Ruled by Race: Black/White Relations in Arkansas From Slavery to the Present

6. The Coming of Jim Crow

C H A P T E R 6 The Coming of Jim Crow The year 1891 was a legislative disaster for African Americans like no other in the history of the state. Measures were passed that would soon result in their effective banishment from the political process and segregate them from whites. Kenneth C. Barnes argues that the key to understanding these catastrophic events lies in an analysis of what happened years before in places like Conway County. As already noted, Conway County was the scene of vengeful behavior that far outlasted the Civil War itself, but by 1872 the Democrats were again in control and surely thought their domination would last indefinitely. But from their perspective an unnerving demographic began to occur. From no more than 630 blacks in 1870 the black population shot to 3,206 in 1880, a rate of growth dwarfing the increase of the white population. By 1890 it had doubled again; suddenly blacks composed 39.4 percent of the population of the county. Many blacks came from South Carolina where voter fraud and violence followed the end of Reconstruction, and understandably they hoped the situation would be different in a part of Arkansas where many whites had not wanted to secede from the United States. The Lure of Populism Blacks, lured by labor agents to Conway County, made their homes in the fertile bottomlands north of the Arkansas River. Besides blacks came a number of immigrants including Germans, French, Italians, and Polish, many of whom were 109 1STOCKLEY_pages_i-250.qxd 10/7/08 12:06 AM Page 109 Catholic. By September 1884 Republicans, with the aid of black voters in Conway County, were now back in power. But it was not only the Republicans who had come back to life, for in their midst there was a whole new political force now sweeping the country. Farmers who had never cared about politics were now joining something called the Agricultural Wheel in Arkansas. The Wheel and its organizational forerunners stood outside the traditional parties and attracted disgruntled farmers of both races who began seeing their world through a populist lens that counted as enemies merchants and their laws that favored the mortgagor and their economic policies that resulted in low prices for their crops. Beginning as early as 1882 black farmers in Prairie County in east-central Arkansas were listening to populists voices for help on solving their financial woes, and with the help of the founder, a white man by the name of Milton George from the Northwestern Farmers Alliance, they put together the first local organization in Arkansas.1 Wheelers and groups like them talked a language farmers could understand. Steven Hahn writes, During the early 1880s, blacks in the Arkansas Delta built the Sons of the Agricultural Star to such a size that the state Agricultural Wheel, in 1886, dropped its “whites only” eligibility clause to accept the membership (though in racially separate units). By 1888, two hundred black wheels (as they were called) could be identified in Arkansas, and when the Wheel and Farmers’ Alliance merged, resurrecting the policy of racial exclusion, they went on to form the Colored State Agricultural Wheel.2 While Kenneth Barnes is unable to trace the nature of any new political alliance in Conway County, whether farmers who identified themselves with the new populism and Republicans joined together or had separate slates, he maintains that “by 1884 Conway County Democrats became well aware of the splintering effects of a third-party vote but argued futilely that a vote for the farmers meant a vote for the Republican Party.” With “the highest voter turnout ever 110 THE COMING OF JIM CROW 1STOCKLEY_pages_i-250.qxd 10/7/08 12:06 AM Page 110 seen in Conway County, the farmers and Republicans defeated the Democrats for every County office, with most of the winners appearing to be Republican.”3 Despite having their ballots and poll books stolen in a Republican township, this coalition brought in votes, as well, for the Republican candidate for governor Thomas Bole who beat Democrat Simon P. Hughes by sixty-seven ballots. None of this would have been possible without the support of the county’s black population, and the Democrats knew it. Suddenly, populism had become a threat that had the Democrats reeling. In Arkansas the Agricultural Wheel by 1884 had ten thousand members and was growing fast. Blacks Battle the Klan...