My mother, Mildred, worked for thirty-five years at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the Defense Electronics Supply Center. After my father’s untimely death, she raised five children alone as a widow—working, providing, and modeling what duty, resilience, and quiet patriotism actually mean. Springfield shaped us, and we helped shape Springfield in return.
My maternal grandparents, Odell and Eva Wood, journeyed to Springfield in the early 1900s with their parents, fleeing the terror of oppression and near-slave conditions in Alabama and Georgia. They were not immigrants from another country; they were part of what history would later call the Great Migration—American citizens seeking safety, dignity, and opportunity within their own nation.
Springfield’s struggles with racism did not begin in the present moment. In 1904, a white mob broke into the Clark County jail, seized Richard Dickerson—a Black man accused of killing a white police officer—and lynched him in public before a crowd of onlookers. His murder was followed by riots that destroyed Black-owned businesses throughout Springfield’s Levee District.
This is why I am terrified.
With the suspension of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and the anticipated escalation of ICE raids, fear is no longer theoretical. It has arrived in homes, schools, churches, and workplaces. Terror does not begin with the raid itself. It begins with the waiting.
But this fear does not stop with immigrant families alone. In a city like Springfield, where Black families have lived for generations, enforcement actions based on appearance will inevitably ensnare African Americans whose roots in this country trace back through slavery itself. People who ‘look Haitian’ will be stopped, questioned, and forced to prove belonging they have never had reason to question.
For many African American residents, the cost of challenging that suspicion is simply too high. It is measured not only in money—legal fees, missed work, lost income—but in mental and emotional strain. The burden of defending one’s citizenship, one’s humanity, is a toll this community has paid before.
Springfield is not a headline or a cautionary tale. It is a living place built by Black families, immigrant families, veterans, factory workers, educators, and federal employees. When you terrorize one group, you destabilize the entire city.
Springfield is not a problem to be solved. Its people are not poor, lost, or waiting to be rescued. We are proud. We are capable. And we understand what is at stake when fear masquerades as governance.
Springfield deserves more than to be traumatized for political theater. Haitian families deserve protection, not persecution. Black families deserve recognition, not erasure.
History will remember this moment—not only for what was done, but for what was tolerated. The measure of this nation has never been how loudly it proclaims freedom, but how faithfully it protects it when fear is politically convenient.
The only remaining question is whether America will recognize itself in what it has chosen to do.
Melinda Carter is an attorney, business consultant, and civil rights advocate raised in Springfield.