News Progress

•May 2, 2018•

By Chuck Sweeny
Of the Rockford Register Star

Victory Bell can still remember the night when he boarded the Illinois Central Railroad’s City of New Orleans in Durant, Mississippi, bound for Chicago, then changing trains and ending up in Rockford.

It was 1945, at the height of the Jim Crow apartheid in Dixie that purposely kept blacks poor with few rights. Bell, his mother and siblings were headed north to join his father, who had already moved north to get a factory job.

“We had been sharecroppers,” the 83-year old Bell remembers working near Durant, 60 miles north of Jackson. The family had eked out a living, but opportunities for advancement just were not there for black folks.

“I remember it was in the middle of the night when we boarded the train. We had to sit in the black section. When we got to Illinois, the conductor said we could sit anywhere we liked on the train,” Bell said, “and we no longer had to say ‘sir ‘or ‘ma’am’ to white people, which was new to us.”

His uncle and father had come to Rockford in 1943 and 1944 to get jobs that paid better than sharecropping. Read More

•April 25, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

When I was a kid politician in the 1960s, titans of commerce and industry often served on appointed boards in Illinois, especially those for higher education. No longer, it seems.

Instead, the elites of commerce, technology, industry, law, and financial services focus their influential efforts on Chicagoland. They serve through the likes of the Chicago Economic Club, the Commercial Club of Chicago, Chicago Ideas Week, World Business Chicago, the Chicago Club, and 1871 (a Chicago incubator). You see “Illinois” anywhere in that list?

Elites tend to focus on matters of direct concern to them, like business, family, social circles. Illinois as a state and its government aren’t on their radar screens.

The State of Illinois is basically responsible for education, higher education, transportation, social services and health care.

Yet, elites in Chicagoland send their kids to private schools or good suburban public, which don’t rely on state dollars.

Later, elites send their youngsters East and to other, well, elite private colleges. Read More

•April 25, 2018•

By Joseph Bustos
Of the Belleville News-Democrat

During the first century of the state’s history, the natural habitats along the Illinois River helped spur fishing industries and had places for hunting.

The Illinois River was a habitat for bottom-feeding fish such as catfish, common carp and smallmouth buffalo as well as mussels. The abundance of fish led to a commercial fishing industry between Havana and Meredosia, according to the state museum. Towns had their own markets that processed and shipped fish to large Midwestern and Eastern cities from the 1890s to the 1950s.

Sport hunters formed clubs and bought land along the Illinois River to start duck hunting resorts managed by locals, according to the state museum.

However, there also was a demand to be able to transport goods, which changed life along the river. Read More

•April 18, 2018•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

The two major political parties in Illinois are morally bankrupt. We need a serious, credible new party to challenge them and provide an alternative for voters. Creating a new party is easy in concept, yet incredibly difficult, though not impossible, to pull off.

The straw that broke this camel’s back came in the past week. I was shown to be incorrect in my belief that an extraordinary majority of lawmakers could wrest a bill from the clutches of the Illinois House Rules Committee, which is controlled absolutely by Democratic House Speaker Mike Madigan.

In fact, in the Illinois House, a single, solitary objector to a motion to discharge a committee kills the effort.

When a discharge motion—to free a bill for consideration by the whole body—is proposed in the Illinois House, Madigan’s chief henchwoman, majority leader Barbara Flynn Currie, simply stands up to say she objects, which kills the effort. Unbelievable.

If 95 percent of Illinois House members favored the idea of actually voting on a proposal that the Speaker has buried in Rules Committee, the Speaker alone can keep it from ever reaching members for a vote. Read More

•April 11, 2018•

By Roger Ruthhart
Rock Island Argus

John Looney was the original Quad-Cities vice lord and also one of the nation’s earliest organized crime leaders.

Looney was a thin, cold, gaunt, sort of dour-looking man with haunting eyes. He wore the same baggy, dirty suit every day and ate raw liver on toast. He ran for the Illinois State House as a Democrat and lost. His bitterness over the defeat launched his career as the undisputed godfather of the underworld.

He controlled a vast and unmatched empire of extortion, bribery, booze, gambling and prostitution. There were downtown shootings, political graft and bombings and behind it all a scandal sheet newspaper. His influence reached into Wisconsin, Missouri, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and the East Coast.

His power in Rock Island grew almost absolute because he was able to control portions of two key elements of society – politicians and the press. Member of his organization controlled elements of his crime business.

Looney published the Rock Island News from about 1905 to 1923. The papers of that era said “no filthier, more libelous newspaper has ever been printed in the United States. All of the stories were written in the foulest of language.” The News and The Rock Island Argus waged a vicious newspaper war for years. Read More