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4. Mass Mobilization and the Early Civil Rights Struggle—“He Founded a Movement”: W. H. Flowers, the Committee on Negro Organizations, and Black Activism in Arkansas, 1940–1957
- University of Arkansas Press
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4 Mass Mobilization and the Early Civil Rights Struggle “He Founded a Movement”: W. H. Flowers, the Committee on Negro Organizations and Black Activism in Arkansas, 1940–1957 Since the 1980s historians of the civil rights movement have moved beyond the exploration of national events, figures and organizations , which much of the initial body of literature addressed, toward a probing of local developments, assessing their impact upon the dramatic social upheavals taking place between the mid-1950s and mid1960s in American society. These studies have helped set a new agenda of issues. In particular, the growing number of community studies has highlighted the inadequacy of the existing chronology of the civil rights movement. Tracing the origins of black protest back into the 1930s and 1940s, they have stressed that an understanding of developments in those decades is fundamental to fully comprehending changes that occurred in later years.1 Building upon work already done in uncovering local movements elsewhere, this essay focuses on the rich and vibrant history of black protest in Arkansas. More specifically, it seeks to highlight the role of W. H. Flowers and the Committee on Negro Organizations (CNO) in the continuing struggle for black rights. At a time when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was reluctant to offer help, the CNO emerged as the premier focus for encouraging organized direct-action protest in the state. This essay 55 traces the development of the organization, its changing strategies and agendas, and locates its local campaigns in the context of the New Deal and World War II. Also, the essay explores the complex relationship between Flowers, the CNO, and other centers of power, protest and influence in the state, as efforts were made to assemble a united black front in an “organization of organizations.”2 Above all, it seeks to consider the ways in which Flowers and the CNO established precedents and served as catalysts for civil rights activities that captured national attention only in later years. Both in the way they laid the groundwork for later direct-action protests and challenged black perceptions of themselves and their capacity to resist Jim Crow at the time, Flowers and the CNO played a vital role in the story of black protest in Arkansas. On March 10, 1940, at the Buchanan Baptist Church in Stamps, Arkansas, six young professional men sat on a raised platform in front of a gathered assembly of around two hundred blacks. These men formed the core of the CNO. W. H. Flowers, a young lawyer and driving force behind the initiative, stood to speak. He charged that there was a “blackout of democracy” in Arkansas. There was, he claimed, no adequate organization to serve the needs of its Negro citizens, to publicize and stand up against the daily racial injustices they were forced to encounter. Realizing the magnitude of the task in filling such a void, Flowers expressed the belief that the young leadership of the CNO possessed “enough brain power and courage to revolutionize the thinking of the people of Arkansas.”3 William Harold Flowers had been born in Stamps in 1911, son of a businessman and a schoolteacher. His family belonged to a professional elite that formed the upper echelon of black society there. Writer Maya Angelou, who grew up in the same town, referred to Flowers’s grandmother as the “aristocrat of Black Stamps.”4 Inspiration to pursue a legal career came early. Trips as a child with his father to watch jury trials at the courthouse had given him his “first peep into the judicial system.” Later, at the age of sixteen, he was given an insight into another side of southern justice. On a visit to Little Rock, he witnessed the burning of a lynched black man, John Carter, on the main black downtown business throughfare, on a funeral pyre built with pews plundered from a nearby black church. It was at this sight, he would recall in later years, that he was “truly converted to be a lawyer.”5 Graduating from Robert H. Terrell Law School in Washington, 56 Beyond Little Rock [3.230.147.225] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:52 GMT) D.C., Flowers returned to Arkansas, setting up a practice at Pine Bluff in 1938. Young, eager, and idealistic, with his first-hand experiences of southern injustices toward blacks, from the outset he wished to use his legal talents to further the cause of the race there. Originally, he wanted to...