Sarah Stumpf 0:00

Something that's only available in a in a secret dusty corner where you've already got to know where you're looking isn't isn't accessible. The the community deserves better than that. And we all deserve to have access to this history. No matter who you are and what your interest in Rockford is, their accomplishment just deserves to be celebrated. Their struggles deserve to be known. And you know, this book is part of celebrating their stories, their voices, their joys, and their and their difficulties. How can we learn from the past if we don't know it, if we can't find it? [Calm, lofi music begins playing]

Lara Griffin 0:57

It's a new year and we're back with an new episode. I'm your host, Lara Griffin. And if you've wondered about who built this city, laid its foundations, shaped its earliest communities, then you're going to want to hear this. Today we're talking about the book African Americans in Early Rockford, 1834 through 1871 by John L. Molyneux. For context, the time frame is before the founding of Rockford through the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. This book has been a passion project of our very own RPL librarian, Sarah Stump. She is joining me today to share about this book and the journey to its second printing. So welcome, Sarah.

Sarah Stumpf 1:39

Hi, Laura. Thanks for having me back.

Lara Griffin 1:40

Yeah, it's great to have you here with us again. You've become our archaeologist of the library. Should I call you Indy?

Sarah Stumpf 1:50

I I at no point in the this book project did I have to lift up a statue and try to put something else on top of it or run away from any large rolling boulders.

Lara Griffin 2:00

But yeah, they've the first thing you introduced to me was the 1491 Bible.

Sarah Stumpf 2:06

Oh yeah.

Lara Griffin 2:07

The 45-star flag, and now we're here at this book, which was printed in 2000, but is like a lot of history. 150 years. So you are always finding these hidden treasures in our stacks.

Sarah Stumpf 2:23

Yeah, that I have sort of stumbled into a niche, haven't I? It's called Sarah Found a Weird Old Thing, and then, you know, and then down the rabbit hole we went.

Lara Griffin 2:32

Yes. So tell us about how you came across this book and yeah, and more about this book.

Sarah Stumpf 2:39

So African Americans in Early Rockford was written by John Molyneux, who worked for the Rockford Public Library for a number of years. Retired in, I want to say 2007 or 2008, and he ran the local history department for that time. And he was a historian by trade, not a you know, librarian or archivist, but he did help, you know, organize to the best of the ability that he had with the resources he had, a lot of the historical collections that we have right now. I think if I would have called John when I found that that Bible, he would have said,

Sarah Stumpf 3:13

Oh, of course there's a 1491 Bible in the bottom of a cabinet. You know, I mean, he just he knew things where everything was. But this was also a time as RPL was moving towards digitization, moving towards electronic records, and didn't always have the time and the expertise to properly archive things. So this was something that was his passion project outside of work, which was doing research into the African American history of early Rockford.

Sarah Stumpf 3:43

This is a time period where you're largely talking about early newspapers or before newspapers. So you're looking at things like journals, documents, uh things, interviews with people years later talking about this time, looking back on this time period. But he worked in the local history room in a time where it was becoming easier to find more black history, but it was all later. It was civil rights era black history, it was World War I or World War II Black history.

Sarah Stumpf 4:16

Finding these earliest black settlers and how they built the earliest parts of Rockford was really a challenge, and he started doing that research, and that turned into this book. And my from talking with John about this in the last you know year as we've worked on this project, he wrote the book and he wanted the proceeds to benefit the library.

Sarah Stumpf 4:41

So he approached at the time the library director was named was uh was Joel Rosenthal and or Joel Rosenfield, that was his name, and approached him and they basically turned his at the time, I believe it was a typewriter written, you know, version into

Lara Griffin 4:59

What year is this?

Sarah Stumpf 5:01

This is 99, 2000-ish when they start doing this. And they type it all up in a in a computer di computerized document and they send it off and they get some copies printed and they sell them. And they, you know, they were very proud, and like I said, the proceeds benefited the library, but they didn't make long-term plans for this.

Sarah Stumpf 5:23

They really treated it like it was a thing they did once and then they were done. And what has happened is because this is the only book that really has so much of this history and so much of this information in it, it became sort of this weird rare treasure. I mean, they only printed a couple hundred. I want to say maybe 300 were copies were printed.

