Henry Stephens, 1869-1939

Henry Stephens, 1869-1939. . , Near this site in 1917, union miner Henry Stephens walked a long route home "with headlamp and dinner bucket" at dusk in support of the streetcar workers' strike and boycott. He vowed to trek long miles in solidarity: "I'd live in the fields on hard corn for a just cause.", A descendant of enslaved people from Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens's plantation, Stephens sought freedom in Lincoln's town. Black men worked in Springfield's coal mines since 1860. After 1890, some were machine runners, the most dangerous job in the mines. When the pick of the machine stuck, the backfire pounded the runner., The promise of solidarity led Springfield's black miners to join the United Mine Workers of America. The union pledged unity across racial lines. By 1908, there was a black president of a mixed ethnic union local in the area. Stephens connected workplace and civil rights struggles when he attempted to desegregate Springfield's theaters in 1907 with a white comrade, and he headed the Springfield Colored Working Men's Association. Through their activism, Springfield's black miners pushed a provision in their union contract that banned hiring discrimination, a first in Illinois history. , Stephens told poet and journalist Carl Sandburg that the UMWA had not eliminated job discrimination. "A union means united. Yet they's mines runnin' twenty-five years and the white man never lets the negro in.", Sandburg immortalized Stephens' words and the aspirations of Springfield's black miners in his poem "The sayings of Henry Stephens" and in his most famous poem, "The People, Yes."