Mt. Zion
Missionary Baptist Church

John Gwynn is known as Peoria's Martin Luther King Jr. for the work he did to desegregate the community. Throughout the 1960s, Gwynn mounted campaigns against segregation in housing, schools, government, restaurants and corporations like Caterpillar and Central Illinois Light

Company.

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A Tennessee native, Gwynn attended college in that state and served in the U.S. Army during

the Korean War before moving to Peoria in the mid-1950s. He worked for a short time at the

U.S. post office before going to work full time for the NAACP.

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Gwynn led peaceful protests throughout the community. "He could gather a crowd of

200 or 300 (protesters) to a site in 15 minutes – and he did so several times – and they

just wouldn't move," Arthur Greenberg, a local attorney active in the civil rights

movement, told the Journal Star in 1996.

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Gwynn's efforts helped end legalized segregation throughout the community. Public

housing in the Taft, Warner and Harrison homes became available to Black people,

and companies began hiring minorities in greater numbers.

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"John was the lightning rod, the stick that woke the mule up every day," said Don

Jackson, who was NAACP president at the time of Gwynn's death in 1996. "He

was Peoria's Martin Luther King."

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Gwynn was president of the Peoria chapter of the NAACP from 1961 to 1993,

and the statewide NAACP president for more than two decades. He was 67

years old when he died in 1996.