Sarah Stumpf 5:42

And when they were gone, they were gone to the point where we have two, I believe, in the local history room archives that are in pristine, beautiful condition. And we were left with three that we would circulate to the public, and they look terrible. They're all together with tape. I mean, we used to have a fourth, but the pages all fell out.

Sarah Stumpf 6:03

This was just something where even we, as the people who had facilitated the publishing of it, couldn't get more copies of it. And what we saw over the years was community interest. Uh Winnebago Boone County Genealogical Society, particularly Jerry Moore, who's involved with that, had asked us, could we get copies printed? And the answer always was, well, that's time-consuming and expensive because we don't have the original files. Uh-huh. Whatever was typed up in the late 90s, early 2000s is long gone.

Lara Griffin 6:34

Wow.

Sarah Stumpf 6:34

We we just didn't have it. And they know there was a cost barrier to we would have to then remake it, reformat the whole thing, then pay the printing costs, and it just it there was no shakeout on that. But we had been asked several times over the years. And when I came into this position in 2022, working with adult materials, I believe it was Jean Lythgoe who sort of casually said to me, Oh, you know, we printed a book once. It's that book.

Sarah Stumpf 7:03

And I was like, that book that everyone always is asking if they can get more copies of. I mean, we'd had, gosh, we'd had a pastor reach out in I want to say 22 or 23. He wanted to do a book club, wanted to know if he could borrow 10 copies from us. And we had to say, like, we don't have 10 copies that we could even loan you, man. I mean, we've got, we've got a couple, and the condition of some of them is pretty shoddy.

Sarah Stumpf 7:26

But because this was the only source of this history, and because RPL had been so involved in its initial printing, I think there was definitely an interest in how do we how do we preserve and encourage and bring it back and share it but just how okay, so how are we gonna do that?

Lara Griffin 7:44

I love that it was like the community really wanting it and like saw it as an important like piece of historic history.

Sarah Stumpf 7:53

I mean, my my former boss, Alan Dady, had these emails. I have a handful of them that he forwarded to me over the years, you know, asking about it or but yeah, these were things people would reach out to Alan or would talk to former library directors or library board members about. Yeah. This was something that people wanted and wanted more wider distribution of. We just didn't, we didn't have it at the time. And so, you know, putting together a project to just okay, let's just spitball. How much would it cost?

Lara Griffin 8:23

Yeah. Well, how did it come like I remember last year you were like, oh, look at this book. And I'm like, yeah, that's cool. She's like, I'm and you were like, I'm gonna see about getting it.

Sarah Stumpf 8:33

I mean, fall down a rabbit hole.

Lara Griffin 8:36

And I was like, okay. But it happened a lot sooner than I thought it would.

Sarah Stumpf 8:41

You know, I had this because it had been published in 2020, I had this like mental, like, we're gonna do a 25th anniversary edition. And, you know, it it's technically 2026 before it gets in your hands, but in my mind, it's still that 25th anniversary edition. Uh what happened was, you know, we reached out to Jerry Moore at Winnebago County, Winnebago Boone County Genealogical Society. He was able to donate some money.

Sarah Stumpf 9:05

The Rockford Historical Society was willing to donate some money, and the Rockford Public Library Foundation was willing to donate some money because it's just it's the initial startup cost. And once we had some funds secured, it was like, okay, well, let's let's do this. Let's make a full digital manuscript with this, which is something I'm not qualified to do remotely, which is how I ended up going to visit Dave Pederson at uh Maze Books.

Lara Griffin 9:34

Okay.

Sarah Stumpf 9:35

And because I knew he was involved in publishing local authors and local, you know, things. Like, Dave, Dave, how do you make how do you make a book? I mean, I buy books. I deal with the end pro I don't deal with their birth and creation. How do how do you do this thing? And it became clear that that Dave and Maze were the people to work with, that they had experience with editing, layout, format, getting graphic artists, printers.

Sarah Stumpf 10:02

Because he was doing this, we ended up, you know, working with them on the logistics of, okay, how do we want this, we want to do this, how do we get it made? And so I've spent the last few months copy editing. We we took scans of the book, the the copy that was falling apart in pages in our hands. We sent it off to a scanning company in Milwaukee. And in order to do these scans, they had to take the pages out anyway.

