Ben Jealous: Chicago convention and Illinois’ unique place in civil rights history

Getty Images Stock Photo (TriceEdneyWire.com)—The modern civil rights movement hit a new peak last week in Illinois. It marked the movement coming full circle, in a way, back to the state of its birth more than a century ago. Illinois is the unsung “alpha and omega” of the movement. It was the 1908 Springfield, IL Race Riot that sparked the creation of the NAACP. That marked the beginning of what would become the modern civil rights movement that evolved through the 1950s and 60s and is still evolving today. And last week, Illinois hosted the nomination by one of America’s major parties of a candidate for president who has broken barriers her entire career … who comes from a family of bold civil rights activists … who could be our first woman president, our first president of Asian descent, and only our second Black president. If Springfield was the civil rights movement’s “alpha,” then this year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago and Kamala Harris’s campaign are, to date, its “omega.” Barely more than a month ago nobody knew this was going to be Harris’s convention. Yet the history of the civil rights movement makes poetry of the fact she accepted...