Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas brings together the work of leading experts to cast a powerful light on the rich and diverse history of Arkansas’s racial and ethic relations. The essays span from slavery to the civil rights era and cover a diverse range of topics including the frontier experience of slavery; the African American experience of emancipation and after; African American migration patterns; the rise of sundown towns; white violence and its continuing legacy; women’s activism and home demon¬stration agents; African American religious figures from the better know Elias Camp (E. C.) Morris to the lesser-known Richard Nathaniel Hogan; the Mexican-American Bracero program; Latina/o and Asian American refugee experiences; and contemporary views of Latina/o immigration in Arkansas. Informing debates about race and ethnicity in Arkansas, the South, and the nation, the book provides both a primer to the history of race and ethnicity in Arkansas and a prospective map for better understanding racial and ethnic relations in the United States.

In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Arkansas governor Orval Faubus viewed the desegregation of Little Rock Central High through very different lenses. The president worried that displays of rampant racism tarnished the nation's reputation as a global power and undermined efforts to thwart the spread of communism. The governor sided with his segregationist constituents to guarantee his political survival. For the nine teenagers caught in the middle, Central High was a cauldron of racial tension. These students represented the black and moderate-white community’s desire for social justice. The documents collected in this book–newspaper articles, political cartoons, excerpts from oral histories and memoirs, speeches, photographs, and editorials–help readers understand how this local, southern conflict became a national and international cause. The documents selected cover the period 1900–2006. Some have never been published before or are in out-of-print sources. Each reveals something significant about the event and its aftermath, while some offer an unconventional or unexpected perspective on the crisis and the issues it raised. A timeline, a list of key players in the crisis, and a selected, annotated bibliography are included.

Readings in Arkansas Politics and Government brings together in one volume some of the best available scholarly research, both new and not so new, on a wide range of topics and issues of interest to students of politics and government in the Natural State. The twenty-one articles are arranged in four sections, ranging from the state’s socioeconomic and political context to the workings of its policymaking institutions and the key policy puzzles facing the state in the early twenty-first century. Some of the topics covered include demographics, legislation, issues of church and state, the role of African Americans in the legislature, term limits, constitutional reform, civil rights, and education reform. Ideal for use in introductory and advanced undergraduate courses, the book will also appeal to lawmakers, administrators, journalists, and those interested in how politics and government work in the state.

Arkansas, the Old South’s last frontier, was forced, after the election of Lincoln, to face the issue of secession. A decade earlier, the state had spurned all efforts from within to withdraw from the Union, but the following ten years drew Arkansas deeper into the economic and cultural community that bound it to the other slaveholding states. Now rumblings of secession were heard even before the president-elect assumed office on March 4, 1861. The question was asked on street corners, in offices, barbershops and living rooms: Would Arkansas leave the Union?

Answers to that question caused a fundamental realignment of politics in Arkansas during the winter of 1860–61. The former political coalition of Democrat and Whig fell away in a geographical split between the uplands and the lowlands. In this important and exciting book, the first to tell the story of Arkansas’s road to secession, James Woods examines the differences between uplanders, whose mountain regions offered little useful farmland for any crop, and lowlanders, whose vast deltas were ideally suited for cotton farming. The southern portion of the state began to rely increasingly upon slavery as it became linked to the economy of cotton and Southern antebellum values, but the northern region of the state did not. Woods focuses upon the resulting social, economic, and geographic divisions that grew within Arkansas before and during the secession crisis. He captures the political struggles of the state as it tore away from the nation, and as it threatened, in so doing, to tear itself apart.

In November 1912, popular and pretty eighteen-year-old Ella Barham was raped, murdered, and dismembered in broad daylight near her home in rural Boone County, Arkansas. The brutal crime sent shockwaves through the Ozarks and made national news. Authorities swiftly charged a neighbor, Odus Davidson, with the crime. Locals were determined that he be convicted, and threats of mob violence ran so high that he had to be jailed in another county to ensure his safety. But was there enough evidence to prove his guilt? If so, had he acted alone? What was his motive?

This examination of the murder of Ella Barham and the trial of her alleged killer opens a window into the meaning of community and due process during a time when politicians and judges sought to professionalize justice, moving from local hangings to state-run executions. Davidson’s appeal has been cited as a precedent in numerous court cases and his brief was reviewed by the lawyers in Georgia who prepared Leo Frank’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1915.

