By Barrett Holman Leak
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SAN DIEGO — There is deep grief, shock and trauma right now over the fatal police shooting in Springfield, Illinois of 36-year-old Sonya Massey — in her own home, after calling police for help.
The nation is traumatized and angry. Calls for justice abound. What people know is the details of her killing. What is not widely known is that the murder of her ancestor and other members of the Black community in Springfield set into motion a call for justice by the American Jewish community, which brought about the formation of the NAACP.
Sonya Massey was the descendant of William Donnegan – a Black American whose home was invaded and he was removed from it and lynched during the Springfield Race Riot of 1908. This was the predecessor to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Just as the destruction of Black Wall Street and the Black community in Tulsa was not taught in American schools, neither was the Springfield Race Riot of 1908. I only came across it while researching and preparing materials for the Playing Together Project’s booth at the Juneteenth Freedom Festival in Memorial Park.
So, how does a Jewish woman fit into this story?
Anna Strunsky: Jewish Belarussian Immigrant
The journey begins with Anna Strunsky (March 21, 1877–February 25, 1964). Strunsky was a Belarussian immigrant who fled to the United States of America along with her family, to escape the deadly antisemitic genocidal attacks known as “pogroms” of czarist Russia, when Anna was eight years old.
As an adult, Strunsky became a journalist, author and a tenacious social activist, whose social group was a radical literary and artistic Bohemian group in San Francisco (known as “The Crowd”). She was the only person to ever co-author a book with Jack London, who was part of the group. She graduated from Stanford University in 1900 and became a journalist.
Both she and her sister Rose were freelance reporters for William English Walling’s The Independent newspaper. Walling was the millionaire son of a former Kentucky slaveowner and had a number of businesses in addition to publishing a newspaper.
Strunsky was a liberated and assertive woman with a reputation for being revolutionary and unafraid of being politically or socially controversial. Walling was a socialist and had a great interest in Russia. It followed that Strunsky and her sister Rose were assigned to travel to Russia as correspondents, reporting on the 1905 Russian Revolution.
At one point, she was temporarily imprisoned as a Russian dissident. Walling traveled to Russia to see the woman who was sending back courageous dispatches from the Russian Revolution. They fell in love and married. A year after that, they returned stateside, where she became front-page news for scandalously keeping her birth name instead of taking William Walling’s name upon marriage. The Chicago Daily News declared, “In Defiance of Social Conventions; As Anna Strunsky She Will be Known.”
Strunsky and Walling separated a decade or so into their marriage and after the birth of four children, but never divorced. He predeceased her. When she died the New York Times attached Walling’s name to hers even though she did not use his name professionally.
Rumors of Racial Rioting
Based in Chicago, both Anna and English (as he was known) became renowned for their investigations and writings on a variety of causes including labor rights and disenfranchisement. One day, Anna got a tip about racial violence happening in Springfield, Illinois, and convinced her husband that this was a story they immediately needed to see in-person and report on for the public.
Thus, in August 1908, Strunsky and Walling traveled to Springfield, Illinois (Abraham Lincoln’s hometown), to investigate the Springfield Race Riot. What they saw was outrageous: A mob of about 5,000 White American citizens and European immigrants in Springfield, Illinois, decimated the Black community. Black-owned businesses and Black-owned houses were vandalized, destroyed and businesses torn down. Black people were beaten and lynched.
The population of Springfield in 1908 totaled about 47,000, with approximately 5.5% of those being African Americans, or about 2,585 persons (who had only been freed from formal slavery 43 years earlier).[1] The riot resulted in the deaths of at least 17 people: nine Black residents, and eight White residents who were associated with the mob, six of whom were killed by crossfire or state militias and two who died by suicide. It was misreported for decades that only militia were responsible for White deaths and that more Whites than Black people had died.
One of the persons murdered through lynching in the Springfield Race Riot was William Donnegan. Sonya Massey’s ancestor. Even sadder is that Massey died, as a result of racial injustice, in the exact same hospital as Donnegan, 116 years later.
In his article, “The Race War in the North”, which appeared in the September 3, 1908 edition of The Independent, Walling declared: “The spirit of the abolitionists, of Lincoln and Lovejoy, must be revived and we must come to treat the negro on a plane of absolute political and social equality,” and he appealed for a “large and powerful body of citizens to come to their aid.”
