Sooner or later thoughtful residents of scores of towns in Illinois ask themselves why there are no black citizens in their communities. Much of the answer lies in the history of the 19th century.

To some students of Illinois history, the key to understanding remains the antebellum period when the ineffectively challenged institution of slavery kept the great majority of American blacks locked in the South. Other answers may seem to be the provision of the Illinois constitution of 1848 that barred free blacks from the state. Article XIV of that document read as follows: "The General Assembly shall, at its first session under the amended constitution, pass such laws as will effectually prohibit free persons of color from immigrating to and settling in this state; and to effectually prevent the owners of slaves from bringing them into this state for the purpose of setting them free."

In 1853 a law was passed making it a crime to bring free blacks into the state, while a harsh Black Code made it unpleasant for those already here. Whatever the reason, blacks in Illinois numbered only 7628 in 1860 and only 28,000 in 1870 after the antebellum prohibitions were removed by the events of Civil War and Reconstruction.

In the postwar period numerous small towns began to speak of and enforce "ordinances" that forbade blacks to cross the city limits or to remain in town after dark. Perhaps the antagonism of this generation was based on the use of black strikebreakers disputes.

The number and distribution of newspapers picking up the stories of these labor/race conflicts and the amount of space devoted to them testify to the importance they held in the minds of Illinoisans. Black strikebreakers were used to break miners' strikes in St. Clair County, February, 1874; in Braidwood, April, 1877; Rapid City, January, 1880; Springfield, November, 1880; Grape Creek, July, 1886; Carterville, May, 1898; Pana, August, 1898; Virden, September, 1898. In the meantime much publicity had been given to the use of black strikebreakers in the Chicago stockyards in 1886 and on the railroads in 1894.

The black strikebreakers were imported from the Southern states, and in most instances were unaware of the role they would play once they arrived in Illinois or the violence which would grow up around that role.

By 1898 many communities had established their "ordinances," reinforced by a state law passed the following year which made it an offense for any individual or company to persuade workmen to come to Illinois or to change jobs by false representation of the kind of work to be done, the pay, the conditions of employment, or the existence of a strike. It also forbade the hiring of out-of-state persons to guard property.

Thus, by 1900 the blacks in Illinois numbered only 84,468 of a total population of 4,821,550. Attitudes shaped by 19th-century conflict exploded into full-scale race riots in the new century, at Springfield on Aug. 14 and 15, 1908; at East St. Louis on May 28 and July 2, 1917; and at Chicago from July 27 to Aug. 2, 1919.