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, a red star ringed by a crown of white stars on a midnight field, the city's name in gold letters beneath, 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.