When you think of Illinois, you think of Chicago. But it was in Springfield, a modest capital set on the plain, that Abraham Lincoln lived. He arrived in 1837, a young lawyer, bought the only home he would ever own, and left in 1861 for the White House, promising to return. He came back in 1865, in a coffin: he rests today at Oak Ridge, beneath the Lincoln Tomb.
In August 1908, a few streets from his grave, a white mob ravaged Springfield's Black neighborhoods. The outrage, erupting in Lincoln's own city, led the next year to the founding of the NAACP.
Springfield's flag, an official seal on blue, says nothing of this double memory. It flies before the institutions, sober and continuous, above a city that watched Lincoln rise, buried him, then had to face the very thing he had fought.