[Lurkina.n.Learnin]

“Symbols of hate cannot and will not represent the values of the Land of Lincoln.””

This is huge. They swear to shun the Democrat party.

[Verginius Rufus]

The Confederate battle flag is not a symbol of hate or racism. It's just that the Left in recent years has claimed that it is. Most of the Confederate soldiers did not own any slaves, and a lot of the Union soldiers thought that they were fighting to preserve the Union, not to end slavery

DuQuoin is in Perry County, named for Oliver Hazard Perry, the winner of the battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812. All of the surrounding counties are named for slaveholders.

A lot of the initial settlers of southern Illinois came from Southern states. Slavery was banned there by the Northwest Ordinance but after Illinois became a state a proposal to allow slavery lost only by a 4-3 margin among the voters. In Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, set in a town on the Mississippi River, the runaway slave Jim can't just cross the river into Illinois--he would not have been safe there. Of course that is a novel but it reflects Twain's memories of the antebellum period in that area.