Origins

By: Mark Wyman, Ph.D (professor, Illinois State University)

From the arrival of the first African-Americans in McLean County, Illinois, in 1835, until the present, the Bloomington-Normal community has been influenced in its development by the activities of its black citizens. But the story of that influence, of the many ways that African-Americans participated in the life of what became a thriving Central Illinois commercial and educational center, was seldom acknowledged. Their experiences lived on as memories, brought out at family reunions, almost unmentioned in local historical accounts.

This began to change in the late 1960s. The energy and curiosity centered on the African-American past that burst forth around the nation with the Civil Rights movement and the "Roots" narration led to the eventual emergence in Bloomington-Normal of a determined effort to collect and publicize information on the local black community. This brought formation of the Bloomington-Normal Black History Project (BNBHP).

Today that project, connected to the McLean County Historical Museum, operates on a variety of levels and in a variety of formats: it collects materials, holds workshops, sponsors archeological digs (including one at a Tennessee plantation where the slave ancestor of a Bloomington man had lived), features concerts by black performers, presents scholarships to encourage student research, and offers ongoing aid to persons seeking to study the African-American past.

The organization also has prepared transcripts of some eighty interviews conducted over the past thirty years. Recently, the BNBHP has been the guiding force behind preparation of material for a database showing African-American residents of Bloomington-Normal as depicted in the City Directories from 1885-1917.

The first gathering to begin telling the story of the local black community apparently was held in 1969, at the Bloomington Public Library. Planning to write a book, the participants began some collecting and these materials would form the first assembling of artifacts and interviews. Although these early efforts faded after several years, several persons later active in the Black History Project were also active in this earlier endeavor, including Jo Munro, Caribel Washington, Howard and Elaine Bell, Ruth Waddell, and Marge Smith. Early academic leaders were two historians at Illinois State University, Dr. Joseph Durham and Dr. Ira Cohen, and later art professor Dr. William Colvin.

But as that group was going through its rocky early years, another effort-independent and unconnected to the efforts launched in 1969-was taking form through the efforts of an ISU Sociologist in the late 1970s to have students learn folk remedies through interviewing elderly African-Americans. The sociologist was Dr. Mildred Pratt, who became the guiding force behind the eventual formation in 1982 of the Bloomington-Normal Black History Project (BNBHP).

"I was interested in content as well as process," Dr. Pratt commented in discussing those early activities with students. Encouraged by the enthusiastic response among members of the black community, she soon teamed with ISU historian Dr. Stephanie Shaw to organize an extensive interviewing project among elderly African-Americans, seeking some even in the distant cities to which they had migrated after their early years in McLean County.

Excitement over these activities spread, and in addition to the interviews the BNBHP collections grew to include hundreds of photos, records of local churches and such organizations as the "Working Man's Club" and the NAACP; family letters dating back to the slave era; clippings, and artifacts ranging from a black carpenter's homemade cupboard to a 1920s hair-straightener.

By 1988 the collecting and organization work had proceeded to the point where the McLean County Historical Society presented an exhibit in conjunction with the BNBHP, aided by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Illinois Humanities Council, and several local institutions including State Farm Insurance.

That exhibit provided visitors with abundant evidence of the broad, multi-disciplinary approach followed by the BNBHP. Such exhibits around the nation "are generally individualized and splintered," Dr. Pratt noted, but the local activity covers many areas and calls on a wide variety of skills from scholars and laypersons involved. The 1988 exhibit, for example, presented artifacts and information from and about craftsmen, quilters, churches, fashion, home life, parlors, business, military and clubs, in addition to remnants of the slave era.

A scholarly conference in conjunction with that 1988 exhibit provided several scholars an opportunity to evaluate both the project and the local African-American community. More than 4,000 persons toured the exhibits, and one visitor who had visited other African-American history exhibits concluded: "Never have I seen such a broad array in a Black history exhibit."

The increased cooperation between the BNBHP and the McLean County Historical Society was cited by the Congress of Illinois Historical Societies and Museums in 1990 when it presented the historical society with its top award for special projects. Three grants have come from the Illinois Humanities Council.

