Shortly after George Floyd was murdered blocks from her home in Minneapolis, Mihesha Gibbs-Lumpkins decided to return to Pembroke Township with her husband and two children.
Her 13-year-old son was the one who voiced a need to escape the chaos. Walking to school, past the corner store where Floyd was suffocated by a police officer, was overwhelming.
“For this to happen so close to home and along his daily route it terrified us all,” Gibbs-Lumpkins said.
Her hometown, a predominantly Black farming community 60 miles south of Chicago, was supposed to be the perfect reprieve.
Within a few months, the family of four moved into a quaint rambler in Hopkins Park, a small village within the township. It was surrounded by rare black oak savanna and backed up to the landlocked area’s unique sand dunes.
She recalled it as a place with no fences. One farm gave way to another, which gave way to an expanse of towering trees, which gave way to rolling hills of sand.
In the Pembroke she remembered, her kids would be able to play without boundaries. But she did not return to that Pembroke. Today, she doesn’t feel comfortable letting her kids walk to the edge of her property alone.
Gibbs-Lumpkin and her neighbors feel that their once-tranquil community is slowly slipping away. Conservation groups began buying property in the early 2000s to create nature preserves. In the past decade, out-of-town off-road enthusiasts have trespassed on the dunes. They shoot guns and make campfires late into the night, leaving behind bullet casings and beer cans.
The off-road activity has only increased in recent years, according to residents. Gibbs-Lumpkin said she saw droves of 200 to 300 riders at a time descend on the dunes on several occasions this summer. Another resident shared a video with the Tribune of riders revving their engines on an October Sunday at 5:30 a.m.
Lacking its own police force, the less-than-1,900-person township feels attacked and defenseless.
“I used to tell people all the time that Hopkins Park in Pembroke is one of the last places on this earth where you can go to get your mental and emotional health back in order without getting a prescription,” Gibbs-Lumpkins said.
The ambient sound of chirping birds, whistling branches and scurrying creatures was rarely disrupted by cars or planes. Sandwiched between fields, the town was supposed to be a world away from the riots ensuing in Minneapolis in 2020.
Then, shortly after she moved to her new home, off-road vehicles began zooming through her backyard. She had to move the chairs and sofa away from the windows so they weren’t in the line of sight of a stray bullet.
“Our way of life is not being respected. Our right just to sleep peacefully is not being respected. Hearing assault rifles for hours on end is gut-wrenching,” Gibbs-Lumpkins said.
The small, resource-poor township relies on the Kankakee County sheriff’s office to enforce the law. But Sheriff Mike Downey said his force’s hands are largely tied. It lacks the resources to pursue armed off-roaders through acres of rolling sand, and state law empowers officers only to issue citations for criminal trespassing.
But residents, who say not everyone files a complaint, are at a loss. Many have resorted to protecting their property with barricades made of metal mattress frames, used cars and fallen trees. The off-roaders just come back with bulldozers and chain saws. The “No Trespassing” signs they have posted on private property all over town are adorned with bullet holes.
Once antagonists, environmentalists have partnered with residents to fend off the off-roaders.
“(Our responsibility) is no different than anybody else who owns property and lives here,” said the Nature Conservancy’s Illinois director of land and water conservation, Jason Beverlin. “We are part of the neighborhood, and we have a responsibility to work with our neighbors to try to help solve this.”
‘A Black mecca’
Two centuries ago Pembroke’s sandy soil was presumed worthless. People freed from slavery were largely able to stake their claim on the area in the mid-1800s because white settlers passed it over. The town steadily grew as it became a refuge for Black people escaping the Jim Crow South.
Through trial and error, Black farmers learned to live off the land: growing specialty crops to feed their families, harvesting just enough timber to heat their homes and intentionally burning land to keep it healthy. Thanks to their light touch, Pembroke is one of the few places that still looks like it did over 200 years ago, said Kim Roman of the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission.
It’s home to at least 38 endangered or threatened species and the largest concentration of black oak savannas: sparsely treed grasslands found at the convergence of eastern hardwood forests and western grassland prairies. Once covering about 30 million acres across the Midwest, these savannas now account for less than 6,500 acres.
Much of the savanna lies within sand dunes created by a catastrophic flood during the last ice age. Tsunami-like waves from melting glaciers drained the large lakes that covered Illinois and Indiana, leaving behind sand that once lined the lakebeds. Thousands of years of wind shaped 80 acres of sand into the dunes that the off-roaders now call “the bowl.”
The Nature Conservancy began establishing a network of preserves in Pembroke during the early 2000s. Almost 450 acres were collected during public auctions of land lost due to unpaid property taxes. Many residents saw it as an intrusion on a struggling community.
Poverty is endemic, and population loss has been steady. A few churches, a deli and gas station are scattered between shuttered buildings on Main Street. The population has more than halved since 1980, declining from nearly 4,700 to less than 1,900 in 2020.
“We had a Black mecca out here, and we didn’t know it,” Arnettia Marshall said at a mid-December community meeting where a dozen residents aired their grievances about the off-road activity. “We’ve always been a welcoming community, but this welcome comes with respect.”
Today the conservancy has about 2,700 acres in the area but it stopped purchasing land through public auction in 2015, according to Beverlin.
Some of the conservancy’s property leads to and is within “the bowl,” thrusting the organization into partnership with the residents against Pembroke’s newest intruders.
A now-deleted 2022 real estate listing for vacant land advertises “Exclusive access to ‘The Bowl.’ If you know, you know! Bring your ATVs (all-terrain vehicles), 4-wheelers, and motorcycles!”