Sarah Stumpf 10:33

So I was like, good, you can have all this. That's already loose. You're halfway there. But they were able to create scans, so we were able to recreate the book without physically having to just have someone sit there and retype the all 150-some pages. Wow. Yeah. And then how do you lay it out in a professional way? How do you make a new cover? And how do you treat this really like a book?

Sarah Stumpf 10:59

Something that was important to me as a professional who works with books is I wanted this to have lasting staying power because what we were seeing from the community is that the demand was there and the interest was there.

Lara Griffin 11:12

Right.

Sarah Stumpf 11:13

The product just wasn't there.

Lara Griffin 11:14

I mean, it's a story that was that needs to be told.

Sarah Stumpf 11:18

Absolutely. And we live in this world where it is harder and harder sometimes to easily find those histories, particularly of people who have been marginalized. You know, one of the reasons that it's hard to find this history is because these weren't necessarily the people who left elaborate journals or who were interviewed in the early newspapers or who were founders of early newspapers.

Sarah Stumpf 11:41

It was about, you know, really doing, and John had done this incredibly, you know, detail-oriented scholarly work of picking through these sources, most of them through what we have in the local history room at RPL. So it it definitely reflected well on us. Like, look at the the immaculate things you can make with the research available to you.

Sarah Stumpf 12:03

But is it really available to you if the only copies you can find in the community are, you know, up in the local history room? You can't check them out. You can only come to the reading room and read them in person. That's that's not really accessible in the community. I mean, it means someone maybe could find it, but you'd almost have to know you have to know.

Lara Griffin 12:20

Yeah.

Sarah Stumpf 12:21

And as we got further from that 2000 publication date, there were, besides Jean who uh retired this past summer, there wasn't anybody who worked here anymore who'd worked on this original project.

Lara Griffin 12:33

Right.

Sarah Stumpf 12:34

So who's gonna know?

Lara Griffin 12:35

Right.

Sarah Stumpf 12:35

Who's gonna know that we have this gem? A gem you have, you know, hidden away is not really accessible.

Lara Griffin 12:42

And you were telling me before, like it doesn't have an ISBN.

Sarah Stumpf 12:45

No, it wasn't treated it wasn't treated like a book book. There's a way that you publish a book, you you know, put it in with the Library of Congress, you get all the things that go into making some I mean, anybody can go to a printer and say, hey, can you print this stack of something?

Lara Griffin 13:03

Amazon.

Sarah Stumpf 13:04

Yeah, yeah. They'll they'll put it in a form that looks like a book. But as far as having a professional, long-lasting, clear, easy to find, you know, top-tier product, because to me, the history was so important and if to this community that I wanted to treat it like the utmost prof with the utmost professionalism.

Sarah Stumpf 13:27

Like I didn't want to do this if we were just gonna slap and staple it together and, you know, hand it out or, you know, whatever. I wanted to do it like I was making the next New York Times bestseller. I wanted to bring, you know, big five publisher energy, high quality to this. This is what this history deserves. This is what this community deserves. Particularly a lot of the, you know, black folks in our community who had reached out to us over the years who had said they wanted to learn more about this topic. And it was, it was so hard.

Lara Griffin 14:00

Yeah.

Sarah Stumpf 14:00

And they deserved to have something that was as good as I could humanly make it. And so that was how we got into the process of working with Maze Books Publishing Arm. You know, deciding what tone of cream to have on the paper? What kind of paper? I it's if it's too white, I feel like it looks too shoddy and self-published. So we went with, you know, a cream, but how dark of a cream? And then how does the text print on that dark of a cream? Okay, the footnotes, the footnotes don't come out quite as crisp and clear on this color. We gotta tweak the exact hex value decimal coding of what color shade we made the footnotes.

Lara Griffin 14:39

Did you like that process?

Sarah Stumpf 14:41

A little.

Lara Griffin 14:42

Okay.

Sarah Stumpf 14:43

I'm I I'm a nerd. And I love a and I love a project.

Lara Griffin 14:49

Okay.

