normal
that I can find anything on were closed to African-Americans.
Floyd Bonds thought back, and he called Bloomington "a very prejudiced town, because it was a long, long time
after I even got grown before you could walk into any restaurant except Thompson's Cafeteria and get served."
He said he could remember going into different steak houses around,
and just sitting there and sitting there, and then leaving quickly before the police could be brought in.
Places with counter service had a little different system.
Mary Hursey recalled, "My mom worked at Walgreens.
She got the job so we could eat at Walgreens."
So Mary and her sister and two friends stopped on day at Walgreens, but she said,
"We knew we couldn't eat there, but my mom didn't know it.
Mom told us, 'Just go, sit down, have a coke or something,' and she would join us.
But see, they wouldn't serve us. We went and told mom.
My mom said, 'You mean, I'm back here doing all the work, and you won't serve them here?'
They said 'no,' and my mom said, 'I will not work here.'
Well, they wanted to keep her, so they let us sit in the back."
The custom of serving blacks out back was even carried so far as this.
At an Emerson School PTA chili supper in the early 1940s, Dorothy Stewart remembered that
she was "placed in the kitchen to eat my chili, and my white friend ate in the dining room.
Though I felt embarrassed and hurt, I also felt somehow that this was my place."
When told of this later, her mother wrote an angry letter to the PTA,
calling them "low, snake-minded people."
Dorothy said, "I loved her for that, and I knew my mother's independence from that day forward."
Now, stories of African-Americans and the communities to universities are a little bit more complicated
but follow the general pattern that we've seen.
Just as things were starting to open up after World War II, I think Bloomington-Normal
began to follow some of this.
During the war, a vet had come back and gone to a movie at the Normal Theater,
and they told him to move, and he simply refused to do it. Got away with it.
"Also after the war, a returned African-American vet took his nieces to [[wars??]]
in Bloomington for some pop and ice cream, and when told
that they couldn't be served, he cursed them out," Christine Flemings remembered.
"He said he had fought to defend America, and this incident, then," she said,
"became known all over Bloomington-Normal."
So things were starting to change, and it started, really, as an organized basis,
I would say, at an incident at ISNU--that is Illinois State Normal University campus.
At the Pilgrim Cafe, a small, segregated eating place where the Alamo is today.
"Dear Editor, do you know the Pilgrim restaurant refuses to serve negro students of this school?"
This is the featured letter in the ISNU Vidette on October 1, 1947.
For the next four days, African-American and white pickets picketed in front of the Pilgrim Cafe,
and my friend Jack Muirhead did some research
and found out that almost every one of those picketing was a returned vet.
Almost everyone.
The cafe's two owners, who were from Springfield, said they were "just following
policies already established in Bloomington-Normal," that's all they were doing.
"Besides," they said, "Illinois State had their own cafeteria that served everyone."
Well, the ISNU student council then voted to oppose racial discrimination in restaurants,
but they refused to support calling for students to boycott the restaurant,
and they did say they did not approve of picketing.
Picketers attended the next council meeting.
They argued that this hurts Illinois State.
"A restaurant on the fringe of campus which has racial discrimination is a reflection on the whole university."
The university president Raymond Fairchild called this a side issue because it wasn't happening on campus,
and he said, "I am against discrimination." But he said, "I don't approve of picketing as a way to bring change."
The Wesleyan student paper got in on this and argued "It's one thing to allow a large number of downtown
restaurants to continue to refuse service to negroes,
but to allow such a problem to arise in the very front yard of a closely knit community
of white and colored college students means treading on tender ground."
Finally in December 1947, the owners of the Pilgrim Cafe announced,
"Effective immediately, the management invites the patronage of the entire student body."
Well, I think that's the first organized attack on
segregation in the community, although there may be some that I didn't find.
Well, the story of ending segregation here is a long one with a lot of details, and I think it's going
to have to wait for another program, which we're already talking about.
But let me tell a few milestones.
During the war, when desperate local industries took in blacks and whites, and they ate together in cafeterias,
this may have kind of started some change ideas.
However, it's an uneven advance and retreat.
In 1955, the Human Relations Council's president pointed to three recent incidents.
One was William Warfield, a very famous African-American singer brought here by the symphony.
He was permitted to eat in a local restaurant, but the management placed screens around him
(crowd murmuring) to separate him from the other clientele.