Author Nita Gould is a descendant of the Barhams of Boone County and Ella Barham’s cousin. Her tenacious pursuit to create an authoritative account of the community, the crime, and the subsequent legal battle spanned nearly fifteen years. Gould weaves local history and short biographies into her narrative and also draws on the official case files, hundreds of newspaper accounts, and personal Barham family documents. Remembering Ella reveals the truth behind an event that has been a staple of local folklore for more than a century and still intrigues people from around the country.

 

In her perceptive chronicle of everyday life on an Arkansas plantation, Harriet Bailey Bullock Daniel sheds light on the plantation economy, medical practices, religion, slavery, and sex roles in the period from 1849 until Daniel's marriage in 1872. The work is a rich mixture of mundane details surrounded by momentous events, and Daniel's sure grasp of both provides enjoyment and enlightenment for any reader.

With the admittance in 1948 of Silas Hunt to the University of Arkansas Law School, the university became the first southern public institution of higher education to officially desegregate without being required to do so by court order. The process was difficult, but an important first step had been taken. Other students would follow in Silas Hunt's footsteps, and they along with the university would have to grapple with the situation. Remembrances in Black is an oral history that gathers the personal stories of African Americans who worked as faculty and staff and of students who studied at the state's flagship institution. These stories illustrate the anguish, struggle, and triumph of individuals who had their lives indelibly marked by their experiences at the school. Organized chronologically over sixty years, this book illustrates how people of color navigated both the evolving campus environment and that of the city of Fayetteville in their attempt to fulfill personal aspirations. Their stories demonstrate that the process of desegregation proved painfully slow to those who chose to challenge the forces of exclusion. Also, the remembrances question the extent to which desegregation has been fully realized.

Reminiscences of a Private is William Bevens’s personal chronicle of his participation in such famous Civil War battles as Shiloh, Chickamauga, Atlanta, and Nashville. There is no supernal heroism here, no pretension, no grandiose analysis. Bevens is neither introspective nor philosophical, and he rarely dwells on the larger issues of the war. He concerns himself with what mattered to him as a common foot soldier. There are longer and fuller accounts of the war; however, few are as honest or as direct as this frank and forthright journal. By confining his contributions as editor to filling gaps in Bevens’s narrative, to correcting some misspellings, and to providing dates and explanatory notes, Daniel Sutherland allows Bevens to tell his story of a young Arkansan at war. His unassuming voice will speak to all readers with compelling candor.

With their cameras and notebooks in hand, photographers Sabine Schmidt and Don House embarked on an ambitious project to document the libraries committed to serving Arkansas’s smallest communities. Remote Access is the culmination of this fascinating three-year effort, which took the artists to every region of their home state.

Schmidt’s carefully constructed color images of libraries and the communities they serve and House’s rich black-and-white portraits of library patrons and staff shine alongside the authors’ personal essays about their experiences. The pages here come alive with a deep connection to Arkansas’s history and culture as we accompany the authors on visits to a section of the Trail of Tears near Parkin, to the site of the tragic 1959 fire at the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville, and to Maya Angelou’s childhood home in Stamps, among many other significant destinations.

Through this testament to the essential role of libraries in the twenty-first century, Schmidt and House have created a clear-eyed portrait of contemporary rural life, delving into issues of race, politics, gender, and isolation as they document the remarkable hard work and generosity put forth in community efforts to sustain local libraries.

This paperback facsimile edition restores to print Howard Kester’s Revolt among the Sharecroppers, a lost classic of southern radicalism. First published in 1936, Kester’s brief, stirring book provides a dramatic eyewitness account of the origins of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU), the Arkansas Delta sharecroppers’ organization whose cause was championed by religious radicals and socialists during the 1930s. Accompanying Kester’s original text is a substantial new introductory essay by historian Alex Lichtenstein.

This edition will introduce general readers, scholars, and students to a social movement with significant historical implications. In its commitment to interracialism, the STFU challenged long-standing southern traditions. In its hostility to the agricultural recovery programs of the 1930s (which tended to benefit landowners at the expense of tenant farmers), the union offered an early critique of New Deal liberalism. And, finally, in its insistence that the dispossessed could assume control of their own destiny, the STFU foreshadowed the progressive social movements of the 1960s. Thus, Revolt among the Sharecroppers is an important primary document that makes a signal contribution to our understanding of labor history, African American history, and the history of Depression-era America.

