Springfield, Illinois - President Joe Biden is due to announce a new national monument on Friday at the site of an infamous 1908 race massacre in Springfield, Illinois.

Biden will be joined by civil rights leaders in the Oval Office on the 116th anniversary of the massacre to declare the site a national landmark. The proclamation, announced by the White House, will protect 1.57 acres of federal land to be managed by the Department of the Interior’s National Park Service.

The Springfield massacre followed two reports of Black men allegedly assaulting white women. At least one of the accused, George Richardson, was later found to have been falsely identified and the rape indictment dismissed.

A white mob gathered at the Sangamon County Courthouse to lynch the accused men, and it became even more enraged when it found out they had already been moved to a jail in another town.

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Some 5,000 racist rioters then turned their fury on Springfield's Black community as a whole, destroying businesses and homes. Between August 14-16, six Black people were fatally shot and two others lynched, while around 2,000 people were forcibly displaced from the city, according to Blackpast.org.

The assault in Springfield – home of President Abraham Lincoln, who issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 – led to the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.

The Springfield massacre preceded a series of 1919 racist terrorist attacks following World War I, which came to be known as Red Summer.

Such abuses continued in subsequent years, notably in the destruction of Black Wall Street during the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, for which living survivors are still demanding justice.

Over the decades, these acts of violence have spurred calls for reparations from the federal government, whose racist laws and policies have enabled centuries of enslavement, segregation, vigilante violence, and discrimination against Black people.

Biden's new designation comes just weeks after a white sheriff's deputy shot and killed Sonya Massey, an unarmed 36-year-old Black woman, in her Springfield home after she called 911 fearing an intruder.