At that same restaurant, on Mother's Day,
a black ISNU student, with her mother, went to eat and were denied entry.
And an African-American policeman could not eat at a local hamburger joint.
"But," she reported, "nine restaurants, which before did not serve negroes,
now had indicated they would like to."
So it's advance and retreat, advance and retreat.
Luvada Hunter told us how, in those years of the '50s,
Main Street and Center Street cafes--like Quality Cafe, Kresge's, Walgreens--gradually opened up.
And according to Barbara Waddell, there were more cases of whites, especially younger whites,
joining blacks to oppose these things.
And Barbara Wadell told, once when she and some white friends went out,
they wanted to go in a place and get something to eat.
She said, "Well, they won't serve me," and they said, "Come on!"
So they went in, and the waitress made clear they weren't going to serve Barbara,
so the others all ordered with full panoply of things, and then when they brought the food,
everyone got out, went out, and they yelled back, "Eat it yourself!"
(crowd laughs)
By 1962, the Bloomington-Normal Council on Human Relations
could report that the major eating places are open to all customers.
Although they had a few reports of problems with the short-order cafes.
It seemed that victory was in sight, but I just recently learned that in 1985,
a story in Illinois Wesleyan got a report that a restaurant in Bloomington had refused to serve a black,
and so he went and checked in it, and it was true.
And he found that a women's dress shop would not allow blacks to try on dresses.
Well, students picketed whites-only barber shops in the '60s,
and opened most of them up by the end of the '60s.
However, the situation with segregated swimming at Miller Park
had only gotten worse in these years after World War II.
The low point, certainly, was reached in August 1948 when a six-year-old girl went swimming
on a day that there was no lifeguard at the black beach.
Phyllis Hogan was pulled from the water, but it was too late. She had drowned.
An angry letter writer pointed out that this "mud hole had been the target of the NAACP for years, to no avail,
and the 'payoff' came with the death of this little girl in a pool of stagnant, treacherous water
scarcely fit for a porker in a pastureland. It was a disgrace to Bloomington," he wrote to the Pantagraph.
Two years later: 1950.
In response to an NAACP request, the County Health Department director asked the Mayor of Bloomington to
"please see to it that the toilets and the showers in the black changing rooms
are finally connected to the sewer line."
(crowd murmurs)
Mary Hursey recalled for Professor Pratt's interview that
"the anger was really boiling after that drowning."
She said she told her mother at the time that she was sick of it.
"We are not swimming in that hole anymore. The boys that keep looking at us dressing, that girl died there.
People are getting hurt, getting cut, everything. We are swimming in the white pool."
So she went to Mayor McGraw and told him that in person.
He didn't say anything, and she went swimming in the white area. Was not stopped.
A few years later, and I don't have the exact date on this, the park board gave up.
Closed the black swimming area--the hole--and when Carl Sneed and his family moved into town in 1958,
Carl told me it was all integrated.
There was no separation at Miller Park Lake.
So changes began to come more rapidly, I think, in the '50s and '60s
because now there were state and federal laws.
Places like State Farm begin hiring blacks for positions other than janitor and janitress.
Still, Ruth Liddell, to get hired with the GE factory, had to stage a one-person sit-in
in the GE office before they hired her.
So local action remained important, and there are several individual acts I want to mention here.
A covenant of open occupancy was taken around Normal by Reverend James Pine
at the Campus Religious Center and a bunch of students.
So they went to the almost 300 homes that rented at least one room to black students,
and of the 300, only five would sign open occupancy.
That they would rent to anyone regardless of race.
In my research, with the help of some people,
I could find only one example of a racial covenant in a contract in the sale of a home on Country Club Place.
1949 forbade the new owner to sell to a non-caucasian.
However, the leading realtor in that career often, I was told,
would not even see black customers, potential customers.
So perhaps a racial covenant was not needed.
Here's another example.
Professor Ralph Smith and his wife Ellen were helping a new black professor, Charles Morris and his wife Jean,
find a home in the '60s, and there was one for sale on Normal Avenue.
So they went there, and the owner said, "Well, if my neighbors will approve it."
So they went to a whole bunch of the neighbors and almost none of them would approve it,
and one just shouted "no" when they came up.