After Dr. Pratt retired from teaching, leadership in the BNBHP passed to Caribel Washington, who served as president for several years and continues an active role in the organization. Both ISU and IWU continue to provide members and leadership, seen in current treasurer Monica Taylor (IWU), secretary Mark Wyman (ISU), and historian Pam Muirhead (IWU). Current co-presidents are Willie Tripp and Reginald Whittaker. Other current officers are co-vice presidents Diana McCauley and Jean McCrossin and historian Jack Muirhead.

By the opening of the new century in 2001 the BNBHP collections were extensive enough and well-known enough to attract researchers from the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, seeking information on blacks in small Midwestern towns as it created an exhibit of a black homestead for its Old World Wisconsin outdoor museum.

Other topics which can be followed in the collections include differing viewpoints on community life in general, regardless of race; the homefront during America's wars from the Spanish-American War onward (and black soldiers' experiences during those conflicts); religion; economic life in boom times and Depression; housing; education; social life; medical care and health; athletics; discrimination; civil rights activities; children, and many others.

Research is ongoing into census materials and city directories. They have helped determine the number and location of the twin cities' African-Americans, because from 1885-1917 the City Directories listed a (C) or (N) for "Colored" or "Negro" after the names of blacks. The McLean County Genealogical Society is publishing this information in a booklet, using the results of earlier work by Caribel Washington in transcribing some 7,000 hand-written cards from the directories.

Artifact collecting continues, as families seek to preserve photos, letters, and clippings as well as home and work objects. Clippings files document the increasing civil rights activity that led to desegregation of Bloomington-Normal's restaurants and public facilities in the 1950s and 1960s. A prize among the collected letters is an 1858 written request from a slave to a slave owner, asking for her "sayso" that he might marry a woman who was her slave; it had survived in family records.

Archeological digs have provided further artifacts, and also much local publicity for the BNBHP as co-sponsor. The first, in 1991, was conducted by ISU's Midwest Archeological Research Center at the Tennessee plantation which had been home to the slave ancestors of some Bloomington African-Americans. In 1993 a dig was held at Wayman A.M.E. Church, and two digs were conducted on property of the Barton family in Normal, whose nursery man ancestor was recruited to migrate there by the town's founder in the Civil War era.

At the heart of the project-and much used by researchers--is the oral history collection, numbering some eighty taped interviews with transcripts. While most of these center on descriptions of life for Bloomington-Normal's black population from the early 20th Century onward, some venture into recollections passed down from the slavery era, as well as discussions of more contemporary events.

In one such account, a retired man recalls his fourteen-hour segregated bus trip from St. Louis to a Southern military post soon after his induction into the Army in World War II-when the deputy sheriff in one small Southern town forced the uniformed soldier back onto the bus at gunpoint, forbidding him from either eating or using the restroom there.

Continuing to branch out, the BNBHP in recent years has helped sponsor and participate in Juneteenth celebrations held on the IWU campus.

But the importance of the work of the BNBHP and its predecessor can perhaps be best evaluated in the answer given by Greg Koos, executive director of the historical society, when asked how many artifacts from the community's black population were present in the museum's collections before the efforts began in the 1970s: "We had one artifact then."

Today a large and broad array of materials awaits researchers visiting the Bloomington-Normal Black History Project collections in the McLean County Historical Museum, 200 N. Main St., Bloomington, IL 61701.

BNBHP Collection Finding Aid

Bloomington-Normal Black History Project

Finding aid for the 6-box archival collection

Oral Histories

Wilbur Barton

Early Normal family, ISNU grad & athlete, WWII veteran, teacher/principal.

Howard and Elaine Bell

Early Bloomington family, WWII veteran, Depression era history, Elaine was active in community service.

Richard and Rose Bell

Business owner and farmer, Rose Anna from early McLean County family, Illinois Soldiers & Sailors Home, domestic.

Robert and Lillian Augusta Boykin

Social clubs, Union Baptist Church, domestic, yard & railroad work, farm life & sharecropping in the South.

Lue Anna Clark

Father was enslaved, WWI era restaurant business, boarding of ISNU students

Kathyrn Dean

State Farm employee, civic & social clubs, grandfather was Civil War veteran.

Robert Gaston

Barber, WWII veteran, Chamber of Commerce Board member.

Claude Hursey

Claude Hursey was born in Mississippi, the son of a Greek father and an African-American mother. His mother brought her son to Bloomington when he was about thirteen. His memories of Bloomington at the time of the World War I and after are very strong.

