What does Springfield, Illinois in 1908 tell us about Springfield, Ohio in 2024? • Ohio Capital Journal

Lying about black people is nothing new in political campaigns.

Despite thoroughly debunking false rumors that Haitian immigrants ate cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, former President Donald Trump and his Republican allies insist on repeating the lies.

“If I have to create stories,” admitted JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, “that’s what I’m going to do.”

While many political observers believe that these lies have finally, as New York Times columnist Lydia Polgreen described, “crossed a truly unacceptable line,” white politicians have been telling shameless, fear-mongering, and racist lies about black people for the past hundred years. year.

One of the most infamous lies took place in 1908 in another Springfield, this one in Illinois. As a historian who studies the impact of racism on democracy, I believe what happened there and in other cities helps illuminate what Trump and Vance are trying to do today in Springfield, Ohio.

Lying when everyone knows you’re lying seems to be the idea.

New purpose, old message

Springfield, Illinois, the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, was a working-class town in 1908 with a population of just under 50,000—about the same size as its modern counterpart in Ohio.

Because of the city’s manufacturing industries, Springfield was also an attractive place to live and work for black men and women escaping the social oppression of the Deep South.

Springfield’s black population grew by about 4% annually, and by 1908 about 2,500 black people lived there to work in the city’s factories. As the wealth of some black families increased, so did racist fears among whites that black migrants would take their jobs.

Rumors spread through false newspaper reports among white residents that a black man had raped a white woman.

As the story went, a black man broke through the screen door of a modest home in a white neighborhood. He allegedly dragged a 21-year-old white woman by her throat to the backyard, where he raped her. Or at least that’s what the woman said.

A few weeks after the incident, the woman admitted that she had lied. There was no black man. There was no rape. But by then, telling the truth was too late. The rumor had caused a wave of anti-black violence.

William English Walling, a white, liberal journalist from Kentucky, reported that the white people of Springfield “made deadly attacks on every negro they could lay their hands on, to pillage and pillage their houses and stores, and to burn and murder.”

The violence raged for two days as white “affluent businessmen” looked on complicitly, Walling wrote. Several blocks in black neighborhoods were burned to the ground and at least eight black men were killed.

One of the murdered men was William K. Donnegan. The 84-year-old died after his white attackers slit his throat and then hung him with a clothesline from a tree near his home.

As a dozen different rioters told Walling, “Well, the N—–s started thinking they were as good as us!”

Telling the truth about racist tropes

In the early 19th century, racial tensions were usually expressed in sexual terms: black men had sex with white women.

That sexual fear was part of what cultural historians call a “master narrative,” a symbolic story that dramatizes white nationalism and the belief that citizenship and its benefits were preserved for one racial group at the expense of all others.

One of the first to debunk this rape fantasy was Ida B. Wells, the black editor and owner of the weekly magazine Memphis Free Press.

In 1892, a white mob lynched one of her close friends, Thomas Moss, and two others associated with his cooperative Peoples’ Grocery store. The Appeal Avalanche, a white newspaper from Memphis, wrote that the lynching was “done decently and in order.”

In her May 21, 1892 editorial on Moss’s death, Wells told another story about “the same old racket – the new alarm about raping a white woman.”

Wells explained that she worried that people living outside the Deep South would believe the lies about black people.

“No one in this part of the country,” she wrote, not even the demagogues who spread rumors, “believes the old lie that Negro men rape white women.”

Political fear mongering

What happened in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898 was based on a deliberate, cynical election strategy of lies.

In the early 20th century, North Carolina’s disaffected, poor, working-class white populists joined forces with black Republicans to form what became known as the Fusionists.

In Wilmington, then the largest city in North Carolina, the Fusionists were able to vote out the white-nationalist Democratic Party in the early 1890s and became a symbol of hope for a democratic South and racial equality.

They also became a target for Democrats seeking to regain power and restore white nationalism.

The spark came in the summer of 1898 when Rebecca Felton, the wife of a Georgian congresswoman and a leading advocate for women’s rights, gave a speech to Georgia’s Agricultural Society on August 11 in which she sought to protect the virtues of white women.

“If lynching is necessary,” she said, “to protect a woman’s dearest possession from the ravening beasts, then I say lynching; a thousand times a week if necessary.”

In response, Alexander Manly, the black editor of The Daily Record, in Wilmington, followed Ida B. Wells’ example and attacked the myths of black men. Manly pointed out in his August 1898 editorial that poor white women “are no more particular in the question of clandestine meetings with colored men than the white men are with colored women.”

Democrats eager to stoke racial fear distributed Manly’s editorial throughout North Carolina before the November 1898 election, denouncing the “scandalous attack on white women!” disapproved. by “the rude Negro editor.”

As if that weren’t enough to roil North Carolina Democrats, party officials sent the Red Shirts, their white nationalist militia, to Wilmington to overthrow the city’s biracial government, install all white officials and end white rule. restore.

To this end, a white mob destroyed Manly’s newspaper office, drove him and other black leaders into exile, rampaged through black neighborhoods and killed untold numbers of black men.

It was a white nationalist coup.

The great white protector

In his contemporary effort to separate the white working class from the black working class, Vance has urged his supporters to ignore “the crybabies” in the mainstream media.

“Keep the cat memes flowing!” he posted on X.

An estimated 67 million people watched the US presidential debate on ABC and heard Trump angrily proclaim: “They’re eating the dogs. They eat the cats. They eat…the pets of the people who live there.”

Once again the old story is brought back to life.

Joseph Patrick Kelly, professor of literature and director of Irish and Irish American Studies, College of Charleston

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.