Don’t worry: he’s just going to make a speech and leave. Morris Dees, the famous civil rights attorney who co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center, will deliver an address titled “A Passion for Justice” Monday night at Sangamon Auditorium. But he’s not going to hang around long enough to poke into any racial problems Springfield […]
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Highwayman
Writer John Jermaine has long heard about speed traps in the towns of Edinburg and Rochester, located south of Springfield on Route 29. With the route expanding from two to four lanes, the highway will now skirt around Edinburg. Jermaine decided to check in with Officer Dennis Greenwald, chief of the Edinburg Police Department for […]
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The Case of Sampson’s Ghost
During the summer of 1837 Lincoln represented a widow who claimed an attorney named James Adams stole land from her husband. At the time, Adams was running for probate justice of the peace in Sangamon County, opposed by Lincoln’s friend, Anson Henry. As Adams and Henry campaigned and Lincoln pushed the widow’s case forward, letters […]
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SPD’s revolving door
This story isn’t about Renatta Frazier or Rickey Davis. The long-awaited and much-anticipated report on the Springfield Police Department’s treatment of those two African-American officers (one resigned, one still hanging in there) is due to be delivered to the City Council at the exact same hour Illinois Times goes to press. It’s a coincidence that […]
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Prison Diaries
Prison is a good place to get some writing done. In the 14th century, Marco Polo recorded his Travels in an Italian cell. Martin Luther King moved a nation with his “Letter From A Birmingham Jail.” Nelson Mandela dictated his autobiography on Robben Island, hiding the papers in a buried can. During his 16-year, on-again, […]
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The Lincoln Files
On the morning of Thursday, March 13, seven people gathered around a long wooden table inside the offices of the Lincoln Legal Papers. Few subjects have been written about more than Abraham Lincoln, yet these scholars are constantly uncovering new facts and interesting connections. Two groups, working independently of each other, are currently compiling all […]
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Abraham the barbarian?
Edgar Lee Masters enjoyed taking off everyone’s rose-colored glasses. His Spoon River Anthology wipes away the facade of pleasant, small-town American life. His 1935 biography of his friend Vachel Lindsay, while complimentary, broke the news behind Lindsay’s death–that he died by drinking liquid Lysol, not after suffering a heart attack, as was widely reported. He […]
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THE OTHER ELECTION
Springfield District 186 has won awards. But it also has ten schools on the state’s Early Warning List–schools with more than half the students failing to meet state standards two years in a row. It routinely wins grants for reading, technology, science, and math. Yet most of its black students perform below state standards, while […]
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Politics as usual
One way to gauge how very close this mayoral race is would be to look at the daily paper’s latest poll. Another would be to look at all the last-minute political maneuvering among City Council members. Last Tuesday night’s vote on an ordinance offering an early-retirement incentive program for city employees was surrounded by all […]
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A rough draft
The investigation that was going to take just three weeks and cost $15,000 is finally ready—almost ready, that is. Last Tuesday night, after spending 20 minutes discussing an early-retirement plan for city employees, the City Council spent 90 minutes in executive session listening to attorney Chris Nichols from the Peoria firm Husch & Eppenberger present […]
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War as tradition
My son’s leaving for Iraq this week. I wish him well. For years I’ve told him what his generation needed was a good war. It would be a wonderful character builder. See how it worked for mine? But I meant that more as irony, as paternal joshing, and not as wish. Whatever–Sean is going. And […]
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Cop Out
Sergeant Kevin Keen is the public information officer for the Springfield Police Department. Fielding calls from the media is his job. I ring his number and tell him I’m working on a story about Renatta Frazier, the former police officer who left the department under a cloud of controversy. As all of Springfield undoubtedly knows, […]
