President Biden designated a national monument on Friday at the site of a 1908 race riot that laid waste to a Black community in Springfield, Ill., joining civil rights leaders and state lawmakers at the White House to commemorate the 116th anniversary of the rampage.
The proclamation comes as Mr. Biden looks to burnish his legacy during his remaining months in office. It also takes place nearly six weeks after the police shooting of Sonya Massey, a 36-year old Springfield resident, whose death renewed national conversations surrounding racism and police violence and drew a direct reproof from the White House.
“Sonya’s death at the hands of a responding officer reminds us that all too often Black Americans face fears for their safety in ways many of the rest of us do not,” Mr. Biden said in a statement after the shooting last month. “Sonya’s family deserves justice.”
The two-day riot in 1908 was started by a white lynch mob that arrived at a local jail to kill two Black men being held there, and that then flew into a frenzy after learning that the men had been transferred to another facility. The furor — which occurred not far from Abraham Lincoln’s home — killed several people, destroyed dozens of Black homes and businesses, and required scores of Illinois state militiamen to put down. Outrage at the racial violence spurred the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The group asked last year that the president recognize the site, and the process continued through a National Park Service study of homes burned during the riot and other surviving structures near the Madison Street and 10th Street rail corridor in the city. The designation on Friday will protect about 1.57 acres of federal land in the vicinity.
At the ceremony on Friday, Mr. Biden stressed the importance of acknowledging moments of racial violence in American history.
“It’s important that everybody walk by this area and know what happened, because it can happen again,” he said, pounding on the Resolute Desk for emphasis.
Senator Tammy Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois, who appeared beside the president, said the proclamation was a testament to the role that Midwestern states had played in the civil rights movement and the legacy of the N.A.A.C.P.
“Good things can come out of bad things, as long as you don’t forget what happened,” she said.
Mr. Biden designated the site through his authority from the Antiquities Act, a 1906 law intended to prevent the looting of Native American artifacts from archaeological sites that has been more recently used to convert public land into national monuments.
The signing of the proclamation was the second time Mr. Biden had used the act to preserve a site for its importance to the civil rights movement. The first was the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, which was established last year to honor Mr. Till, a teenager whose murder galvanized the civil rights movement, and his mother. That monument encompasses sites in Mississippi and Illinois.
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Wednesday that the president had long considered the designation of the Springfield site “critically important” and in keeping with “telling the full story of America.”
“We have made great strides to march toward full equality,” she said, “but America has never lived up to it in its entirety.”
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