Sarah Stumpf 14:49

I came at this, I'm not a local history specialist, but I do have a history degree from the University of Wisconsin, and history was one of my first loves. And if you visit the staff pick section here in at the Main Branch, you'll often see history things, and the person who staff picked them was me. So this is a, you know, in general, history and historical things are something I love. But book publishing was something I've never been into.

Sarah Stumpf 15:15

I'm like, I don't know about it. I don't know how this works. I d I have it was not a topic that was of interest to me. So once we were able to get, you know, everything lined up and put together a product, you know, it was still really important to John that all the proceeds from this benefit the Rockford Public Library.

Lara Griffin 15:36

Oh, that's amazing.

Sarah Stumpf 15:37

And you know, we've had you know some conversations like what is the library doing in the in the business of making a book or publishing a book? Are you gonna get into book publishing? The answer the short answer is no. Because the long answer is, well, if you work here for 40 years and you immaculately research a book and, you know, and and birth your your beautiful baby into the world and then want to give it to us for free, uh, maybe, I guess, in theory.

Sarah Stumpf 16:02

But it was such a unique constellation of factors that had created the book in the in the first place. And I wanted to make sure that we were preserving that spirit that this book, it is uh, you know, absolutely about the voices of early Rockford that deserve to be heard, the stories that you don't know. But it's also it's a library story. It's about the library coming together and working together on a project that benefits the whole community and the library.

Lara Griffin 16:34

Yes.

Sarah Stumpf 16:35

So

Lara Griffin 16:36

And it's good to know where we're from.

Sarah Stumpf 16:37

Yeah.

Lara Griffin 16:38

We need to know where we're from.

Sarah Stumpf 16:39

Absolutely. You need to know some of these people, and there are stories in here. There are people that you've heard of. Lewis Lemon. I think most people in town know who Lewis Lemon was. They know the Lewis Lemon came to Early Rockford as a slave, got freed. That's that's what people know about Lewis Lemon. What did Lewis Lemon do in Early Rockford? What how did he get freed? What was his relationship with his, you know, the man who owned him?

Lara Griffin 17:08

Yeah.

Sarah Stumpf 17:09

How do you legally free someone in a territory area where there are no courthouses to just you can't electronically file those documents with the court.

Lara Griffin 17:18

And the city didn't even exist.

Sarah Stumpf 17:20

The city doesn't exist. How do you how do you document that?

Lara Griffin 17:24

and he was like the founding one of the founding

Sarah Stumpf 17:27

Yeah, he was one of the earliest settlers when they decided the the man who owned him, Germanicus Kent, had come through with an expedition and sort of seen the area, I believe a year earlier, and he owned Lewis Lemon at that time and then brought him out here with an agreement to earn his freedom. And so the work he did in early Rockford, it's not just like, oh, he was a guy and he moved here and then he was free.

Sarah Stumpf 17:52

It was like, no, the work he did here in Rockford, you know, the manual labor he did, he did a lot, you know, he did a lot of cooking for people they you know that would come through the area and stay with the Kent family, early settlers and explorers and things like that. You know, who was feeding them? Lewis Lemon. Those people don't eat if Lewis Lemon isn't here. How is he how is he going about his time? Okay, now he's freed. He has worked off the step with this deal that he has made with Mr. Kent and it is concluded. What does he do afterwards? You know, in town? Where does he go?

Lara Griffin 18:27

Right.

Sarah Stumpf 18:28

He didn't stay with the Kent family, you know, he went and he ended living with a guy named Isaac Wilson, uh, who was also who was a who was Rockford's second black resident. Okay. And the things that he did with his with his time and for the community, before there even really was a community to speak of, I mean, you really gotta think this is, I don't know, 15, 20 guys living in the woods.

Lara Griffin 18:53

Yeah.

Sarah Stumpf 18:54

This is this is a very small group of people. And even the

Lara Griffin 18:57

log cabin era.

Sarah Stumpf 18:58

Log there log cabins hunting for your food, fishing for your food, uh, you know, rationing out deliveries and supply trains and you know, trying to figure out the the realities of hard living. And so most people don't know anything about that. They they just know this like two-sentence Lewis Lemon, early founder, was a slave, then got freed. Yeah. And there's so much to know about him. And also, okay, so you've got Lewis Lemon and Isaac Wilson, who are the first two black residents, and air quote, not like this is a town you can reside.

