July 28, 2024, 6:00 AM EDT

By Cassandra Lane, author and editor

"According to the family of Sonya Massey, the 36-year-old mother of two shot dead by an Illinois sheriff’s deputy July 6, she was a descendant of William K. Donnegan, who’d been a shoemaker and conductor on the Underground Railroad before he was lynched by a white mob during the Springfield Race Riot in 1908. Massey, they say, died at the same hospital, St. John’s, where Donnegan died after his white attackers slit his throat and hanged him from a tree outside his home."