The two cities--Bloomington-Normal--finally pushed through some strong open-housing laws by the late '60s.
Now, a major help in the drives of that period was the arrival in 1959 of Merlin Kennedy.
Moved here from Detroit, he was the Decatur native.
And he became a foreman at the Eureka factory, president of the local NAACP pretty quickly.
An active member of a new interracial group called "US" that pushed very hard on open housing,
especially public housing sites, and several other issues.
But I remember Merlin most as the "Black Santa."
The NAACP used to use the annual Christmas parade in the '60s, in November in the '60s,
to push their message of integration.
In 1965, their NAACP member Jim Butcher came dressed as a Santa.
Caused quite a stir, and so the mayor of Bloomington issued an order. There's to be one Santa in the parade.
(crowd chuckles)
So in 1966, NAACP had a float,
Merlin Kennedy was on it in a Santa suit, and the police stopped the float from entering the parade,
and Merlin hopped off then and walked with the crowd all the way to the courthouse square out here.
Merlin told me his aim was to get people to recognize that if there are black kids around,
there ought to be a black Santa.
Well, some final thoughts. I've kept you too long.
Many questions remain.
There was only one governmental action, that 1908 park board action.
So was it only the mood of the country spreading here?
Was that responsible for letting racial segregation develop here?
What would have happened, also, without the race riot in Springfield in 1908, and in Chicago in 1919?
And how can we explain the white population's acquiescence?
And all this happened while the NAACP is complaining?
And why is Bloomington-Normal's history of racial segregation such a secret?
Especially among the white population?
Why not point to racial segregation as an important part of our community's past, even if we are ashamed?
As important as Abraham Lincoln's visits, Route 66 coming through,
I think there is a duty of memory, and if we are not willing to erect physical markers
about this key element of our past,
then we should at least refuse to keep it a secret. Thank you very much.
(crowd applauds)
(Jack Muirhead) Thank you very much. If you have questions. I will bring the mic to you, to direct questions to Mark.
(audience member) What needs to be a addressed next?
(Mark) Well, I think we would need to talk to African-American members, but I think there are housing problems, still, that appear.
Sometimes I hear it goes okay, and other times I hear it doesn't.
(audience member) Mark, I was told, I don't know if this is true, maybe you can confirm it, that in 1968,
it was either Malcolm X's assassination of King's,
a president of ISU ordered the flag that was flying moved to half-mast and
construction workers who were building one of the dorms then ran back up and see-sawed back and forth,
and then from that period, one of the black faculty members on campus was beat up.
Is there any truth to that, or am I inventing this?
(Mark) He's a little from the dates. Was that 1970, the flagpole incident? (agreement from crowd)
Year before we came here.
Boy, this gets complicated because the
Black Student Union wanted to name the new student union after Malcolm X,
and they wanted...let's see...a bunch of the Black Panthers had been killed by the police in Chicago,
and they wanted the flag lowered in memory of them.
And the fight then was over raising up the flag or lowering the flag? Right, Charles, was that it?
(Charles) The fight was over lowering the flag to bring attention to the events that were happening in Chicago at the time.
One of students on campus who were relatives of some of the people in Chicago who died, murdered.
I think the answer, then, of injuring to a black staff member was not the result of that.
Was not directly connected to the flag incident. During that time,
when there were demonstrations around the nation, and some universities closed--we did at ISU.
But there were protests on campus at the time, and during on of those nights when the campus was trying to
keep tempers down and control what was going on on campus.
And one of the black staff members, who was trying to do that, was injured by one of the policemen
on the ISU force at the time.
So there were two things that were happening,
and they weren't directly connected.
We did have an incident of a black staff member being injured,
and it was not directly connected to the flag lowering incident.
It happened at another time.
John, do you wanna ask me a question? (chuckle)
(John) I was there, as you know probably,
and bunch of the faculty was
traveling around,
trying to find peace on campus. So I was also there that noon,
and a very dramatic confrontation took place because at the end of campus,
where the bridge is now, the
white hats were gathering on their lunch hour. They came in and raised the flag back to full-staff.
Over in front of the old gymnasium were the black union guys,
and they had sticks with long chains on them. They were making noises with them,
agitating, and I was going along with a bunch of other people in the center, looking at the flagpole,
looking at the white hats out there,
looking at the blacks there, and wondering what was going to happen, and about that time,
just when reaching a dramatic point, suddenly we heard the loud sound of engines,
and every truck that the university owned came pulling up past the football, began circling the flag...
