Historical marker at 11th and Washington streets to remember Henry Stephens (SCHS photo)
Henry Stephens was an African-American coal miner in central Illinois from the 1890s into the early 20th century. Poet Carl Sandburg talked to Stephens sometime around 1917 and turned Stephens’ thoughts about racism in the mines and the need for labor solidarity into a free-form poem, “The Sayings of Henry Stephens.”
Stephens (1869-1939), who lived in Springfield and is buried at Oak Ridge Cemetery, was recognized in June 2025 with the erection of an Illinois State Historical Society marker at 11th and Washington Streets.* The marker, however, doesn’t tell the whole story.
Here is “The Sayings of Henry Stephens” (punctuation, capitalization and line spacing in original):
If you get enough money
you can buy anything
except … you got to die.
I don’t like meatheads
shootin’ off their mouths
always wrasslin’ ‘n wranglin’.
The cost of things to live on
has gone too high.
They ought to be brung down
where they’s more equal like
with other things.
One summer
potatoes was peddled
around Springfield here
for fifty cents a bushel;
another summer
I paid four dollars a bushel.
Tell me why this is.
We got to work to eat.
And the scripture says:
“Muzzle not the ox that
treadeth out the com.”
Human is human.
Human may be wrong
but it’s human all the same.
There’s time when a scab
ought to have his head knocked off
his shoulders.
But first we ought to talk to him
like a brother.
I pay a dollar a month to the coal miners’ union
to help the street car strikers.
It costs me $25 if they ketch me ridin’ on a car.
That’s all right.
Las’ Monday night I busted somethin’ in my left arm.
I walked, mind you, I walked a mile and a half
down to the doctor’s office.
It kep’ on swellin’ an’ when I got home
my wife had to put salt and vinegar on
to get my sleeve loose.
They always did say
Springfield is a wickeder town for women
than Chicago.
I see ’em on the streets.
It always was an’ I guess always will be.
Fifty per cent of the men that gets married
makes a mistake.
Why is that?
You’re a white man
an’ I’m a negro.
Your nationality don’t make no difference.
If I kill you
Everybody says:
“Henry Stephens, a negro, killed a white man.”
I got a little Indian blood in me
but that wouldn’t count.
Springfield is Abraham Lincoln’s town.
There’s only eight mines out of twenty
In Sangamon county
Where the white miners
Let a negro work.
If I buy a house right next to the Peabody mine
That won’t do no good.
Only white men digs coal there.
I got to walk a mile, two miles, further,
Where the black man can dig coal.
The United Mine Workers
Is one of the best or-gan- IZ-a-tions there is.
United means union,
And union means united.
But they’s mines runnin’ twenty-five years
And the white man never lets the negro in.
I remember when we was tryin’ to organize.
We met in barns an’ holes,
We met in the jungles.
I used to go to all the meetin’s them days.
Now we meet downtown in a hall.
Now we’s recognized by everybody
Fur one of the most powerful or-gan-IZ-a-tions
in the United States. I don’t go to meetin’s nowadays
But if they’s a cause to strike for I’ll strike.
I’d live in the fields on hard com for a just cause.
Yes, for a just cause I’d live in the fields
On hard corn.
– The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (1970)
The poem’s mention of “the street car strikers” presumably refers to the bitter strike by Springfield streetcar workers in 1917. As other unions boycotted the streetcars, the management hired strikebreakers and armed guards to keep the cars running. The dispute eventually led to a Labor Day riot in downtown Springfield, the shooting death of a police officer, and a general strike that threatened to shut down the city.
Rosemary Feurer, an associate professor of history at Northern Illinois University and member of the board of directors of the Illinois State Historical Society, researched the historical marker. She found that Henry Stephens was a descendant of enslaved people who worked on a plantation owned by Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy during the Civil War and later governor of Georgia.
Henry Stephens, who was born in Georgia, first appears in Springfield city directories in the first decade of the 20th century (although those were not his first appearances in local newspaper files; see below).
When police officers shot and killed Robert Heigh, a Black robbery fugitive from Bloomington, in 1904, Stephens was among those calling for an investigation. “We deplore the frequency of these instances of the wanton taking of human life,” the protestors said. The officers involved, however – Harry Taylor and A.L. “Link” Morgan – also were African-American, and, in a newspaper statement, 50 other Black community leaders defended the police. Nothing came of the protest.
Stephens’ 1907 attempt to integrate Springfield theaters, mentioned on the historical marker, also bore no fruit. Stephens and his unnamed white companion attempted to buy tickets to the Olympic theater (known as “the Big O”), a burlesque house at 409-11 E. Jefferson St., but were told, “No colored persons are allowed here.”
Stephens sued for $200 damages under a state civil rights law. His lawsuit was dismissed on a technicality and apparently was never revived.
