On June 15, 2002, at 10 o'clock on a Saturday morning, a crowd gathered for “Black Heroes Carved in Stone,” a ceremony held at Chippiannock Cemetery. They had convened to honor nine black soldiers who had volunteered to fight in the Civil War. The men had lain forgotten in unmarked graves until the cemetery’s office manager discovered their story while creating digital records from handwritten ledgers.

At the crest of Brady Street Hill are monumental busts of the founder and developers of the Palmer College of Chiropractic. At their center is an imposing bronze with these words: “Dr. Daniel David Palmer, Discover and Founder, 1845-1913.”

On October 6, 1922, hundreds of baseball fans gathered around a scoreboard in the front window of the Argus in downtown Rock Island to follow the third game of the World Series. Halfway through the game, two large black cars pulled to a stop in the middle of the street. Exiting their cars, several men stood in the street to fire guns at two men who returned their fire. The fans scrambled away from the ricocheting bullets in panic. Several men were shot.

These are the first words on an historic marker at the Black Hawk Historic Site in Rock Island. "The marker states that La Main Cassee was 'a true friend of the American cause during the Revolutionary War' who confronted a British war party here in 1779. The same marker then commemorates the burning of Saukenuk by the American military in 1780."