Lara Griffin 19:34

Right.

Sarah Stumpf 19:34

The first two people who are living in the woods. And then you start, as the town starts to build up, you do have black families coming. You have the Williams family coming, you have Reuben Armstrong who opens a black barber shop. He's a surgeon barber. So he's gonna cut your hair or anything else you might need cut uh at this at this era. And the the small businesses that they built, most of them on State Street, on, you know, in the early versions of State Street, you can see their businesses grow, you can see their families grow.

Sarah Stumpf 20:08

They have kids here, they marry , or sometimes come with wives, or sometimes, you know, know people or bring women in. You know, they they settle. They become founders of Rockford just as much as anybody else. But it just, you know, their story is not as widely known and not as widely told.

Lara Griffin 20:28

Right.

Sarah Stumpf 20:29

And they deserve to speak for themselves and to have their stories, their accomplishments. You know, Reuben Armstrong and several of them were Civil War veterans. Uh the you've got the story of uh one of the Williams, uh James Williams, who saves a man, uh, who's a black man from Rockford, who saves a white man from Rockford, and they get together every year until they die on the date of the day that, you know, that they saved, you know, he saved his life. Black Jim, white Jim, the two Jims. They're known as the two Jims.

Sarah Stumpf 21:03

And so you have these early stories about heroism, bravery, business, interracial friendships, growing faith communities and different kinds of people. The the type of black settlers who came after the Civil War were largely, you know, freed, I would call them freedmen refugees. They, you know, had nothing left in the South. They didn't have anything to their name. Largely white benevolent societies in Rockford helped them get settled, helped them find homes, helped them get educations.

Sarah Stumpf 21:38

It it takes a while, you know, to get these people settled, but there's there's clashes with Irish immigrants. There, there it's not all sunshine and roses. It there definitely are challenges. But if you're ignoring those challenges, then you're ignoring the people that rose to met meet those challenges. And so for me, it was just so important that this not end up a weird thing shoved in a cabinet like that, like that 1491 Bible that someone finds in the back of a cabinet 500 years later and goes, ah, someone made this. I wanted it to be out there.

Lara Griffin 22:13

And how do how do you ensure that it gets out there?

Sarah Stumpf 22:16

So the book is currently for sale through the foundation website. So if you go to the Rockford Public Library Foundation and you click on where they have shop, it is available for pre-sale. It'll be coming here in early February.

Lara Griffin 22:29

Do we have a date yet? Is there a book?

Sarah Stumpf 22:31

We have a like we have a ballpark of February 9th. The date is whatever day we pick it up from 11th Street Printing. That's the date we have. But it should be, it should be relatively soon. The book is with the printer, so it's just a question of when it actually gets printed out. And we have things that are happening in February with as part of Black History Month, but really part of celebrating this book release.

Sarah Stumpf 22:56

We are going to have a display in the gallery of the photo, some of the photographs of people that are on the covers of the book, and it's going to highlight some of the stories, like some of the things I was talking about, Lewis Lemon, Reuben Armstrong, early black veterans, labor, educational desegregation, what it was to be, who was the first black person to graduate from a Rockford High School? Who was the first, you know, black woman? Who was the second? These early family, they were trailblazers in so many ways. They were, they were a million firsts for us.

Lara Griffin 23:29

Wow.

Sarah Stumpf 23:30

And so we're gonna have a little bit of a historical display downtown in the main location where people can come and learn about some of these people.

Lara Griffin 23:37

We'll be up by February 1st. I'm working on it.

Sarah Stumpf 23:40

And then we're having an event, sort of a book kickoff lecture about the African Americans of Early Rockford, and that's gonna be February 17th at the Nordlof at 6 p.m. And John's gonna be there, John Molyneux, who is you know still alive and with us. He doesn't work with us here at RPL. He's been enjoying his retirement for you know a number of years.

Sarah Stumpf 24:02

But we're gonna have John be there as well as Amanda Becker from Rockford Historical Association. She is a also a history teacher at Auburn High School who has taught local Black Rockford history as part of her history classes to Rockford students. Skip Gilbert, who is a pastor and history educator who's taught at RVC in Rockford College about history, particularly black history. And we're gonna talk about some of these interesting people in this book and some of the things that they accomplished. Some of the stories you might not know.

