When the Massey Commission was formed, community members rightly questioned what it would actually do. Some expected a short-term task force – something tidy and symbolic. But the charge the commission was given, and the one I accepted as managing director, is not the kind of work that fits neatly into a headline. It asks a community to look at itself honestly, even when that truth stings.
This is not abstract work to me. I hold this role with the full gravity it deserves. I am accountable to Sonya Massey’s memory, to the community that demanded this commission exist, and to the systems that must change if safety and dignity are ever to coexist in Sangamon County.
We are doing this work in a time of deep national tension – between what America promises and what it permits. Across this country, citizens are detained, health care is dismantled and distrust is sown in cities governed by Democrats. That chaos is not a coincidence; it is a choice. It’s the same machinery of fear that resurfaces whenever accountability draws near.
And we would be dishonest to pretend that Sangamon County stands apart from that history. In 1908, right here in the hometown of Abraham Lincoln, a white mob lynched two Black men and burned Black homes and businesses to the ground. The ghosts of that violence still walk our streets – not in chains or flames, but in the policies, fears and silences that followed. The horror of that riot, born of lies and sanctioned silence, shocked the nation and gave rise to the NAACP. That’s our inheritance: the birthplace of both violence and resistance.
Legal scholar Sora Han once wrote that “the United States isn’t at war. The United States IS war.” That truth reverberates here. The war she names isn’t fought only abroad. It’s embedded in our housing policies, policing, schools and daily governance. It is the war of segregation dressed as zoning. The war of divestment disguised as fiscal responsibility. The war of indifference that pretends neutrality.
For those who want to understand how this war was waged close to home, I urge you to read Segregated in the Heartland, the 2019 report documenting how Springfield’s policies created and sustained racial segregation long after the riot’s smoke cleared (https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-segregation-series.html). That history is not distant; it is the scaffolding of our present.
The Massey Commission exists precisely because of this truth and along that same fault line. We were formed after another act of state violence – the killing of Sonya Massey. But Sonya’s name must never stand alone. We also remember Earl Moore Jr., killed in 2022 while pleading for help from those sworn to protect him, and Gregory Small Jr., who was shot by police in 2021, reminding us that excessive force is not theoretical – it is lived, felt and too often excused. Their names are not statistics; they are indictments of systems that fail to see Black life as fully human.
The Massey Commission was formed to investigate, to learn and to insist on a different way forward. What we are asking of our county is not radical. It is responsible. It is to reckon with harm, repair trust and center humanity as a matter of policy, not poetry.
That work does not belong to the Commission alone. It belongs to all of us who call Sangamon County home. The findings of Segregated in the Heartland and the Massey Commission’s Calls to Action are not competing narratives; they are chapters of the same unfinished story. Both ask us to confront the architecture of inequity that still shapes our daily lives.
As managing director, I take this role with unflinching seriousness. Accountability is not a posture for me; it is the work itself. Our charge is to transform grief into governance, to make visible what has been buried, and to insist that transparency and equity are not optional virtues but the baseline of democracy. My responsibility is not to maintain calm; it is to help build a foundation where calm is no longer purchased through silence.
If you read one thing this year about our community, let it be Segregated in the Heartland. And when our final report is released, read that too – not as a set of recommendations to admire or dispute, but as an invitation to act. The path toward justice has already been mapped. The question now is whether we have the courage to walk it together.
The Sangamon County Board’s decision to extend the Commission’s timeline and funding is more than an administrative note. It’s a statement that conscience still matters, and that legacy work takes both time and courage.
So, as we release our Year One Report, we do so with clarity:
Now that we know, we cannot unknow. We know what happened here – in 1908, in 2022, in 2024, and in every year between, when justice was deferred and humanity denied. The question before us is no longer what happened. It is: What will we do now that we know?
That is the work I hold with both gravity and gratitude. That is the work that will define who we become next.
Kelly Hurst is managing director of the Massey Commission. Contact her at masseycommission@gmail.com.
This article appears in November 6-12, 2025.