Merlin and Beulah Kennedy

Active in civil rights, NAACP, Youth Council, employment & housing issues.

Ethel Murray

Ethel Murray was born in Lincoln. She remembers a childhood relatively free from racial prejudice. However, her home was near the gathering place for the Ku Klux Klan. She moved to Bloomington in her late teenage years and began to do day work in domestic service. At one point she was a full-time worker for Mrs. Hazel Buck Ewing.

Lucinda Posey

Pre-Civil war Bloomington family, Dir. of Medical Records (Brokaw Hospital), community & civic boards, Mt. Pisgah Baptist Church.

Roy and Delores Shavers

Melody Gospel Choir, African-American business in Bloomington & Clinton, St. Mary's Catholic Church.

Oscar and Ruth Waddell

WWII veteran, skilled employment at GE, breaking employment barriers, home ownership, Willis Stearles

Caribel Washington

Caribel Washington lived most of her life in Bloomington.  She graduated from Bloomington High School during the Depression, and then for several years worked in a WPA educational program for preschool children. Later she worked at State Farm Insurance when opportunities for Blacks there were very limited. 

Josephine Samuels & Reginald Whittaker

Normal, IL family, business, work at Woolworth's, GTE, Baha'i

Related Resources

History Of African Americans In McLean County

This book was originally written for students. Primarily, it was intended to provide information about our community that was not widely known. It was also intended to expose students to the wide range of historical resources that are easily available to all of us and from which we can learn much about our community. Now it has been revised and expanded with the hope that it will be of interest to a wider audience.

MLA:
“History Of African Americans In McLean County.” McLean County Museum of History, 1998, https://archive.org/details/historyofafricanamericansinmcleancounty. Accessed 05 Oct. 2024.
APA:
History Of African Americans In McLean County (1998). McLean County Museum of History, https://archive.org/details/historyofafricanamericansinmcleancounty
Chicago:
“History Of African Americans In McLean County.” McLean County Museum of History. 1998. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/historyofafricanamericansinmcleancounty

History of the Illinois Association of Club Women and Girls, Inc. 1901-1975

In presenting to the Illinois Association of Club Women and Girls, Inc. this history, we must first relate the records of the pioneer women, who gave to us their organized efforts and accomplishments.

MLA:
“History of the Illinois Association of Club Women and Girls, Inc. 1901-1975.” McLean County Museum of History, 1975, https://archive.org/details/rubyedwards. Accessed 05 Oct. 2024.
APA:
History of the Illinois Association of Club Women and Girls, Inc. 1901-1975 (1975). McLean County Museum of History, https://archive.org/details/rubyedwards
Chicago:
“History of the Illinois Association of Club Women and Girls, Inc. 1901-1975.” McLean County Museum of History. 1975. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/rubyedwards

McLean County Blacks in the Civil War

Examines the extent of involvement of Black people from McLean County, Illinois in the Civil War. Previous research has indicated there were about 20 Black males from McLean County who enlisted in "colored regiments." This paper will show the number of Black males who enlisted during the war is probably closer to 39 and the number who died in battle or of disease totaled 13. After the war, at least 29 Black veterans who had served in a variety of regiments, moved into the county.

MLA:
“McLean County Blacks in the Civil War.” McLean County Museum of History, , https://archive.org/details/mclean-county-blacks-civil-war. Accessed 05 Oct. 2024.
APA:
McLean County Blacks in the Civil War (). McLean County Museum of History, https://archive.org/details/mclean-county-blacks-civil-war
Chicago:
“McLean County Blacks in the Civil War.” McLean County Museum of History. . Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/mclean-county-blacks-civil-war

Pictorial Souvenir Central Illinois 1912

From the foreword: "The purpose of this book is to bring before the people, in a brief way, the colored professional and business men and women, who are striving onward, and whose lives and endeavors are worthy of emulation." 

MLA:
“Pictorial Souvenir Central Illinois 1912.” McLean County Museum of History, 1912, https://archive.org/details/pictorialsouvenir1912. Accessed 05 Oct. 2024.
APA:
Pictorial Souvenir Central Illinois 1912 (1912). McLean County Museum of History, https://archive.org/details/pictorialsouvenir1912
Chicago:
“Pictorial Souvenir Central Illinois 1912.” McLean County Museum of History. 1912. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/pictorialsouvenir1912

Zoom: Black History BINGO

This virtual program engages students in the names, faces, and places of Black history in McLean County. A partner program with the...