The whole time, "they were circling the wagon," and that created all kinds of applause and cheers from the crowd
and by that time, lunch hour was over,
and maybe the guys with the white hats saw the blacks. Anyway, they went away, and everything simmered down.
Well, they honestly believed that if somebody hadn't brought up the idea of those trucks,
something serious could have happened that day.
(audience member) Can I add just a postscript of this flag business?
My office was in Cook Hall, not far from flagpole, and
this was perhaps several months after these incidents, but I was coming out of my office one morning.
There was an electrician working on the door to Cook Hall, and I said, "What's going on?"
"Oh, we're putting in an automatic flag raiser."
(crowd laugh)
(self-identified) Bob Sutherland. I was present that night, too, that day,
and our President Reagan was the one that brought the trucks, ringing the flagpole.
It's real interesting. The rumors at the time were that the hard hats who came onto campus
were partly a clap got up by some townies in Bloomington, and paid them to come in and do that.
And the flag was low, and
the hard hats raised the flag again, and they cut the lanyard so that it couldn't be lowered again.
And then the students shimmied up the flagpole and got the lanyards and lowered the flag back to half-staff.
And then the trucks circled.
And my memory tells me that there were state police on campus then, too,
brought in to see how things were going to develop,
and our understanding, too, on campus was that President Reagan suffered for this in Springfield,
then the legislators had his scalp for having let the flag be lowered, and for doing all of this,
and he resigned then in a year of so saying it wasn't enjoyable to be the university president anymore.
Yeah, his finest hour came on the night of the Kent State
problem, when the Normal police charged up North Street toward Hovey Hall,
and I think a black faculty member was clubbed,
and two white administrators were clubbed by the Normal police.
Then Braden had said then-mayor Charles Baugh, who very foolishly closed
all the streets around the campus, so the students couldn't get back to their dorms.
They would be arrested when they stepped off the curb.
Braden, there in the rain under his umbrella, told the police, "If your rest any student, you'll have to arrest me, too."
That was Braden's really finest hour, and I think he deserves a lot of credit for having
shepherded ISU through a very difficult period.
("I agree" from audience member)
(audience member) Can you talk about the integration of building and trades organizations when they were turning in the 20th Century sometime?
(Mike) Yeah. I wish Mike Matejka could have been here. He knows a lot about that,
and it certainly went on unevenly here.
But I think the arrival of people like Mike Matejka had such a change. Jack, would you add anything to that?
So I'm sorry, that's something I don't know about. (Jack in background) Yeah?
(audience member) The Penn family did as much to open up hiring with the labor union,
the skilled trades unions were a completely different matter and situation.
Carpenters, no electricians, no...plumbers, yes.
There was a very successful set of African-American plumbers in the community who
did a whole bunch of work for a whole bunch of people.
(Mark) There in the far corner.
(audience member) I had a question about the schools. I went to District 87.
I don't know what truth to it there was, but there was always talk about attempts to beautify the school districts,
and that the reason that I always heard was there was always pushback from Unit Five because they didn't want to do that.
I don't know...
(Mark) I used to hear that, too. I think there's probably more to it than that, but I think that was where
the pushback came from.
(audience member)This isn't a question, just a comment. I think the Fairview Sanitarium building,
I believe, is going to be torn down later this year.
I think everyone in this room should go out there and cheer where that happens after the story he told.
(crowd chuckles)
(audience member) Do you have any information, has a non-Caucasian family ever lived on Country Club Place?
(crowd chuckles)
(Mark) I don't know of any.
Certainly a Jewish family, right?
but non-Caucasian family, I don't know.
Well, oh. Here's one. One more, and then we'll let you go.
(audience member) I don't live on Country Club Place, but I do live on Normal Avenue, and Professor Morris,
he would be more than welcome there today.
(crowd laughs)
Our street is very integrated,
and we have a wonderful community, and it's, you know.
My daughter goes to school with one of his grandsons,
and I think things have changed a little bit. We have a lot further to go, but it's kind of nice.
(Mark) Okay, I think we'll close it. Thank you all very much.
(crowd applauds)