Beverlin and his colleagues have been intentional about establishing more collaborative relationships with residents. Gibbs-Lumpkins was hired last year as a community engagement specialist.
The organization sent the police a letter last month requesting a conversation about getting the off-roading activity under control. Earlier this month, Downey acknowledged to the Tribune that his office received the letter but has yet to respond.
The sheriff’s office has received 66 calls since 2020 regarding criminal trespassing within the township, according to sheriff’s office records. Downey said most off-roader-related calls have been logged as trespassing complaints.
Ultimately, he questioned whether the off-roaders were a “huge problem,” stating that his office only averages a dozen calls about trespassers in Pembroke Township per year. Nineteen of those 66 calls were made this year and 14 were made last year, according to mid-December data. There were also 31 calls reporting shots fired in 2024 and 85 calls in 2023, the same year the sheriff responded to an ATV accident that killed a child.
Roadblocks to prosecuting
This spring, Gibbs-Lumpkins bought another home, away from the dunes, because of all the off-road activity. Caravans of off-roaders still whiz by at all hours but she feels better protected from the gun activity.
Bruce Collins, who currently lives along the bowl’s perimeter, said he’s had stray bullets fly into his home twice: once through his son’s bedroom wall and the second time through his living room window.
“I’ve been complaining for the last three years, and no one did anything,” Collins said. He’s frustrated that municipal and county officials aren’t taking ownership over the issue.
Hopkins Park Mayor Mark Hodge has put the responsibility squarely in the sheriff’s court.
“If we had our own police department, then we could manage and eliminate this within a month,” said the mayor, who worked as a corrections officer in California for two decades before returning to his hometown and assuming public office in 2015.
Pembroke and Hopkins Park’s governments are toothless without their own police force. The county sheriff is not authorized to enforce village and township ordinances. The sheriff must depend on county and state trespassing, noise pollution and gun laws, which Hodge said would be adequate if enforced.
Some of Hodge’s peers in local government and his constituents believe the sheriff’s office’s lack of attention has racial undertones. Pembroke is a predominantly Black town, and Kankakee is a predominantly white county.
“The police treat us differently” was a phrase repeated constantly during the December community meeting.
Kankakee County is 70% white, while Pembroke Township is 70% Black.
“I think it’s racial. I’ll say it because I do believe we are paying our tax dollars like everybody else,” Rosemary Foster, a lifelong Pembroke resident and Kankakee County Board member, told the Tribune in early December.
But the police said the bowl’s topography makes it particularly difficult to regulate activity in Pembroke compared with other parts of Kankakee County, where unauthorized off-road activity is also common. Squad cars are not equipped to chase ATVs and razors through the expansive, rolling dunes.
Several residents told the Tribune their 911 calls for help were met by responders telling them nothing could be done.
“We can chase them all we want and the issue becomes, if we get into a pursuit with an ATV and God forbid something bad happens to the driver of that ATV, who do you think they’re going to blame?” Downey said. “With the SAFE-T Act, all we can do is write them a citation anyway.”
Trespassing is not a detainable offense following the passage of the 2021 Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today Act. First-time offenders are issued a ticket, and second-time offenders can be arrested only for a couple of hours. The crime is considered a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in prison and a $2,500 fine.
Kankakee County State’s Attorney Jim Rowe said he has met with village and township leadership to discuss “criminal activity” at the bowl.
“My Office will prosecute any such crimes that are reported to law enforcement and meet the requirements for criminal prosecution, i.e., witnesses to the offense, identity of the trespassers, signed trespass complaints by the property owner, etc.,” he wrote the Tribune in an email. “This evidence, and more, is required by law for a trespassing offense to be charged.”
But the sheriff’s office has not cited any off-roaders in Pembroke since the SAFE-T Act was passed, and many of the calls about off-road activity have been made anonymously, Downey said.
In the last five years, the sheriff’s office has only filed one official incident report of criminal trespassing and two reports of stray bullets damaging homes in the bowl’s perimeter, according to official documents obtained by the Tribune via a Freedom of Information Act request. None identified a suspect.
Downey is hopeful that a new ATV fleet purchased by his office this fall will help his team wrangle off-roaders in the near future. The fleet hasn’t been deployed yet, and off-road activity has slowed down with the cold weather.
Gearing up for grassroots action
Hodge, Foster and Pembroke Township Supervisor Samuel Payton sent a joint letter pleading for assistance from the Illinois chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The association did not respond to the Tribune’s request for comment.
The local leaders plan to send a similar letter to Attorney General Kwame Raoul and the Illinois State Police in the coming weeks.
Residents have also been strategizing grassroots action. They organized a “stand-in” to confront armed off-roaders in late October. And, during the mid-December community meeting, they discussed using drones to track vehicles, joked about a tax boycott to incentivize police action and encouraged one another to file formal complaints every time they call the police.
Everyone reminisced about a time when no one needed fences. They agreed the rural community needed its own police department.
A couple of residents floated the possibility of using the demonstrated interest in off-roading to bring much-needed economic activity to the small town. It was quickly shut down by others.
“Eventually, (creating a regulated ATV riding area) is one of the things that the community could consider doing on our terms. But right now, we need to take control of the situation that’s threatening a lot of our landowners,” Johari Cole-Kweli, the founder and president of the Community Development Corporation of Pembroke-Hopkins Park, told the Tribune. “We’re getting accosted. It’s lawless.”