Sarah Stumpf 24:40

If you'd like to come to the event and purchase a book, and you know, you're certainly welcome. If you'd like to come to the event and purchase nothing and just learn, we're happy to have you as well. It's it's sort of it's like our own little party to celebrate what we've done here.

Lara Griffin 24:54

That'll be like a great conversation.

Sarah Stumpf 24:56

It's I'm really looking forward to it. John, John and Amanda has been his protege, John's protege. So they they know each other very well. And then in Skip is just a very entertaining, you know, educator. The three of them are are I think it's gonna be a blast. They're gonna, they're gonna really bring something that is educational and so important to meet this moment, but also a good time.

Lara Griffin 25:19

Yeah.

Sarah Stumpf 25:20

And we're really hoping that now that we have this all set up, it isn't something that gets shoved in a dusty corner. I mean, if you're asking me what I what is Sarah's dream for this book that I spent so many hours,

Lara Griffin 25:36

What is your dream, Sarah?

Sarah Stumpf 25:38

What is my dream, Sarah? It is that, you know, there's a copy at your church, or your pastor read it, or your book club read it, or you know, you saw a copy at your grandma's house last time you were there, or a friend mentioned it to you. And then you can get it. You can find it in town. And if we run out of copies, we'll just print more. We it won't be something that sort of got fallen into a black hole and got squirreled away in a in a corner of a library.

Sarah Stumpf 26:05

One of the things that was really important to me was to register it with the Library of Congress. We will be sending a copy to the Library of Congress in DC because I want a hundred years from now, when we're all dead, very dead, someone might be interested in the history of early Rockford or of the black cities of the Midwest or, you know, early African-American settlers of the Great Lakes region. I don't know. I don't know what question a historian is going to answer 100 years, 200 years in the future.

Sarah Stumpf 26:39

All I can say is that I want to preserve this. I want to share this, and I want to make it available in the years and the centuries to come. And so that was why we invested time and luckily found financial sponsors who could really back us on this because the the goal of the Rockford Public Public Library is to educate and inform. That's one of the things in our mission statement. And it's so important.

Lara Griffin 27:11

Yeah. I mean, we need that. And there are so many layers to history, and we need this layer of history to be seen and known and heard.

Sarah Stumpf 27:21

Absolutely. And something that's only available in a in a secret dusty corner where you've already got to know where you're looking isn't isn't accessible. The the community deserves better than that. And we all deserve to have access to this history, no matter who you are and what your interest in Rockford is. Their accomplishment just deserves to be celebrated. Their struggles deserve to be known.

Sarah Stumpf 27:50

And, you know, this book is part of celebrating their stories, their voices, their joys and their and their difficulties. How can we learn from the past if we don't know it, if we can't find it? And so I'm hoping my goal for this is, you know, if you are so inclined to spend $20 to buy a copy of the book, that'd be great. If you'd like to check one out for the live, we're definitely going to have nice non-falling apart, non-held together with tape copies at the library.

Sarah Stumpf 28:23

Now that that we've got a new printing. I want this to be something that is accessible to anyone in the community. Whether you're just a casual person who reads history, whether you someone mentioned something that you thought was interesting or funny, whether you're a serious researcher, it doesn't matter. This history is so important to disseminate and share. And that's that's been the dream. That's the goal, is that it lives on, you know, after I'm gone, after John's gone, after Amanda and everyone who worked on this project is gone, it becomes something that this community has that outlives us all.

Lara Griffin 29:03

That's awesome, Sarah. Thank you.

Sarah Stumpf 29:06

Thank you, Lara.

Lara Griffin 29:08

So thank you for joining us on today's episode of the RPL podcast. We hope this conversation deepened your understanding of the rich and often overlooked history of Rockford's early African American community. You can explore the full story in the Rockford Public Library's newly published book, which will come out February.

Sarah Stumpf 29:29

February 9th ish. Early February. Pre-order now, as soon as you will be notified as soon as you can come to the library, pick up your copy, or have it shipped to you.

Lara Griffin 29:37

Exactly. So if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe, share it with a friend, and stay tuned for more stories [Calm, lofi music begins playing] that connect us to our past and inspire our future. Thanks for listening.