Illinois History Minutes

It’s March Third, the date in in 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill creating the National Academy of Sciences. Election to the academy was for several years the highest honor that an American scientist could receive. 

On this day in 1913, Black journalist and activist Ida B. Wells marched with the Illinois delegation of a march in Washington D.C. for women’s suffrage. The march had a separate section for Black women, but Wells joined the main delegation instead. 

And March Third 1923 was the date of the very first issue of Time Magazine, featuring retiring Congressman, and former House Speaker, Joseph Cannon of Danville on the cover.  Time magazine described Cannon as one of the last of Washington’s Old Guard, who used the speakership for quote “perpetuating the dictatorship of the standpatters in the Republican Party”. 

It’s March 2nd, and Illinois Industrial University opened for classes in Urbana on this day in 1868. Illinois’ first state university offered education that working families could afford, with three faculty members and a few dozen students. The University of Illinois dropped “industrial” from its name in 1885. It’s now a place where nearly 50,000 students are taught by 27-hundred faculty members.          

On this day in 1971, WILL-FM began weekly recorded broadcasts of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The program was the very first offering from National Public Radio. NPR produced its first live network broadcast a month later --- a Senate hearing on the Vietnam War. It would launch its daily news program “All Things Considered” in May. 

It’s March First --- the day in 1940 when Harper and Brothers published “Native Son” by Richard Wright. The novel about a young Black man who turns to murder in a systemically racist society was set in Chicago, where Wright had lived during his twenties. “Native Son” was a best-seller in 1940, and a hit on Broadway the following year. Wright himself starred as the novel’s anti-hero, Bigger Thomas, in the first of three film versions. 

On this day in 1784, the Commonwealth of Virginia relinquished its claim on Illinois County, ceding the territory to the United States government. Illinois County included modern-day Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. All three would gain statehood over the next 35 years. 

It’s February 28th, the day in 1928 when pioneering Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux released his movie, “Thirty Years Later”. This lost silent picture is one of more than 40 movies made by Micheaux, who grew up in southern Illinois, and later lived in Chicago, where he recruited actors for his early films. “Thirty Years Later” told the story of a man of mixed race, brought up as white, who wins the love of a Black woman once he gains pride in his own Black heritage. 

1928 was a leap year. So was 1968. And on February 29th of that year, a federal commission chaired by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner released its report on racial conflicts in America. The Kerner Report’s conclusion:  unless action was taken the nation would continue “moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal”.

It’s February 25th. We don’t know the exact birth date of Nance Legins-Costley, who was born to Black indentured servants in 1813, in Kaskaskia, then the capitol of the Illinois Territory. But we know that she spoke out in court repeatedly against her legal status as someone who could be bought and sold, despite Illinois’ anti-slavery laws. By the 1840s, Nance Legins-Costley was living in Pekin, a mother married to a free Black man, but still an indentured servant in the eyes of the law.

The Illinois Supreme Court finally granted freedom for Nance and her children in 1841, after a young attorney named Abraham Lincoln took up the case. As a free woman, Nance Legins-Costley become a respected matriarchal figure in Pekin, and later in Peoria, where she died in 1898.

It’s February 24^th. And on this day in 1823, the Illinois General Assembly appointed a panel of commissioners to make plans for the Illinois and Michigan Canal. The idea was to link the Chicago River with the Illinois River, and ultimately, the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River. The Illinois and Michigan Canal finally opened to boat traffic in 1848 and remained in use until 1933.

Former Illinois Governor George Ryan was born on this day in 1934. Ryan spent five years in federal prison on a corruption conviction dating back to his time as Illinois secretary of state. He would rather be remembered for his opposition to the death penalty as governor, which led him to declare a moratorium on state executions and to commute death sentences to life imprisonment.

Camp Butler, near Springfield, was the largest training facility for Union soldiers during the Civil War. And on this day, February 23^rd, in 1862, it became a prisoner of war camp as well, with the arrival of two-thousand Confederate soldiers, captured at the Battle of Fort Donelson. But bad food, poor sanitation and disease took a deadly toll, and 700 prisoners died that summer. Today, a cemetery at the Camp Butler site contains the graves of soldiers from many wars, with a section reserved for Confederate soldiers.

On this day in 1967 Washington Week In Review premiered on the old National Educational Television service. WILL-TV picked up the show two years later, and still airs it today.

It’s February 22^nd, and on this day in 1932, Republican governor Louis Emmerson signed a bill creating a graduated state income tax in Illinois. It was a response to a fiscal crisis fueled by the Great Depression. But the graduated tax was thrown out by the Illinois Supreme Court, which ruled that it violated the state constitution’s uniformity requirements. Illinois got a flat state income tax in 1969.

On this day in 1926, Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five recorded this version of “Come Back Sweet Papa”, one of Armstrong’s 79 Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings, all made in Chicago. These records helped establish the primacy of jazz soloists over collective performances.

It’s February 21^st, and on this day in 2007, Chief Illiniwek made his final sanctioned appearance at a University of Illinois sporting event.

Those fans were chanting for the Chief, a performer --- usually a student ---- dressed in Plains Indian ceremonial costume. The Chief began appearing at Illini games in the 1920s. But in later years, he faced criticism from Native Americans and others who condemned him as a demeaning stereotype. In 2007, facing N-C-double-A sanctions, University board chairman Lawrence Eppley ordered an end to the Chief. Graduate student Dan Maloney gave Chief Illiniwek’s last performance, during halftime at an Illinois-Michigan game, coming out after his dance for one last appearance before the cheering crowd, his eyes brimming with tears on the Assembly Hall’s giant video screens.

I’m Jim Meadows. Illinois Public Media.

It’s February 18^th, the day that former Illinois governor Bruce Rauner was born in Chicago in 1956.

It’s also the day, two years ago, that former governor Rod Blagojevich was released from prison, after President Donald Trump commuted his prison sentence for corruption.

On this day in 1930, Streator Illinois native Clyde Tombaugh, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, found evidence of a previously unknown moving object in the night sky, an object we now know as the dwarf planet Pluto.