Today, Cairo, Illinois (pronounce CAY-roh) is a virtual ghost town. Predicted to grow bigger than St. Louis when it was first founded, Cairo perpetrated some of the worst racial injustices outside of the south. Due to its alienation from the rest of Illinois geographically and ideologically, Cairo’s downfall seems to be that it was southern town in a northern state.
After the Civil War, three thousand blacks decided to remain in Cairo. In the 1870s and 1880s, black men were excluded from skilled and semi-skilled professions that were available in a time of good economic growth in Cairo. Black women often worked as servants for white homes, but their work didn’t go without complaint.
It was of the utmost importance to the white citizenry that blacks were kept in their places without education or political power. After the Civil War, African Americans realized they could use their large minority numbers to sway Republican party numbers, and help to shape public policy. Waging this power and helping the Republican party helped give black Cairorites a degree of power, and after 1870, white Republican party leaders let their black supporters attend county conventions as delegates.
Despite their marginal strides in the 1800's political arena, education for black children was lacking, and whites balked at any change. In 1867, black community leaders wanted to build a public school to educate the city’s black children. Leaders knew that they would need money from the white community, and soon after the proposition, white and black leaders worked together to form the “Colored Union School of Cairo.” Things soon soured, and, unwilling to wait for the problems to be worked out, Shores, the leader of the school and intended lead teacher, told black parents to demand that the black children of Cairo be admitted to the white public schools. White residents were outraged. The black leaders failed to integrate the schools in the 1870s, and by the mid-1870s black students began attending school at the Greeley Grammar school. The school was understaffed—five teachers taught 220 black students.
Poor race relations and citizen vigilantism came to a head in 1909 when a mass mob of 10,000 citizens lynched a black man arrested for the murder of a white woman. On November 8, a 24-year-old white shop clerk name Mary Pelley was raped and murdered. A black man named William “Froggie” James was arrested for her murder. After his arrest, Sheriff Frank E. Davis told his deputy to take James in the woods to protect him from possible mob violence, into Karnac, Illinois. Joe Herrin, a Cairoite who was hunting near Karnac, recognized the sheriff, and returned to Cairo to tell of James’ whereabouts. The mob came to Karnac, and took James back to Cairo. The mob attempted to hang James, but the rope broke, so they shot him and burned his body. Before his body was burnt, the mob cut off his head and placed it on the end of the pole, took out the man’s heart and cut it up into pieces and handed them out as souveneirs, and soaked pieces of rope with his blood.
After the lynching of James, the mob tried to find another man involved with the Pelley murder, but not finding him, killed a white man named Henry Stazner, accused of murdering his wife. The day after, the mob composed of 10,000 people, the governor called eleven militia companies to Cairo to restore order.
After this, race relations and employment woes, for both white and black, but for blacks in particular continued to deteriorate from the early-to-mid-1900s. Cairo reached its largest population in 1920 of around 15,000 people. By the 1930s, Cairo’s population was struggling financially and began dwindling. By 1935, 40.4 of Cairo’s population was on relief rolls from the government.
By 1960, Cairo population is 9348 with 39 percent black. Racial tension and corrupt police officers again came to a boil with the death of a young black soldier, under shady conditions, in custody of the Cairo police department. The department said the decidedly happy soldier had hanged himself in his jail cell. Hunt’s death divided and militarized the black and white citizens of Cairo, and, with the limited power of black police officers and the negligence and corruption of white officers, vigilante citizens again took their ideas of justice into their own hands.
Aside from violence, blacks recognized the long-standing economic woes of the city, and began biting back with a boycott of white businesses who wouldn’t hire or properly serve blacks, thereby pounding another nail into Cairo’s economy and further depleting its population, something that still hasn’t recovered.
Cairo is now a ghost town, despite attempts beginning in the 1980’s that continue through the present day attempting urban renewal. With enough structures to house a population of 20,000, the town truly looks deserted at a mere 3000 citizens.