“Variations in Black”: Eureka’s Stories – February 7, 2008

Image: http://ww1.eureka.edu/emp/jrodrig/webpage/racism.bmp

[Note: Today’s account contains racist language from the early-twentieth century that is used only in the spirit of historical accuracy.]

Sometimes it is all too easy to view our history through rose-colored glasses, but doing so can lead to an inaccurate assessment of our essential core values. Although we know who we want to be, it becomes difficult for us to gloss over those inconsistencies that reflect a different perception of self. We want to be the product of the abolitionist founders, we want to be the heirs of the nineteenth century reformers, but we sometimes have to swallow the bitter medicine that makes us realize that our thoughts, deeds, and actions have not always been the most pure. As collective sinners, we all stumble at times.

It is hard to understand why a farm machinery company in Eureka, Illinois, would advertise its services in the 1880s on a business card that reflected one of the worst caricatures of the Jim Crow South. From our modern-day vantage point, we cannot fathom what population demographic in central Illinois might appeal to such a marketing strategy. Today, for lack of a better term, the approach seems just plain dumb.

Racism was never an attitude that remained exclusive to the U.S. South. Even during the antebellum era it was common for many of the Midwestern states – Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois – to enact “Black Laws” that placed severe social and economic limitations upon the free blacks who resided in those states. These laws, which were akin to the later “Jim Crow” laws found in the post-Reconstruction South, were alive and well and functioning in the 1850s when Eureka College was founded and the town of Eureka was chartered. Legal restrictions existed even in the “Land of Lincoln” that made free blacks somewhat less than completely free.

The levels of racism within northern communities were often reflected by the practices followed in local cemeteries as some towns and villages sought to maintain segregated burial grounds. Eureka’s Olio Cemetery, located immediately to the southwest of the Eureka College campus, is somewhat unusual in that it is an integrated cemetery. Prominent black citizens of the community were buried in Olio Cemetery and up until the 1910s the local newspaper ran prominent stories and obituaries that documented this practice. By the 1920s, racial attitudes hardened in central Illinois with the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan. During the 1920s, the editor of the Pekin Times was a Klansman, and he used his newspaper to advance the causes of his organization. Here in Eureka, burials of black citizens continued as they had previously, but some changes were made. Local newspapers no longer carried obituaries of black burials, such burials were often made at unmarked gravesites, and record books in Olio Cemetery identified the deceased often by an anonymous “X” rather than by a specific name. Racial tensions had hardened to that point in central Illinois. (The 1890 census identified 120 black residents as living in Woodford County, but the 1920 census identified only two.)

Other factors indicate the relative rise of racism in central Illinois, and more particularly, here at Eureka College. In 1917, the edition of The Eureklan, the college yearbook, contained a blatantly racist poem titled “Sleep My Little Nigger.” The poem had been written by Rex Hieronymus, an English major who was also the son of a former president of the College, Robert E. Hieronymus. Using horrific terms and phrases – “pickaninny . . . kinky headed coon . . . niggah . . . coal black boy . . . chicken . . . watahmellon” – the poem tries to mimic the stereotypical dialect of the plantation-era South. It is hard to imagine how an editorial board would approve of such a poem today. Even harder to fathom is the desire that one would place such a poem in a publication of record like a college yearbook.

When we reckon with history we must acknowledge our feats as well as our foibles. The poet Maya Angelou has stated that “Prejudice is a burden which confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible.” Clearly, ours is a burdened history.