SPRINGFIELD — As three teams of students sat on stage in the auditorium of Springfield Southeast High School Sunday, tensions were running high. In the first hour, students gasped and cheered as they learned the answers during the Springfield Black History Bowl. But by the second hour, it was clear that last year’s winners of
The law requires teachers to cover contemporary Native American history and urban communities like Chicago.
CHAMPAIGN — Gerald McWorter — a professor in African American Studies at the University of Illinois — said he grew up hearing stories about his great-great-grandfather, Frank McWorter. “Free Frank,” a former slave who bought his own freedom, founded New Philadelphia, Illinois in 1836. The town was an incorporated town for fifty years — and
At a time when Black composers and performers were underrepresented in the classical music world, WILL-FM’s Roger Cooper filled the gap with “Classically Black”, a nationally distributed series of programs produced for Black History Month from the late 1980s until Cooper’s retirement in 2008.
DANVILLE – Brennon Hightower says Black history is lacking in the education her two sons receive at their public school in Danville, a city in east-central Illinois. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Hightower decided to homeschool her sons — aged 10 and 15 — using curricula she found and liked. But even that material included very
There will be food, music, dancing and a serving of history, Danville’s Juneteenth Celebration, which runs from 5 to 8 PM on Friday, June 19, at Lincoln Park (1000 N. Logan Ave.). A Facebook page for the event is linked here. Juneteenth marks June 19, 1865, when word of the Emancipation Proclamation formally came to