Upon seeing the mayhem, murder and destruction being perpetrated by White residents on the entire Black community, English put out a national call for people to do something about what Anna and he witnessed:
In the article, English wrote that the “fanatical, blind and almost insane hatred of the black community by the white citizens of the north had initiated a permanent warfare.” English vilified the local Springfield press for supporting the White riots by inflaming public opinion against the Black community through claiming all Black people were responsible for the actions of a handful of criminals (who never made it through the justice system but were instead lynched and inflaming the resentment undergirding the racial fears of the White community.)
The Root of Racial Injustice
Walling realized there was an even greater danger of the Springfield riots: He calculated that because the town’s Black population was relatively small (roughly mimicking San Diego’s current African American population percentage, according to the latest U.S Census), it “could not possibly endanger the ‘supremacy’ of the whites.” He concluded that the White rioting against the Black community was financially motivated – the intention was to gain power through seizing or if that was not possible, destroying the businesses and jobs, real estate and property of the Black community.
In economic cost, personal and property damages, suffered overwhelmingly by Black people, amounted to more than $150,000 (approximately $5.1 million in 2024), as dozens of Black homes and businesses were destroyed, in addition to three White-owned businesses of suspected Black sympathizers. You can read a very thorough and detailed Wikipedia account of the riot, with a plentiful amount of primary and secondary sources to verify the formation here: Springfield Race Riot of 1908
“[E]very community indulging in an outburst of race hatred will be assured of a great and certain financial reward,” he wrote, “and all the lies, ignorance and brutality on which race hatred is based will spread over the land.” ~William English Walling.
Writing a conclusion to his article, English then framed the economic and racial injustice events in Springfield as a foreboding symbol of the growing threat to America’s democratic principles. This would later be the same conclusion of The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who called for an end to economic disparity and recognized the harm it was doing to the Black community and in general, American society.
The article aroused the conscience of Mary White Ovington, a White New York social worker, who wrote a letter to Walling offering her support. Ovington arranged a meeting among Anna Strunsky, English Walling, Jewish social worker and philanthropist Henry Moskowitz, and herself. Strunsky, Walling, Moskowitz and Ovington met in Anna and English’s New York City apartment on West Thirty-Eighth Street. They called themselves a National Negro Committee. Collaborating, they created the NAACP – The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
To increase support, they issued a call for a national conference slated to occur on the centenary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, February 12, 1909. Written by Oswald Garrison Villard, “The Call” envisioned Abraham Lincoln revisiting the country in 1909 to assess the progress of race relations since the Emancipation Proclamation. It ended with an appeal to “all believers in democracy to join in a national conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests, and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty.”
“The Call” was sent to prominent Jewish Americans, Black Americans and White Americans for endorsement. Among the sixty signers who answered the call were Jane Addams, John Dewey, W.E.B. Dubois, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Francis J. Grimke, and Ray Stannard Baker.[2]
With dozens answering the call, they set a meeting and on May 31 – June 1, 1909 the committee gathered again in Strunsy’s and Walling’s New York apartment. There they formally created the NAACP to advocate the civil and political rights of African Americans. In May 1910, Walling became the chairman of the NAACP’s executive committee. Black American civil rights activist, sociologist and author W.E.B. DuBois served as its first public relations director.
A Lasting Gift
Favorable publicity generated by the Pink Franklin case, in which the NAACP defended a black sharecropper accused of murder, attracted new supporters to the NAACP. Among them was the independently wealthy Joel Spingarn (1875-1939). Spingarn, the eldest son of an Austrian Jewish tobacco merchant, had a deep sense of social responsibility and abhorred racial violence. Intent on reform, he made an unsuccessful bid for Congress on the Republican ticket in 1908 and served as a delegate at the national conventions of the Progressive Party in 1912 and 1916. Spingarn resigned his professorship at Columbia University in 1911 to devote his energy and talents to the NAACP. He was successively elected as Executive Committee member, chairman of the board, treasurer, and finally president between 1930 and 1939.
Joel Spingarn was the originator of the Spingarn Medal, awarded annually by the NAACP since 1915 for the highest achievement by an American of African descent. Spingarn sponsored the award in an attempt to counter the negative depiction of Black people as criminals that was common in newspapers of the time. It is handed out at the NAACP Image Awards. At its annual convention, the NAACP presents the award after deciding from open nominations. Spingarn specified that should the NAACP end, it would be managed by Howard or Fisk Universities.