Over the next three decades, Stephens took leadership roles with Zion Baptist Church, the Colored Odd Fellows, and the local Republican Party, where he was elected a precinct committeeman. He was a leader of the apparently short-lived Colored Men’s Working Association, which supported John Schnepp for mayor in 1915. And in the 1935 mayoral campaign, Stephens served as a spokesman in the African-American community on behalf of candidate William J. Lawler. Schnepp and Lawler lost those elections.
In an odd incident later in 1935, Stephens was jailed briefly for allegedly trying to bribe a witness not to testify in a murder case. The witness, Robert Anderson, was scheduled to say he saw Willie Greenwood shoot a girlfriend, Essie Baker, in a drunken brawl at their home. Stephens, a relative of Greenwood’s, supposedly offered Anderson money to leave town instead of appearing before a grand jury.
Stephens views the remains of his burned out home along with one of his surviving dogs, 1938 (Courtesy State Journal-Register)
Anderson testified anyway, either out of public spirit or because the supposed bribe amount (a puzzling $38) wasn’t worth it. Greenwood was convicted and sentenced to prison, and no charges were ever filed against Stephens.
Stephens and his wife Nola (1872-1953) owned a three-room home on North 15th Street for most of their lives in Springfield. The house was destroyed by fire on Jan. 27, 1938.
“Stephens, 67 years old, said he had left the house with two other dogs and was in a barber shop when he learned the house was afire,” the Illinois State Register said. “He ran home attempting to save the dog but was driven out by the flames. Mrs. Stephens was at work.”
Stephens’ grave at Oak Ridge Cemetery is unmarked. (Cemetery records report his last name incorrectly as “Stephen”, without the final “s”.)
“Big Henry” Stephens
Henry Stephens may be more historically significant than the plaque indicates: he is thought to have been the leader of African-American coal miners caught up in the Pana Massacre of April 10, 1899.
The Pana incident was one of a series of violent labor battles in the Illinois coalfields in the late 1890s, many of them intensified by racism. In Pana, members of the United Mine Workers of America, almost all of whom were white, had been on strike for a year in the fall of 1898, when local mine owners imported several hundred Black miners from Alabama to try to reopen their mines.
The African-American miners may or may not have known in advance that they had been hired as strikebreakers. At any rate, though, they quickly learned they were caught in the middle between the mine owners and determined striking miners.
As tension mounted in September, an armed gang of white miners forced 30 potential Black strikebreakers off a Pana-bound train at Tower Hill. Another group of union gunmen briefly seized Louis and David Overholt, owners of one of the mines. In self-defense, the Black miners armed themselves, allegedly with weapons provided by mine management, and formed the Afro-Anglo Mutual Association for protection.
Newpapers at the time said the leader of the Alabama miners was “Big Henry” Stephens – later identified by Feurer as the same man Sandburg talked with two decades later.
The Pana riot took place Sept. 28, 1898, after a Christian County deputy sheriff pulled a gun on Big Henry Stephens, who responded by brandishing his own revolver. Both men suffered only minor wounds in the ensuing gunplay, but a stray bullet killed a bystander, a white miner named Xavier Lecocq.
Kevin Corley, co-author with Douglas E. King of Sundown Town (2018), a fictionalized account of the Pana confrontation, described the results in a June 2025 Facebook post titled “Big Henry Stephens Finally Gets the Recognition He Deserved”.
What followed was one of the bloodiest days in Pana’s history. Outraged by Big Henry’s arrest and treatment, a fierce gun battle broke out between Black miners and coal company guards (sic – it was union miners, not company guards, who fired on the Black miners). Four Black men and one Black woman were killed, as well as Frank Coburn, son of a former sheriff. The five Blacks were buried hastily in a potter’s field in the Twin Pine section of Linwood Cemetery.
Big Henry Stephens (last name sometimes misspelled “Stevens”) at first was accused of killing Lecocq. Ballistics evidence, however, suggested the fatal bullet was fired by the deputy. Stephens eventually was convicted of inciting a riot. Corley continued:
After serving his prison sentence, Big Henry settled in Springfield, Illinois. His fight for justice was far from over. He campaigned to integrate Springfield’s mines and, in 1907, led efforts to desegregate the city’s theaters. He also headed the Springfield Colored Working Man’s Association and later fought to integrate the city’s streetcar system. …
More than a century after his struggle, Big Henry finally received formal recognition. On September 24, 2023, journalist Millie Meyerholz and the Pana Palladium unveiled a monument honoring the five Black men killed in the April 10 gunfight and others who died in those turbulent times. Then, on June 18, 2025, the Illinois State Historical Society dedicated a memorial marker to Big Henry Stephens at 11th and Washington in Springfield.
His story—one of courage, injustice, and perseverance—now has the place in history it always deserved.
*The historical marker was unveiled at what could end up being a temporary location on the southwest corner of 11th and Washington streets, in front of Springfield’s “The Hub” transportation center. Some details of Hub construction were still incomplete at time, however, and officials said the marker might eventually be relocated nearby.
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