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An 1853 law gave Black people 10 days to leave Illinois: You were never taught this history and a Northwestern project hopes to change that

If you were a free Black person moving through the antebellum United States, at least in theory, you faced a handful of stark options: Settle in a slaveholding Southern state, venture out into the vast unknown plains of the West, move into abolitionist New York or New England, or take a chance on one of the supposedly free states of the Midwest.

By 1848, according to the Illinois Constitution, slavery did not exist within its borders. On the other hand, some Illinois newspapers ran notices identifying runaway slaves so former owners could find them. And in 1853, a 26-year-old state representative from southern Illinois named John Logan — whose family had a reputation for grabbing runaway slaves — introduced what would eventually pass and become known as the Logan’s Black Law.

Its message was loud: From here on, Illinois did not welcome Black people.

For the 12 years the law remained active, any Black person who migrated into Illinois had 10 days to leave; if they didn’t, they were fined $10. And if they couldn’t pay, they were subject to being sold at auction. In return for covering their fine, the purchaser could demand labor, without pay, for however long a judge decided.

The case for the law sounds familiar in 2022: Supporters claimed Black people would be a drag on the Illinois public dole, generate crime and take the jobs of white people. Neighboring Ohio and Indiana began passing similar laws that said Black people couldn’t testify against white people, that refused Black people the right to vote and that excluded any Black child from getting a public education.

The funny thing, in Illinois, is those new laws brought Black residents together.

Ten months after Logan’s Black Law passed, in Chicago, in a hall near Randolph and Clark streets, Black Illinoisans from across the state gathered for the first time. It was the Chicago edition of the so-called Colored Conventions Movement of the 19th century, which started in Philadelphia in 1830. The Black population of Chicago was small then. In 1837, there were only 77 Black residents; but 20 years later, there were just 7,500, statewide. The Black Law became an existential threat to the future of Black Illinois.

Delegates to the convention wondered openly if they should just leave the country. The proposal was nixed, and instead, they organized and protested. But they also discussed emancipation, education, labor, health care, the courts, voting rights and women’s rights.

Even as slavery remained legal throughout the South, they planned a different future.

Or to put it another way, before Black Lives Matter, Black Power, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois and the NAACP, there were the Colored Conventions.

You’ve never heard of them.

Probably most of us have not, said Kate Masur, an Oak Park native and history professor at Northwestern University who specializes in the United States before 1900. “I would venture to say, what Illinoisans know about the history of African Americans in Illinois begins and ends with the Great Migration. What’s taught in classrooms about the 1840s and ’50s? Slavery. Even now I hear, ‘How do I not know this history of the Midwest?'”

So, two years ago, Masur and a handful of Northwestern undergraduates and graduate students started work on an online exhibition of sorts, part of an even larger archive that now spans several universities and museums, to document the radical importance of the Colored Conventions movement, one of our first nationwide conversations on race. Recently launched, their website (coloredconventions.org/black-illinois-organizing) does not have the sexiest title: “Black Organizing in Pre-Civil War Illinois: Creating Community, Demanding Justice.” But its history is more accessible than academic and its intent is ambitious: No less than a reframing of Black Illinois itself.

There are two dozen profiles of Black residents in the 19th century, and histories of local Black churches, and vintage photographs of early Black communities, and data visualizations of settlement patterns of Blacks in Illinois, and charts tracing the growth of independent schools, and interactive maps that reveal where the Underground Railroad operated within Chicago — all of it centered on the conventions.

And that’s just the Illinois website.

“In terms of Black activism, we have an overly prevalent cultural image that real Black organizing only started in the 20th century,” said Mikala Stokes, a Northwestern Ph.D. candidate in history who worked on the project with Masur. “There’s a lack of understanding of how many Black people there were before the Civil War who had their freedom. The vast majority of Black Americans were enslaved, but that free population was not insignificant, and they were asking a question: What does it mean to be free and Black in a slaveholding republic? They were reaching hearts and minds out there.

