Last summer, a group of people attempted to disrupt a popular Levitt AMP concert on the Y Block in downtown Springfield. They were angry about the recent murder of Sonya Massey, and the scene grew tense, with Springfield police moving in.
Someone called Sunshine Clemons, co-president of Black Lives Matter SPI, who was leaving a nearby meeting. She came immediately and approached the demonstrators, listened to them and then got on the stage, asking for calm. It worked. Clemons explained later the protesters were from out of town and seemed satisfied that they “had someone that wanted to hear what they had to say, which I think is really important.”
Those visitors ended any plans to be troublesome and started enjoying the concert. Clemons feels it was important to listen to them because she understood them. “Everybody was in pain,” she says. “Everybody was hurting. People are going to show up with their pain and their rage and their anger,” and, being from out of town, they may not have understood the local context of the Levitt AMP concert series.
That’s the kind of quiet influence Clemons has been able to demonstrate in her role as BLM SPI co-president. She is empathetic enough to feel others’ pain and humble enough to know that others will see things differently and that she might not always be right. She and her friend, Khoran Readus, started the local BLM SPI group as “a complete accident” in 2016. They were grappling with their strong emotional responses to the deaths of Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, at the hands of police a couple of days apart in July 2016.
“A couple of friends and I were all struggling with it, so we figured others had to be as well,” Clemons says. “So we decided to put together a rally to give people a healthy outlet to process that pain and come together to vocalize how wrong this was. It was just going to be a one-time thing, all very spur of the moment.”
But the feedback from the turnout of 300 people at the Lincoln statue in front of the Statehouse pressed them to organize a BLM chapter. “It definitely wasn’t intentional,” says Clemons, who was born in Carbondale and raised in East St. Louis until moving to Springfield in the fifth grade. “I don’t think I would have ever volunteered to lead anything like this intentionally. I’m a very introverted and behind-the-scenes-type person. So it feels very out of the norm for me.”
She has nonetheless devoted the past eight years to building relationships with law enforcement as a focal point but also with organizations such as Heartland Housed, Juneteenth Inc., the Faith Coalition for the Common Good, One in a Million Inc. and
The Outlet.
BLM SPI also planned a Black Children’s Book Week this year, collecting and giving away about 100 books to children Feb. 23 at CAP 1908 on South Grand Avenue East. Clemons explains: “We have a wish list of books that are written by Black people that have Black primary characters so that we can make sure that we’re flooding our community with diverse books. I didn’t grow up seeing myself on pages a lot.”
BLM SPI also became a partner with University of Illinois Springfield for the State of Black Springfield conference last year at UIS, with a relatively new associate professor, sociologist Lesa Johnson, taking the leading role. Clemons says that became an important opportunity for Black people to “talk among ourselves” about what’s working and not working well in Springfield and how to work for improvements.
“Sunshine is very even-toned, not given to extreme outward emotions,” Johnson said. “It doesn’t mean that she doesn’t feel overwhelmed or angry, but that she is always considering strategies and is aware of her surroundings at all times. She works toward solutions while considering the needs of others.”
A major catalyst for BLM SPI occurred in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Protests erupted around the country. It was in the early months of the COVID lockdown, and BLM SPI co-president Readus suggested a car procession instead of an outdoor rally that could become a super-spreader event. An estimated 3,000 vehicles participated, overwhelming the Springfield community and temporarily gridlocking some streets.
Asked what they were calling attention to with the demonstration, Clemons responded quickly: “Systemic racism. Just bluntly, that’s what it is. I know a lot of people say maybe it’s just the ‘one bad apple’ [in policing]. If it were just one, and I hate that phrase, but if it were one bad apple, firing them would solve the problem. But it doesn’t. The problem is within the system and this network of systems that work together. … So we’re calling attention to that as a main source, but also all of the other injustices, microaggressions and attempts to circumvent ways to have true justice.”
Mayor Jim Langfelder participated in that 2020 rally, gave Clemons his business card and asked her what they needed. Her response: to meet with the police and engage in fruitful dialogue. She acknowledged they had met with the Springfield police previously, but she believes the police initially were too defensive. Those conversations changed and improved after their 2020 rally, she said.
Four summers later, Clemons described Sonya Massey’s killing by a Sangamon County deputy as “devastating. It hurts to know that this is the exact thing we’re trying to fight against, and yet it’s happening here. The Black community as well as the community at large is in pain.” She and other activists have participated in protests seeking justice for Sonya and her family and to keep the accused murderer, former Deputy Sean Grayson, from being released from jail before his trial.
Clemons serves on the Massey Commission, which was created by Sangamon County to make recommendations that address “systemic racism and mistrust in law enforcement and other helping professions.” Asked if she is hopeful that the commission will be beneficial, Clemons measured her words and said maybe – maybe “one day, whenever that day arrives. I don’t think it’s now, but I do think it [the commission] could be a tool. Maybe when there’s new people in different leadership positions. … I know they continue to say they’ll listen to us but listening to us and acting on our recommendations are two different things. Whether they take any of it and do anything with it is all outside of my circle of influence.”
Asked what progress or reform might look like, she said she would view “changed behavior and policy changes” as indicators of progress. As an example, she said when they first started meeting with the sheriff’s office, the agency did not consider unholstering a weapon as a show of force that needed to be documented. Now they do, she said, which will improve use-of-force reporting. She acknowledges this may not be the kind of change that people will notice, but it’s important.
She is learning that effecting change is slow, even after eight years of working on it, and she sometimes gets down on herself for such gradual progress. She said they are still asking for the same things that Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X fought for, “and people are still going to be fighting for it way after my time because it’s such slow work and so many people are resistant to it.”
She continues to educate herself with online university classes and with her connection to Johnson at UIS. Last year, she went to Ghana for 10 days with Johnson, who is exploring whether to take students there. “I still cannot think about it to this day without crying,” Clemons says. “It was emotionally turbulent… exhausting and draining.” Clemons teared up as she described standing in a cell where people had been chained together “and the floor was like a two-inch layer of body excrement where everybody was just trapped.” She also stood in the Assin Manso Slave River, the last place where people could get a bath before boarding slave ships for America.
She summarized her activism in remarkably simple, yet profound, terms:
“When I leave here, even if I didn’t get it right, I want people to know that my intentions were good and that I tried. I’m going to get stuff wrong. I started this chapter [of BLM SPI] with my friend. Neither one of us had experience. We were figuring stuff out along the way. We’re just trying to make Springfield better.”
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A bridge builder and waymaker
Ed Wojcicki freelances from Springfield. He was an active partner traveling the state with NAACP leaders for eight years to develop and promote the “Ten Shared Principles” adopted jointly by the NAACP and the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police.
This article appears in Mar 27 – Apr 2, 2025.
Great article and fantastic work, Sunshine!