In Chicago’s Haymarket Square, anarchists gathered to protest the police killing of labor strikers. When police attempted to end the demonstration, a bomb was thrown and exploded in the crowd. In the ensuing clash, police fired into the crowd and eight policemen and several protestors were killed and many more injured.
The Chicago Defender was an influential black newspaper founded in 1905 that, during the early and mid-twentieth century, was a major force in encouraging the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North.
The mythologizing of Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), which began almost immediately after his assassination, placed him in the pantheon of American heroes alongside George Washington. But behind the legend of “Honest Abe”—country raconteur, log cabin president, compassionate father figure, and, finally, national martyr—was a shrewd legal mind, astute politician, and adept student of human psychology. Though he lost his first senatorial election to Stephen Douglas in 1858, the Republican Lincoln outmaneuvered Douglas during the campaign by...
Emmett Till (1941–1955) was a fourteen-year-old African American from Chicago who was brutally murdered in rural Mississippi in 1955. Till was in Mississippi to visit relatives, and on August 24, 1955, he spoke to or whistled at a female grocery store cashier. Four days later the woman’s husband and his half brother abducted Till and beat him severely before shooting him and dumping his body into a river. The murderers were quickly arrested, but they were acquitted at trial by an all-white, all-male jury.
Barack Obama (1961– ) is the forty-fourth president of the United States. Before becoming the first African American elected to the nation’s highest office, Obama attended Columbia University and earned a law degree from Harvard. He also worked as a community organizer in Chicago for several years and in 1997 became a member of the Illinois senate. He was elected to the US Senate in 2004, and that same year his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention lifted Obama into the national spotlight. In 2007 he announced his candidacy...
Dred Scott (1795–1858) was a Missouri slave who sued for his freedom in 1846. While the slave of an Army surgeon, Scott had lived in the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin. Scott claimed that his residence on free soil had erased his slave status. In 1850 a Missouri court gave Scott his freedom, but two years later the Missouri supreme court reversed this decision and returned Scott to slavery. He appealed to the US Supreme Court, which ruled against him in 1857. After the decision, Scott's owner freed him and Scott...
The Lincoln-Douglas debates were a series of seven joint discussions between Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, and Stephen A. Douglas, a Democrat, held during the summer and fall of 1858 in Illinois. Lincoln and Douglas had been debating each other for more than twenty years before their famous contest for the U.S. Senate in 1858. They were...
Wilson, Douglas L. Lincoln before Washington: New Perspectives on the Illinois Years. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998.