Articles

By Bill Kemp. Published on August 10, 2014.

The Springfield Race Riot of August 14-15, 1908, when thousands of white residents rampaged through the city’s black areas destroying l...

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...

By Bill Kemp. Published on February 7, 2016.

The 1915 silent film “The Birth of a Nation” is acclaimed today as one of the greatest achievements in motion picture history. At the s...

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...

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...

By Bill Kemp. Published on October 28, 2018.

For the better part of four decades, friends Jacob Welby Bucher and Charles Carroll Fell of Bloomington performed as the popular vaudev...

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 ...

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...

By Bill Kemp. Published on May 5, 2019.

Try as he might, Bloomington Mayor Robert McGraw could not close the Subway Club, an afterhours “set-up” joint on the city’s west side ...

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...

Articles about Racism