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31. “82% Negro; 100% White” (1965) The following document is an article written by Arkansas Project member Laura Foner for the October 26, 1965, issue of the Brandeis University student newspaper, The Justice. Foner, a Brandeis graduate, spent nearly a year volunteering in Gould. In this article, Foner describes the state of the local civil rights movement and solicits donations for the financially strapped SNCC. Brandeis alumnae Nancy (Shaw) Stoller and Arlene (Wilgoren) Dunn also worked for the Arkansas Project. 82% Negro; 100% White By LAURA FONER, ’65 Going South on Arkansas state highway 65 you will come to a cluster of three gas stations, and a sign: GOULD, ARKANSAS Population 1673 Gould is a town like ‘most any other town in Southeast Arkansas. Look to your right and you are in typical small town America. The main street has two or three grocery stores, one general store, the post office, the bank, and the pool hall. City Hall, in the center of town, is one long room which serves as the police headquarters, the courtroom, the jail, and the “public library” (a few shelves of books along one wall). Except for the big cotton gin in the middle of town and the fields of white cotton which stretch every direction, you might imagine yourself to be somewhere in Massachusetts, just as much as in the middle of Mississippi delta country. 220 Source: The Justice, Brandeis University student newspaper, October 26, 1965, 4 and 7 Separate and Unequal But look to your left—on the other side of Highway 65 and (literally) the other side of the railroad tracks. Is this still America? Are we not in the slums of some South American city? Instead of the paved streets we find dirt roads. When it is dry, the dust covers you at every step; when it rains, the roads become impassable muddy streams. Houses are ramshackle two- or three-room wooden shacks where perhaps nine children share a bed (or the floor) and huddle together when the wind comes through the large cracks. The Negro high school, in the midst of a field of weeds and dust, consists of four old wooden buildings. Two of them are “Jap Houses”—or buildings that come from Japanese concentration camps during the war. “A rat’s nest” is what the students call them, and indeed, many rats have found a home there. The description also applies to the general condition of the school—the large cracks and holes in the floors, ceilings and walls, the inadequate heating, and outdoor toilet facilities. How can two worlds be so far apart and yet so close that only one two-lane highway lies between them? That highway is easy to step across—and yet it forms “the line”— a line as impenetrable as a steel wall. By an unwritten law (unwritten on the statute books, yet branded into the flesh and hearts of millions of men), no Negro can step across that line except when he goes to cut the white man’s yard or mop his floors, shop in the white man’s store (where he can not get a job as a clerk), pay his bills at City Hall or the fine the white sheriff hands out whenever he wants some cash, or (before this summer) to eat at the side window of the white man’s restaurant. Then he must quickly go back “where he belongs.” We are in Gould to see what can be done to break down that wall. Getting Things Done What is needed is not tanks—but organization. What we are trying to do is to encourage the people in Gould to organize themselves to change their lives and the way this town is run. At present, Gould is run almost exclusively by a man named Howard Holtoff, one of the largest cotton planters in the state. Most of the people in the town who have jobs work for the Holtoff family—as tractor drivers, at the gin, or in the field. Gould is 82% Negro, yet there has never been a Negro mayor, city council member, sheriff, or school board member. Which is not to say that Negroes in Gould do not have the vote, as in Mississippi. Here, Negroes have always been voting (or been voted), but their vote and the whole political process is controlled by the same gang of white men. “82% NEGRO; 100% WHITE” (1965) 221 [18.116.36.192] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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