Statesmen, Scoundrels, and Eccentrics: A Gallery of Amazing Arkansans

Isaac T. Gillam

Isaac T. Gillam Despite his birth as a slave,Isaac T.Gillam arose quickly on the political scene in post–Civil War Little Rock. Though he died early, Gillam crammed a great deal of political activity into a few years. Isaac Taylor Gillam first entered the public record on September , , when the young black man joined the U.S. Army, which had captured Little Rock only five days earlier. His exact birthday is unknown for he was a slave, and birth records were not kept of slaves. It is believed that Gillam was brought to Little Rock by his Tennessee owner, who was fleeing the federal army. Being a skilled blacksmith, Gillam was valuable property and worth transporting to another state. After three years, Gillam left the U.S. Army as a sergeant and opened a blacksmith shop. As a sideline, he raised horses. For a time he also served as a city jailer and policeman, but those were political positions and subject to abrupt change. Gillam was active in the local Republican Party during Reconstruction .During the Brooks-Baxter War,an armed conflict that arose from the contested gubernatorial election of  and which brought an end to Reconstruction,Gillam served on the losing side as a captain in the Brooks militia. In  he won election to the Little Rock City Council as a Republican, representing the heavily black Sixth Ward. The Little Rock City Council,like much of the country at that time, was divided among three parties, with the insurgent Greenback Party holding the balance of power.Gillam,while a nominal Republican,often aligned with the Greenbackers to beat the Democrats. In one instance, Gillam and his fellow Republicans entered into a coalition with the Greenbackers to elect their candidate for police chief,though it took  ballots to do so. Later Gillam switched to the Greenback Party and was elected under their banner to the state legislature in , thereby simultaneously serving as a Republican city councilman and a Greenback legislator . He continued his political transformation in  when he was  elected Pulaski county coroner as a Democrat. Gillam completed his metamorphosis in  when he ran again for coroner, this time as the nominee of another insurgency, the Populist Party. Gillam died in , a decade after the state legislature disfranchised black voters. His contributions to society, however, continued through his widow, Cora Gillam, and children. Of the seven Gillam children to reach adulthood, five were teachers. Isaac T. Gillam  Isaac T. Gillam, a former slave who gained broad political experience after the Civil War. Photo courtesy of University of Central Arkansas Archives, Conway. Many of the children attended Shorter College in North Little Rock, which the devout African Methodist Episcopal family helped create. While sisters Mary, Annie, and Leah were elementary teachers, Isaac T. Gillam II was among America’s most noted black educators. Graduating from Howard University, the younger Isaac Gillam later studied at Yale University and a number of other schools. While at the University of Cincinnati, he studied under the famous John Dewey. He retired from the Little Rock Public Schools after a long career, fifty years as principal at Gibbs High School alone. Not all the educators coming from the Gillam family were able to stay in their place of birth. One of Isaac Jr.’s children, Dorothy Gillam, made her mark in education by teaching French in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Little Rock public schools had dropped foreign languages from the black schools around  in order to stress “manual arts.” Upon her retirement, Miss Dorothy Gillam moved back to Little Rock, settling into the family home near Philander Smith College.She maintained the family archives, including her grandfather’s original commission naming Isaac T.Gillam as a major in the Joseph Brooks militia. The Gillam family’s most recent contribution to American leadership is the role Isaac T. Gillam IV played in American aviation and aerospace history. Gillam, a Korean War pilot and later an official at NASA, oversaw production of the shuttle program. He was inducted into the Arkansas Aviation Hall of Fame in . Families like the Gillams were able to do remarkable things, perhaps the most amazing being their success in reducing African American illiteracy from nearly  percent at the end of the Civil War to  percent in thirty-five years. FOR MORE INFORMATION: Dillard, Tom W. “The Gilliam [sic] Family, Four Generations of Black Arkansas Educators.” Journal of Arkansas Education  (): , . Dillard...