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

17. Marianna

C H A P T E R 1 7 Marianna Marianna in Lee County in the heart of the Delta epitomized the racial problems of the state in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In many ways this small, forgotten town of less than five thousand, about equally divided between whites and blacks, proved to have the right ingredients for the “perfect storm.” But it was not just a racial confrontation that was about to occur. Through the vision and political skills of a Southern president, racial injustice and poverty (both white and black) were deemed no longer acceptable in a nation as rich and powerful as the United States. It was Lyndon Johnson who at the height of his power in 1964 insisted in a speech in May at the University of Michigan that America must create a “Great Society” whose goal was to create opportunities for the poor so that they might lift themselves out of poverty. Volunteers in Service to America With the passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 federal programs proliferated, including the creation of Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a domestic Peace Corps in which volunteers, usually college-age young men and women, were trained and often assigned to “community action agencies” throughout the poorest areas of the country. Perhaps the most radical notion of the “war on poverty” was that the local poor themselves would have a 373 3STOCKLEY_pages_251-536.qxd 10/7/08 12:38 AM Page 373 voice in governing these entities. It was this self-governing feature that caused such consternation. Whites in the South had become accustomed to receiving federal aid with its onerous red tape, but it made sure the federal largess went to the “right” people as had occurred, for example, during the Great Depression. As discussed, investigations showed Arkansas had been exhibit A of this practice as the local farm bureaucracies intervened to make certain that planters and not their tenants benefited from the federal programs. But now, with the passage of the economic opportunity act and its regulations, the poor were actually included on the governing boards that administered these programs. Their allies in insuring their actual participation in Lee County were out-of-state VISTA volunteers who began to arrive in Lee County in early 1969. Assigned to the East Central Arkansas Economic Opportunity Agency in Forrest City in adjoining St. Francis County, VISTA volunteers trained as “health advocates” and began to hold meetings with “neighborhood action committees” in Marianna and at least three other rural communities in Lee County. The volunteers could not help but think they had stepped back in time. Dr. Dan Blumenthal, the first VISTA physician in the nation, writes of Lee County: We viewed a scene archetypical of rural poverty in the cotton South. Outside of town [Marianna] there were scattered plantation houses owned by white gentlemen farmers. Down the road was, typically, a collection of tumbledown wooden shacks inhabited by black field hands. Living in similar shacks were elderly blacks and poor whites too old to farm and too unschooled to do anything else, who lived on social security checks or on food stamps, or on seemingly nothing at all. Typically, their houses were located on dirt roads that became impassable when it rained.1 The health needs were obvious. Blumenthal writes that the 374 MARIANNA 3STOCKLEY_pages_251-536.qxd 10/7/08 12:38 AM Page 374 The lack of health care . . . the people receive in an area such as this leads to an early death. . . . It’s an early death following a lifetime of frustration and hopelessness. . . . People suspect, I’m sure, that they’re dying younger than they need to. . . . It’s a hopeless feeling.2 Though blacks composed half the town and were much in evidence as maids, cooks, laundresses, yardmen, and delivery men, they addressed children as “Mister” and “Miss” and were in turn called by their first names. As late as 1962 members of the senior class at the white high school in Marianna (some dressed in black face) performed a minstrel and made fun of blacks to a full house.3 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 seemed to make little difference. Waiting rooms were still segregated in 1969.4 Blumenthal remembered, “Dr. Dwight Gray taught me what Lee County was all about. He leveled with me as a fellow southern doctor, one of the clan, and said...