The gold medal is valued at $100, and Spingarn left $20,000 (equivalent to $439,000 in 2024) in his will for the NAACP to continue giving it indefinitely. Spingarn’s will states that its purpose is “To perpetuate the lifelong interest of my brother, Arthur B. Spingarn, of my wife, Amy E. Spingarn, and of myself in the achievements of the American Negro.”
The Value of Life
It is deeply troubling that 116 years after her ancestor was murdered for being Black, that Sonya Massey is killed in her home by White police violence in the same city. It is not that far from George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police. In Judaism we value life. Each life is precious. Blood is life and the same blood runs through all our veins. We are all equal. Life is not to be taken with disdain and carelessness. The Massey killing makes you cry out questioning “How long? How long? Will things ever change?”
Combing through the herstory of Anna Strunsky, I find her life quite interesting and worth a more in-depth examination. I wonder if this curious brave, humanitarian, compassionate Jewish woman ever knew she would have such an impact on history. Whoever else was later involved, it was Russian Jewish immigrant Anna Strunsky and her drive to enact the Jewish value of tikkun olam of racial justice that brought about the NAACP. Had she and her family not been able to immigrate to the USA and escape the genocidal pogroms of Russia the organization we know would not have come into being.
The Jewish value of tzedakeh most certainly brought about the successful launch and operation of the NAACP. I like this definition I once came across on the website “Learning to Give”: Tzedakah is the Hebrew word for philanthropy and charity. It is a form of social justice in which donors benefit from giving as much or more than the recipients. So much more than a financial transaction, tzedakah builds trusting relationships and includes contributions of time, effort, and insight.
Anna Strunsky and her husband William English Walling (nicknamed “The Millionaire Socialists”), Dr. Henry Moskowitz, brothers Dr. Joel Elias Spingarn and Arthur Spingarn, Lillian Wald, Julius Rosenwald (who also funded The Rosenwald Schools, educating Black Americans) and Kivie Kaplan were all civil rights activists who generously gave serious money, their own money into the fight for racial justice for Black Americans. They gave and raised money and committed their heart, souls and bodies into the work of justice. That is tzedakah.
It was recognized by these Jewish civil rights activists that two vital communities – African Americans and Jewish Americans – have both uniquely endured exclusion, expulsion and exodus across geography, space and time.
Same Old Show?
But today there is also the sense of SOSDF, that is “same old show, different day.” Here, now, 116 years later, a Black person is valued so little as a human being by a White person that she is killed in her own home. Just as Strunsky and Walling witnessed the arson fires, destruction of buildings and beating and murdering of Black Americans like Willian Donnegan, so we now can watch his Black American descendant, Sonya Massey be shot in the face, by police, in her own kitchen.
America’s Jewish community is being besieged with antisemitism. Our children are getting attacked at school or having to walk past or through terrorist-supporting anti-Jewish encampments. Our houses of worship and social gathering are being vandalized. Threats are constantly being made. We are being vilified through social media propaganda and lies. The Jew-hatred is open, virulent and often, unchecked. It is a tiring daily onslaught. The source of the hatred – Arab groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, anti-Zionnist groups like Jewish Voice For Peace and their allies – are using propaganda, miseducation and lies to enlist Black Americans, Latino Americans and Indigenous Americans on their side. Black Americans in particular are being encouraged to view Jews as enemy and the source of all problems, especially economic problems in the Black community.
Clearly, now Americans of African and Jewish descent need to come together and collaborate, because we are not each other’s enemy and never have been. In fact, the Black Church, the center of the American Black community, has always been Zionist. Israel and Jews have never been the enemy of Africa or African Americans. But those who want to debilitate, decimate and eliminate both communities are best served by dividing us and having us forget our respective histories.
I am quite aware of my Jewish and my African history and heritage. Confidently, I write, we are stronger together – and the antisemites and racists know this. When we worked together to solve the problem of American racism we made gigantic strides of progress. When we drifted apart, we gave a strong foothold to those who would first divide, then conquer us.
I hope daily for more Anna Strunskys in this world who see the wrong and persist in doing what is right. We each need to look at what we can do in our corner of the world, our community, to be bearers of healing and justice.
Here are some additional resources if you want to do further research on the Springfield and Tulsa race riots.
–NAACP: A Century In the Fight For Freedom (Library of Congress)
–Tulsa Race Massacre: One Hundred Years Later (PBS)
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NOTES
[1]1908 Race Riot National Monument https://springfieldnaacp.org/race-riot-national-monument/
[2] https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/naacp/founding-and-early-years.html
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Barrett Holman Leak is an author, educator and community organizer.