“So much of the national focus was on the anti-slavery debate — yet as the country heads toward the 20th century, there’s also talk of Black citizenship, conversation about how African Americans helped build the country itself, there’s an argument about whether the U.S. Constitution is pro-slavery, and if our policies are incongruent with founding American principles. The delegates in Chicago are making hypocrisies stand out. The idea that African Americans are American — that doesn’t form out of thin air.”

The Colored Conventions Project started in 2012 with P. Gabrielle Foreman, a Hyde Park native and African American Studies professor at the University of Delaware; she’s now at Penn State, and co-director of the Center for Black Digital Research. A decade on, at least 2,500 academics have worked on the project, creating 18 online exhibitions.

“Why have we not heard enough about this early activism?” asked Foreman in a phone interview. “I think it’s because it’s not the kind of uplifting U.S. history that allows for the nice beautiful tidy arc that ends in something good — like the ending of slavery. These conventions were taking place in nearly every U.S. state and territory and instead of ending triumphantly and decisively, you read about the people who organized them, and their struggles, and what they argued about and you have to wonder: Why we are still arguing for basic things Black people were arguing for 70 years, in the 19th century.”

The project began with one of her classes, she said. “We were studying the networks of Black activism, and someone said, ‘Why aren’t we focusing on women at all here?’ Which was a good question.”

Black women had been instrumental in organizing the conventions, so the class voted to continue studying the history of the conventions. While Masur was working on a book that touched on those subjects — “Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction,” published last spring — she was “taken with the depth of documentation that Gabrielle’s project included,” which led to Masur teaching a Northwestern class on the Convention Movement.

The exhibit that Masur and her team recently completed is a model example of what her project intended, Foreman said, not merely a snapshot of a movement but something that captures a time. “Really, it’s allowing us to see how questions of Black rights and white supremacy, which are so much a part of American history, were not just Southern or Northern issues but also central to the growth of the Midwest.”

Among the more than two dozen families and delegates profiled in the exhibit, many were born enslaved, coming into Illinois from Kentucky and Missouri, settling near the Mississippi River. They became farmers and blacksmiths and barbers. Looking to create community, they also formed schools and churches and built businesses.

Chicago was not the hub of these early settlements, and yet some of the delegates laid the framework for the Chicago to come. James Bonner, an early Chicago activist who served as the Cook County delegate to the convention, was instrumental in building a new home for Quinn Chapel in what became the South Loop; it’s still the oldest Black church in the city (though the chapel that Bonner helped establish was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871). Mary Richardson Jones — whose home hosted Frederick Douglass when he was in town (including when he attended the convention) — sheltered fugitive slaves, raised money for the families of Black soldiers, created a Chicago literary society and served as a mentor to a much better-known Chicago activist, Ida B. Wells.

“I was really surprised by the interconnectedness of these people then,” said Marquis Taylor, a Ph.D. student who worked closely with Stokes on laying out the narrative of the Chicago convention itself. “Though they were facing these laws at home, they had railroads, and they were very much concerned about what was happening across the country. You had people from all over coming to the convention here. There’s a letter from one of the conventioneers apologizing to Frederick Douglass that he was going to have to leave Chicago early because he was due for yet another meeting in Nebraska.”

To research these lives, the team dug into archives of small-town historical societies across the state, plus personal letters, census records, obituaries, church newsletters, newspapers and marriage records.

Valeria Lira-Ruelas, a junior history major at Northwestern who worked on the project, said she grew up around Rockford where she was “taught almost nothing” about the history of Black Illinois. “I was in a lot of AP courses and they pretty much stick to the testing, and so you get nothing like a nuanced history. I mean, when I was a freshman (at Northwestern), I read (King’s) ‘Letter From a Birmingham Jail’ — and I didn’t know he went to jail! I was surprised to learn some people didn’t like him! The nice thing is you get a sense these days of a push towards a more complete history.”

Indeed, Masur particularly hopes to see their website being used in classrooms across Illinois (and has already started to work with history teachers at Evanston Township High School).

“An exhibit like this could just sit there, I guess,” she said. “Or it could get worked into curriculums. Then you might start to see a shift in the way people think of the early history of this state and African Americans. When it comes to the story of Illinois, it doesn’t have to be about just Abraham Lincoln.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com