Articles about Black History
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Early African-American doctor faced segregated Twin Cities
By Bill Kemp. Published on January 31, 2016.
African-American physician Eugene G. Covington came to Bloomington about 1900 to open a medical practice. This being thir...
Duke Ellington big draw in Twin Cities
By Bill Kemp. Published on June 5, 2016.
Someone once said, presumably half in earnest and half in jest, that American contributions to world culture could be reduced to three ...
‘Black Devils’ earned fame in WW I
By Bill Kemp. Published on April 30, 2017.
During World War I, several dozen Bloomington-Normal residents fought in an African-American regiment that earned a reputation for brav...
Emancipation Day once Black community’s July 4th
By Bill Kemp. Published on May 21, 2017.
In the years before the Civil War and for several decades afterward, Bloomington’s African-American community embraced alternatives to ...
Buffaloes battled for respect on hardwood court
By Bill Kemp. Published on December 31, 2017.
In late October 1921, the Bloomington Buffaloes, a “colored” basketball team, defeated a rival club called the Independents by the scor...
Black farm family prominent in Bellflower Township
By Bill Kemp. Published on September 12, 2018.
McLean County farmland has always had a relatively high rate of tenancy—from the earliest years of the county’s establishment to the pr...
Bloomington schools integrated decade after Civil War
By Bill Kemp. Published on February 10, 2019.
Although racially segregated schools are associated with the “Jim Crow” Deep South and the Civil Rights Movement, northern communities ...
Central Illinois final resting place for once-enslaved persons
By Bill Kemp. Published on March 17, 2019.
The stain of slavery pervades the American experience, dating well before the nation’s founding to the present. Yet the all-encompassin...
ISU held racially segregated spring dances in the 1930s and ’40s
By Bill Kemp. Published on April 28, 2019.
The racial climate throughout the United States deteriorated steadily in the first quarter of the 20th century. During this period, Jim...
Sojourner Truth spoke in Bloomington
By Bill Kemp. Published on September 15, 2019.
One hundred and forty years ago this week, on Sept. 18, 1879, the incomparable Sojourner Truth spoke at Second Presbyterian Church in d...
Washington Home couple worked ‘through the heart’
By Bill Kemp. Published on September 22, 2019.
“Cooks and counselors, painters and referees, they are also mom and pop to up to twenty children,” it was said of Louise and Napoleon C...
Joe Johnson, self-appointed Courthouse ‘traffic director’
By Bill Kemp. Published on January 26, 2020.
In the 1960s and into the early 1970s, visitors to the McLean County Courthouse would see two figures stationed at the center of the ma...