Local and city officials in Bloomington, Illinois, this week dedicated a new marker that described the racial segregation that once took place in Miller Park’s beaches.
WJBC reports:
At Miller Park, the historical marker acknowledges there were segregated beaches there during the first half of the 20th Century and beyond. The beach for people of color didn’t have a lifeguard, while whites had a much nicer and safer place to swim, recalled Mary Hursey, 84, of Bloomington
“It was terrible, the conditions that we had, and they had such a nice place over there,” said Hursey.
Hursey knew Phyllis Jean Hogan, 6, who fell off the diving platform and drowned there in August 1948. Hursey said she complained to the mayor, who decided then to integrate the beaches.
One resident described to the Bloomington Pantagraph the segregated beach at Miller Park vividly:
Henry Gay Sr. remembers the segregated area that blacks like himself had to swim in at Miller Park as being filthy.
“It was bad. You wouldn’t put a dog in that kind of stuff,” said the 94-year-old Gay. “But that’s the way people treated you. They cared more for a dog than they did for you.” […]“In that time everything was segregated,” said Gay, who was raised in Shreveport, La., and moved to Bloomington in 1945. “They had signs that said ‘colored section’ and ‘white section.’ You had to stay in your section. I tried to bury all of that stuff because it was so bad.
“It hurts to even talk about it,” he added. “You wondered why one person could treat another person that bad just because the color of their skin was different. Almost all the people who knew how bad it was are dead. A lot of the younger people don’t pay a lot of that stuff any attention.”
Segregation undoubtedly still existed there when Route 66 ran by Miller Park from 1930 to 1940 as part of Morris Avenue.
The marker reads:
In 1908, the park board established racially integrated beaches and bathing facilities at Miller Park. Whites had exclusive use of the lake’s larger beach and cleaner waters, while the “colored” beach was located in the park’s smaller lagoon — “a weed-grown hole of stagnant water,” as one black resident later described it.
This disgraceful arrangement did not go unchallenged. Local blacks already exercised the rights to vote, hold elected office, and attend integrated schools. But the nation’s deteriorating racial climate — as evidenced by 1908 Springfield and 1919 Chicago race riots — helped silence the controversy over segregated beaches. Despite anti-segregation efforts led by the local NAACP, in the 1920s African Americans in Bloomington-Normal could no longer eat at many restaurants or stay in downtown hotels, and were restricted to segregated seating in theaters. Quality jobs and housing were severely limited. Miller Park’s beaches the site of tragedy in 1948 when six-year-old Phyllis Hogan drowned in its segregated waters with no lifeguard on duty. Plagued by poor water quality, the park’s segregated beaches closed in 1953. In 1957, officials reopened the larger beach on an integrated basis. Today, Miller Park — like all city facilities — is open to all.
According to the WJBC report, the McLean County Museum of History, which features a prominent Route 66 exhibit at the facility, raised $4,000 to pay for the marker. The city of Bloomington, Bloomington-Normal NAACP and Not In Our Town Bloomington-Normal also were involved in the project.
Some people are shocked Illinois — which aligned itself with the Union during the Civil War and produced President Abraham Lincoln, author of the Emancipation Proclamation — holds a past of segregation that persisted into the latter half of the 20th century. But James Loewen, author of “Sundown Towns,” and other historians have documented the discrimination that occurred throughout much of the Land of Lincoln during that time.
(Image of the new plaque at Miller Park in Bloomington, Illinois, by Sharon Chung via Facebook)