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

NOTES

N O T E S Introduction 1. Donald Holly in The Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South argues that much migration had already occurred before mechanization took hold (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000). 2. Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 1. For all Arkansans of the time Hahn describes, geography, of course, was destiny within the context of the Southern experience. Numerous Arkansas historians have pointed out the frontier qualities that made Arkansas unique as part of the Old South. As a frontier state of the Old South, timing was everything. As we shall see, when the nation burst apart in 1861, Arkansas was just beginning the process of becoming a major slave state. Its distinct geography, divided diagonally into fertile lowlands and highlands, made the state like and at the same time quite unlike, for example, Mississippi. When war came, Arkansas’s location in the west made the state, much to its leaders’ chagrin, an afterthought instead of a major player in the Civil War. As important as the Reconstruction era was in giving opportunities to blacks within the state—an unsurpassed record twenty blacks were elected in 1873 to serve in the legislature—their leadership roles were limited in comparison , for example, to Mississippi where 226 blacks held public office. Relatively soon after the war ended, once again geography dictated the state’s racial composition for blacks from the older cotton states such as Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, lured by labor contractors, poured into the state seeking greater freedom and opportunities. By the 1890s lynching was on the rise, and Arkansas soon joined the rest of the Old South in passing Jim Crow legislation and measures to disfranchise its black citizens. For most of the first half of the twentieth century , the state’s commitment to white supremacy made it indistinguishable from the rest of the Old South. By the late 1940s a change had begun, and Arkansas distinguished itself from other Old South states by admitting a few blacks into graduate schools. 3. For example, see Donald P. McNeilly, The Old South Frontier: Cotton Plantations and the Formation of Arkansas Society, 1819–1961 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000), 1. “Geography was a central force in the historical development of Arkansas.” 461 3STOCKLEY_pages_251-536.qxd 10/7/08 12:38 AM Page 461 4. According to Jason Phillips, “At least 226 black Mississippians held public office during Reconstruction, compared to only 46 blacks in Arkansas and 20 in Tennessee. Mississippi sent the first two (and only) black senators of this period to Congress.” “Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1865–1876,” Mississippi History Now, Mississippi Historical Society, http://mshistory.k12.ms.us/index.php?id=204 (accessed July 13, 2007). 5. Willard B. Gatewood writes that the “few issues were more emotion -laden in the black community than relating to the color prejudices and preferences of blacks themselves . . . multiple color lines allegedly existed in the black community.” Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 151. 6. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, December 8, 2004. 7. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, December 17, 2004. 8. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, August 23, 2004. 9. Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, July 9, 2004. 10. Arkansas Times, February 3, 2005. 11. Arkansas Times, February 3, 2005. 12. W. Avery Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (New York: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2005), 122. In the late twentieth century, the Arkansas History Commission required that African American history be included in its collection efforts, creating a black history advisory committee. The commission also employs a coordinator of African American history. 13. William M. Adler, Land of Opportunity: One Family’s Quest for the American Dream in the Age of Crack (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995), 21. 14. Brundage, The Southern Past, 121. 15. Brundage, The Southern Past, 119. 16. While I have no quarrel with the increasingly widespread view among academics that race is a “social construct” and has no scientific meaning, for the purpose of discussing past and present relationships between whites and African Americans in Arkansas I have chosen to characterize the events in this history as having a racial significance simply because that is how most Arkansans, white and black, have viewed “race” relations and still, in fact, view them. Chapter 1 1...