Presence, Pride, and Passion: A History of African Americans in McLean County

Despite Illinois laws that were not friendly to Blacks, African Americans chose to make McLean County their home as early as the 1830s. 

MLA:
“Presence, Pride, and Passion: A History of African Americans in McLean County.” McLean County Museum of History, 2009, https://archive.org/details/PPPBook. Accessed 05 Oct. 2024.
APA:
Presence, Pride, and Passion: A History of African Americans in McLean County (2009). McLean County Museum of History, https://archive.org/details/PPPBook
Chicago:
“Presence, Pride, and Passion: A History of African Americans in McLean County.” McLean County Museum of History. 2009. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/PPPBook

The William Carey Barton Family: A Study in Historical Archaeology

Between June 14 and June 30, 1994 archaeological investigations were carried out at the old William Carey Barton home at 304 East Cherry Street, Normal, Illinois under sponsorship of the McLean County Historical Society and the Bloomington-Normal Black History Project.

MLA:
“The William Carey Barton Family: A Study in Historical Archaeology.” McLean County Museum of History, 1996, https://archive.org/details/barton-family-archaeology. Accessed 05 Oct. 2024.
APA:
The William Carey Barton Family: A Study in Historical Archaeology (1996). McLean County Museum of History, https://archive.org/details/barton-family-archaeology
Chicago:
“The William Carey Barton Family: A Study in Historical Archaeology.” McLean County Museum of History. 1996. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/barton-family-archaeology

Wayman AME Church A 175 Year Jubilant Journey Book

We are on a “Jubilant Journey” that has covered 175 years of ministering in McLean County. We are a church in the heart of the city developing a heart for the city.

MLA:
“Wayman AME Church A 175 Year Jubilant Journey Book.” McLean County Museum of History, 2018, https://archive.org/details/wayman-church-a-175-year-jubilant-journey-book. Accessed 05 Oct. 2024.
APA:
Wayman AME Church A 175 Year Jubilant Journey Book (2018). McLean County Museum of History, https://archive.org/details/wayman-church-a-175-year-jubilant-journey-book
Chicago:
“Wayman AME Church A 175 Year Jubilant Journey Book.” McLean County Museum of History. 2018. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/wayman-church-a-175-year-jubilant-journey-book

Wayman AME Church: One Hundred Fifty Years Of History

History of Wayman AME Church, including past clergy and an archaeological dig of the Center St. church.

MLA:
“Wayman AME Church: One Hundred Fifty Years Of History.” McLean County Museum of History, 1993, https://archive.org/details/wayman-church-one-hundred-fifty-years-of-history. Accessed 05 Oct. 2024.
APA:
Wayman AME Church: One Hundred Fifty Years Of History (1993). McLean County Museum of History, https://archive.org/details/wayman-church-one-hundred-fifty-years-of-history
Chicago:
“Wayman AME Church: One Hundred Fifty Years Of History.” McLean County Museum of History. 1993. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/wayman-church-one-hundred-fifty-years-of-history

Wayman AME150th Anniversary Book

MLA:
“Wayman AME150th Anniversary Book.” McLean County Museum of History, 1993, https://archive.org/details/wayman-church-150th-anniversary-book. Accessed 05 Oct. 2024.
APA:
Wayman AME150th Anniversary Book (1993). McLean County Museum of History, https://archive.org/details/wayman-church-150th-anniversary-book
Chicago:
“Wayman AME150th Anniversary Book.” McLean County Museum of History. 1993. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/wayman-church-150th-anniversary-book

Bloomington-Normal Black History Project

An affiliate organization of the McLean County Museum of History

Bloomington-Normal Black History Project

Finding aid for the 6-box archival collection

Black History Resource List

A Google Doc containing links to various local Black history resources such as articles, podcasts, videos, finding aids, images, and more!

Bloomington-Normal Black History Project Photos

Photo collection on the Illinois Digital Archive

Wayman AME Church Archaeology

In the summer of 1992, an archeological excavation was conducted at the Wayman A.M.E. (African Methodist Episcopal) Church at 806 N....