A group of legal minds is hoping to have the man, whose prolonged trial and execution was the catalyst for the Illinois 1908 race riot, pardoned for an unfair conviction. The lawyers submit the jury was racially prejudiced, and thus did not give the man a fair trial.
The Center on Wrongful Convictions and Northeastern University School of Law’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project in Boston have filed a petition for executive clemency on behalf of Joe James, an early 20th-century Black man convicted by a racially charged white jury, according to the Associated Press.
Police arrested James, who was 19 years old at the time, as he was sleeping under a tree in Springfield, Illinois on July 4, 1908. James was accused of beating up a white mine engineer named Clergy Ballard, who later died from his injuries.
Ballard’s daughter Blanche, 16, said a strange man broke into their home, attempted to lure her out of her bed with the intention of raping her, and fought her father. During the fight, the strange man cut and stabbed her father until he was almost dead.
Researcher Carole Merrit reported in her piece “Something So Horrible: The Springfield Race Riot of 1908” for President Abraham Lincoln’s official library challenged the account, asking how a deadly fight broke out and not awaken her two brothers who were in the home or any of the neighbors.
The next day, James was found sleeping a few blocks from the Ballard home. He was recovering from a long night of drinking, gambling and playing piano at a couple of saloons and brothels in the Black district of the city called Levee.
According to the Restorative Justice Project, James, originally from Alabama, was a traveling pianist who came to the area for work and had the intention to continue to play throughout the Midwest.
New to the city, he wandered into the North End, an area for whites, and fell asleep. Four white girls noticed the Black person in the community and went…
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