Beyond Little Rock: The Origins and Legacies of the Central High Crisis

8. City Planning and the Civil Rights Struggle— “A Study in Second-Class Citizenship”: Race, Urban Development, and Little Rock’s Gillam Park, 1934–2004

8 City Planning and the Civil Rights Struggle “A Study in Second-Class Citizenship”: Race, Urban Development, and Little Rock’s Gillam Park, 1934–2004 The historiography of the civil rights struggle has changed dramatically over the past quarter of a century. Early histories that appeared prior to the 1980s concentrated primarily on Martin Luther King Jr. and the familiar “Montgomery-to-Memphis” narrative of his life.1 Since the 1980s, a number of studies examining the civil rights movement at local and state levels have questioned the usefulness and accuracy of the King-centric Montgomery-to-Memphis narrative as the sole way of understanding the civil rights movement. These studies have made it clear that civil rights struggles already existed in many of the communities where King and the organization he was president of, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), ran civil rights campaigns in the 1960s. Moreover, those struggles continued long after King and the SCLC had left those communities. Civil rights activism also thrived in many places that King and the SCLC never visited.2 As a result of these local and state studies, historians have increasingly framed the civil rights movement within the context of a much longer, ongoing struggle for black freedom and equality unfolding throughout the twentieth century at local, state, and national levels. This in turn has helped to broaden the range of issues that historians have explored in relation to the civil rights struggle, which have, for 139 example, variously included the role of women’s activism, the role of violence and armed-self defense, and international dimensions of the struggle.3 A different approach by urban historians has offered an important challenge to the way we conceptualize the civil rights movement. Studies by Thomas J. Sugrue, Arnold R. Hirsch, and others, have explored the role of race and urban development in cities across the United States.4 In doing so, they have shifted the focus of historians from the short-term battles for desegregation and voting rights to the long-term structural issues of urban planning and neighborhood development . This shift in emphasis has in turn forced attention both on the areas in which the civil rights movement failed to have a decisive impact and to the relatively neglected episodes within the civil rights canon. These include, for example, Martin Luther King and the SCLC’s 1965–66 Chicago campaign, which failed in its bid to win “open housing” for blacks in that northern city, and the failure of the 1966 civil rights bill that contained fair housing proposals.5 Studies by urban historians suggest that to understand the wider implications of the civil rights struggle we need to broaden our focus beyond what have been traditionally perceived as the key issues and to pay more attention to those areas the movement failed to address. The history of Gillam Park in Little Rock, Arkansas, is particularly instructive for understanding the link between race and urban development in that city and the nature of the ongoing struggle for black freedom and equality there. Gillam Park is made up of about 375 acres located in the southeast corner of Little Rock in the Granite Mountain area. Although at first glance it appears to be a marginal tract of land, distant from the main body of urban affairs, it has, in fact, often been at the heart of the debate over race and city planning. In the 1930s, the city purchased the property as a site for Little Rock’s first “separate but equal” park. In the 1940s, the site became central to a campaign by black activists for a more comprehensive plan to develop black recreation facilities but also illustrated the growing divide between blacks pressing for equalization within the Jim Crow system and those urging the abolition of segregation and the integration of white facilities. In the 1950s, Gillam Park was the cornerstone of a multimillion dollar slum clearance and urban redevelopment plan that had a profound impact on the future of race, residence, and community resources in the city. Even in the twenty-first century, Gillam 140 Beyond Little Rock Park remains part of the wider debate over race and urban development . Thus, the history of Gillam Park provides a unique opportunity to gain insight into race and city planning policy in its myriad phases of evolution over the past seventy years. Mayor Horace A. Knowlton and the Little...