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RACIAL SEGREGATION HAS LONG BEEN PORTRAYED as confined to the Deep South. But an examination of the past of the Central Illinois twin cities of Bloomington and Normal reveals that it was once a solid part of life there also. And other evidence indicates that segregation was widely practiced in towns and cities around the state and Midwest as well. For it is clear: Illinois cannot shake its collective finger at the South regarding racial segregation.
It was Willie Tripp, then president of the Black History Project at the McLean County Museum of History in Bloomington, who attempted to pierce through the fog surrounding the issue, when he commented some years ago, "People don't know how bad it was. Even black kids don't know how bad it was."1
How bad was it for African Americans in Bloomington-Normal? This article will examine how segregation developed in a community where the antislavery movement had been growing up to 1865 and where it remained strong long after the Civil War. And this change came despite having only one significant, community-wide race-based action by a local governmental unit in its modern history. Segregation's spread in the 1910s and 1920s will be surveyed, and its eventual, uneven termination in the years of World War II through the 1960s. Our research has found that Willie Tripp was right-today few people living in the community know "how bad it was." But it is true that segregation had an important part in the community's history; indeed, it constitutes an extensive chapter.
That chapter includes some sections that would seem to be from the Deep South-blacks required to sit in the back rows at movie houses, blacks not admitted into restaurants and hotels, and a visiting black soloist surrounded with screens in a restaurant so other patrons would not see him. And in the mid-1970s, after an African American historian at Illinois State University left to take a job in the South, his wife told a friend, "At least in the South, we know where the line is." These and many similar tales are all part of the history of Bloomington-Normal. But these stories are almost forgotten today.2
In larger cities, the racial record can usually be uncovered with moderate research. But for most...