Kester’s text recounts the early history of the STFU and its criticisms of the New Deal in compelling, accessible prose. Lichtenstein’s introduction offers biographical background on Kester, explores the religious and socialist beliefs that led him to work with the STFU, describes the racial and social climate that shaped the union’s emergence, places the union’s rise and decline within the context of 1930s politics, and outlines the legacy of this remarkable organization.

Founded in eastern Arkansas during the Great Depression, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) has long fascinated historians, who have emphasized its biracial membership and the socialist convictions of its leaders, while attributing its demise to external factors, such as the mechanization of agriculture, the repression of wealthy planters, and the indifference of New Dealers. However, as James Ross notes in this compelling revisionist history, such accounts have largely ignored the perspective of the actual sharecroppers and other tenant farmers who made up the union’s rank and file.

Drawing on a rich trove of letters that STFU members wrote to union leaders, government officials, and others, Ross shows that internal divisions were just as significant—if not more so—as outside causes in the union’s ultimate failure. Most important, the STFU’s fatal flaw was the yawning gap between the worldviews of its leadership and those of its members. Ross describes how, early on, STFU secretary H. L. Mitchell promoted the union as one involving many voices—sometimes in harmony, sometimes in discord—but later pushed a more simplified narrative of a few people doing most of the union’s work. Struck by this significant change, Ross explores what the actual goals of the rank and file were and what union membership meant to them. “While the white leaders may have expressed a commitment to racial justice, white members often did not,” he writes. “While the union’s socialist and communist leaders may have hoped for cooperative land ownership, the members often did not.” Above all, the poor farmers who made up the membership wanted their immediate needs for food and shelter met, and they wanted to own their own land and thus determine their own futures. Moreover, while the leadership often took its inspiration from Marx, the membership’s worldview was shaped by fundamentalist, Pentecostal Christianity.

In portraying such tensions and how they factored into the union’s implosion, Ross not only offers a more nuanced view of the STFU, he also makes a powerful new contribution to our understanding of the Depression-era South.

What does it mean to have a sense of place? Through history, memoir, poetry, and fiction, the writers of these essays answer this question in a variety of ways, giving us their collective history of natural Arkansas. They speak of the interrelationships of humans and nature, and of the struggles for balance between economic realities and landscape preservation. The book evokes the sheer physical diversity of the Natural State, from the Ozarks and the Boston Mountains to Crowley's Ridge, the Grand Prairie, and the Delta. But far more than mere geography, these are places of intense meaning: sites of enlightenment, conflict, comfort, and vivid experience. Rivers and mountains, plains and forests — these are shorthand terms for specific, beloved, storied places.

When one thinks of the American Civil War, such names as Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and Chancellorsville come immediately to mind. Few recall the battles in the Trans-Mississippi theater.

Rugged and Sublime goes a long way toward filling regrettable blanks in our memory of Arkansas’s role in Civil War. It explore the major clashes and locales of the war, including the state secession convention, seizure of the Little Rock Arsenal, the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, the Pea Ridge campaign, Marmaduke’s invasion of Missouri, the Battle of Helena, and the fall of Little Rock, as well as other actions. Rounding out this new and very readable account are studies of the devolution of Arkansas society when bands of guerillas and jayhawkers menaced the state, the surrender of the Confederate armies, and an assessment of losses.

Winner of the 2010 Booker Worthen Literary Prize, and the 2009 Ragsdale Award.

From the Civil War to Reconstruction, the Redeemer period, Jim Crow, and the modern civil rights era to the present, Ruled by Race describes the ways that race has been at the center of much of the state’s formation and image since its founding. Grif Stockley uses the work of published and unpublished historians and exhaustive primary source materials along with stories from authors as diverse as Maya Angelou and E. Lynn Harris to bring to life the voices of those who have both studied and lived the racial experience in Arkansas.

Topics range from the well-known Little Rock Central High Crisis of 1957 to lesser-known events such as the Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 and the shocking yet sadly commonplace attitudes found in newspaper reports and speeches. Through the words of the most powerful Arkansans such as racist Arkansas Govenor Jeff Davis (1901–1906) to the least powerful, including an unflinching look at the narratives of former slaves, readers will come away with increased awareness of the ways that race continues to affect where Arkansans live, send their children to school, work, travel, shop, spend leisure time, worship, and choose their friends and life partners.