The Achievement of John Longress

In 1882, an African American
blacksmith born into slavery and prominent Adams County Republican, John
Longress, secured a ruling from the Illinois Supreme Court that the Quincy
school board could not “exclude children
of African descent from admission to the public schools which are provided for
white children.”

Chief Justice Alfred M. Craig wrote that the Illinois
Constitution of 1870 and an 1872 law required the legislature to “provide a
thorough and efficient system of free schools, whereby

children of this State may receive a
good common school education,” allowing “no distinction in regard to the race
or color of the children of the State who are entitled to share in the
benefits” of public education. This
Illinois precedent anticipated the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 holding in

Brown
v Board of Education

that “separate but equal” racial segregation of public-school
students violated the federal Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection
under law.

The historian John D. Coats has
written, “By 1890 most of the county’s 2,044 African Americans lived in Quincy,
where de facto segregation ensured that they would live in the northwest corner
of the city.” In an earlier column in this series, Patrick McGinley wrote that
Lincoln School, located at 10th and Spring, was established by the
Quincy school board as the city’s “colored school.” The board mandated in 1880 that
“no colored child shall be enrolled in any
white school except for special permission, and no white child be enrolled in a
colored school save by same dispensation.” In fact, McGinley found, 94 Black
students were attending other schools with white students throughout the city,
but the board wanted to segregate them with the 126 Black students already at
Lincoln.

John
Longress had tried to help his seven children, and other children in Quincy’s
Black community, of which he was a leader. When he died suddenly on September
9, 1886, the

Daily Whig

, recognizing his “keen intelligence and force of
character,”

wrote, “Born a slave, he broke his own fetters, worked out his
own freedom paying his owner a heavy ransom for the boon of freedom.”

Unfortunately, the legal system—at first—failed him and those for whom
he advocated. The school board and the Adam County courts ignored the decision
of the state supreme court. On June 1, 1908, the

Daily Herald

reported
that, as the school board considered building a new Lincoln School, some Black
parents objected to “having a separate school for their children” and asked
that their children be “thrown into contact with the white children.” In short,
more than 25 years after the Illinois Supreme Court had forbidden racial
segregation in Quincy schools, Lincoln remained as segregated as it had been in
1882.

One parent,
Aaron Brown, refused to send his children to Lincoln and, after a justice of
the peace imposed a $10 fine in 1911, initiated a test case to the Illinois
Supreme Court. This time—perhaps on procedural grounds—the court refused to
intervene, a decision in sharp contrast to its action in litigation challenging
segregation in Alton public schools. In 1899, parents had sued the Alton mayor
and city council to compel admission of their children to integrated schools.
That case required almost nine years of litigation, and four return trips to
the court, before the Supreme Court issued an extraordinary “writ of
mandamus”—an order directing local officials to perform their legal duties and
admit the children to integrated schools.

In Quincy,
as decades passed, Lincoln remained as segregated as it had been in 1882 and
1911. In 1919, the

Daily Whig

reported that the local YMCA, after having
invited the Lincoln basketball team to play in a tournament, barred the team
from the floor because the players were Black. The newspaper reported that the “boys
packed up their paraphernalla (sic) and left the building.”

In1932, a

Herald
Whig

story reported that a Quincy pastor was urging the school superintendent
to restore an earlier policy allowing Lincoln athletes to compete in integrated
interscholastic sports, and in 1936 the paper

carried a photograph of
“the present Lincoln school for colored children.”

The
heritage of Lincoln School is complex. Its status as a symbol of Jim Crow
should not overshadow the achievements of its parents and students who, the
Quincy papers tell us, nevertheless supported its active and influential PTA,
dedicated teachers, and champion basketball teams, while providing a central
meeting place for their community. One
of Lincoln School’s alumni grew up to become Quincy’s first Black pilot, a
decorated war hero with a long career in military intelligence, and honoree of
having a Quincy school named for him: Colonel George Iles.

If John
Longress ever doubted that his litigation had been worthwhile, he would have
been wrong. In 1953, the U.S. Supreme Court requested a submission from the
Department of Justice addressing implementation of the

Brown

desegregation decree. Solicitor General Simon Sobeloff filed a brief, citing
the Longress case as an example of state courts declaring public school
segregation illegal under state, not federal, law. More recently, writing in
the Yale Law Journal in 2019, California Supreme Justice Goodwin Liu recognized
the case for the Illinois court’s statement that “[w]e base
our decision on the constitution and laws of the State,” and its significance
as one of the early “pro integration voices.”

The
reasoning of judges may often seem abstract, but to mean anything, it must
reflect the experiences of people. The slave who “broke his
own fetters” and “worked out his own freedom paying his owner a heavy ransom
for the boon of freedom” did, indeed, extend the freedom of others.

Sources

Brown v Board of
Education,

347 U.S. 483
(1954).

Coats, John D, “A Question of Loyalty:
The 1896 Election in Quincy, Illinois”,

Journal of the Illinois State
Historical Society

(Summer 2015) pp. 122, 127.

“Death of John S. Longress”,

Quincy
Daily Whig,

(September 10, 1886) p.3.

“First Lincoln School Built in 1861”,

Quincy
Herald Whig,

(February 16, 1936) p. 6.

Hon. Goodwin Liu, “Book Review: State Courts and
Constitutional Structure”, 128 Yale Law Journal 1308, 1365 (2019}.

“Lincoln Team Barred from Local ‘Y’
Floor”,

Quincy Daily Whig,

(March 9, 1919) p.2.

McGinley, Patrick, “A Look at Lincoln
School 1872–1957”,

,

October
30, 2020.

Meier, August, and Elliott M. Rudwick,
“Early Boycotts of Segregated Schools: the Alton, Illinois Case, 1897-1908”,

The Journal of Negro Education,

(Autumn, 1967), pp. 394-402

“Negro Was Fined”,

Quincy Daily
Herald,

(January 16, 1911) p. 3.

People ex rel. Bibb v. Mayor
& Common Council of Alton

, 233
Ill. 542

(1908).

People ex rel. John Longress v. Board of Education of the City of
Quincy,

101 Ill. 308, 313 (1882) (original emphasis).

“School Board Added Trouble”

Quincy
Daily Herald,

(June 1, 1908) p.6.

“Starts Movement to Have Lincoln
School Athletics”,

Quincy Herald Whig,

(October 17, 1932) p.10.

“Supplemental
Brief for the United States on Reargument” in

Brown

litigation
(November, 1953), at p.102. (available on Westlaw, 1953 WL 78291)