Pembroke Township

The Story of Pembroke Township

Pembroke Township is the broader governmental entity that encompasses Hopkins Park and the surrounding rural community. Its story is one of the most distinctive and important in Kankakee County — a story rooted in freedom, self-determination, and the willingness to build something new on challenging land.

Pembroke was settled uniquely by African-American families, beginning with the Tetter family from North Carolina in the 1860s, and expanding dramatically through the Great Migration, particularly between 1910 and 1950, when Black families from the Deep South fled Jim Crow and sought land ownership and independence in the North. The sandy soil of Pembroke Township was unwanted by European-American farmers who had access to the richer black loam elsewhere in Kankakee County, so when this land became available, African-American families could purchase it at prices they could afford. This was not desperation — it was strategy. Land meant freedom. Land meant legacy. Land meant that your children would inherit something real.

The township is anchored by Hopkins Park, its civic center, which developed with a post office, small businesses, and the gathering places that make a community real. But Pembroke Township also includes the broader rural community — farms worked by families who proved that the sandy prairie could be productive, churches that became the backbone of social life, and institutions like Pembroke School that invested in the next generation.

The eight faith communities serving Pembroke Township (Christ Deliverance Pentecostal, Pembroke Fellowship, St. Augusta Catholic, Pembroke Church of Christ, Fellowship Bible Church, Union Missionary Baptist, Rehoboth Mennonite, and Forest Valley Community Temple) are remarkable. For a township of 3,500 people, eight churches represent not peripheral activity but central community life. Rehoboth Mennonite is particularly striking — a Mennonite congregation in a predominantly Black community speaks to something important: Pembroke Township has always been diverse in faith while unified in purpose.

WrightWay Services LLC represents local entrepreneurship and self-sufficiency. The Illinois Rural Electric Cooperative represents the infrastructure that made rural life sustainable. These institutions — the churches, the school, the services, the co-ops — are how Pembroke Township has persisted through economic challenges that have been real and significant. The community has faced decades of poverty, limited access to resources, and the systematic underinvestment that often follows when rural Black communities are perceived as marginal. But Pembroke has not surrendered. It has continued to be a place where families live, where churches gather, where children are educated, where people build lives on land their ancestors chose.