Integration, massacres, music part of regional African American history
by February 10, 2022 5:10 pm 827 views
Picture from Life Magazine of the integrated students at Hoxie schools.
No one knows exactly when the first African Americans arrived in what is modern-day Northeast Arkansas. The first reports are that a man named William Looney moved from his Tennessee home in 1802 to Randolph County with two African slaves.
During the next several decades, the number of slaves would grow and the African American population would make a permanent footprint in the Ozark hills and the Delta flatlands that define the region. After the Civil War and Emancipation, slaves were freed and continued to work and live in the region and contributed historically to the region.
In honor of Black History Month, the following are some of the historic moments and places that have helped define Black culture in Northeast Arkansas.
Hoxie First Stand
In 1955, the Hoxie School District had financial problems. Superintendent Edward Kunkel Vance hatched a plan. He decided to integrate the student body. At the time, he said he supported it because it saved the district money, it complied with the recently decided U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision, and it was “right in the eyes of God.”
In July of that year, 29 Black students entered the previously all-white school. Only 21 would complete the term. It would become one of the first relatively peaceful school integrations in U.S. history.
Weeks after the first school bell rang that summer, more than 350 segregationists met at the Hoxie City Hall to call for a boycott of the school. The five school board members who voted to integrate were asked to resign. Gov. Orval Faubus said he would not provide any additional state resources to help with the integration. Emotions ran high according to many public reports at the time, but no major violence erupted even as outside segregationist groups descended on the small town near Jonesboro.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sent a woman to study how the integration unfolded. She was sent at the behest of a young attorney, Thurgood Marshall, who would later become the first African American to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. He sent each family in the Black community a letter cautioning them to keep the transition as peaceful as possible.
Life Magazine chronicled the Hoxie integration, and attempts are underway to build a museum to honor the feat in Hoxie.
Elaine Massacre
King cotton’s prices were on the rise, but black sharecroppers who picked it were not benefiting. It was Sept. 30, 1919, and the harvest was about to begin.
About 100 sharecroppers met at a church in Elaine, a small town in Phillips County that sits in the vast Mississippi Delta Region. Armed black guards protected the people inside. Suddenly, white men appeared outside. No one knows definitively who fired the first shot, but during an altercation bullets flew and one white man was killed. Blacks outnumbered whites in that part of the county by at least 9-1 and a panic ensued. Whites poured into that part of the county and formed an armed mob. The 1,000-man group slaughtered Blacks. Historians don’t know how many Blacks were killed, and estimates have ranged from 20 to 800.
As the slaughter unfolded, government officials scrambled to act. Hundreds of soldiers were sent from Camp Pike (near Little Rock) to stop the mob. Soldiers dispersed the mob, and rounded up hundreds of Blacks, according to BlackPast.org. There were reports of torture. Many were only released after their white employers asked for them to be released.
Before the episode ended, 122 Blacks were charged with crimes, and 12 were charged and convicted of capital murder. The murder convictions were eventually overturned after the men spent years in prison. Not a single white was charged with a crime.
It remains one of the most violent race riots in U.S. history.
Rock-n-Roll Highway
The Rock-n-Roll Highway, the stretch of U.S. 67 that runs from Newport to Pocahontas is often remembered for many of the white musicians who performed at clubs and honky tonks that dotted the region post-World War II.
Black musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Al Green, B.B. King, Sam Cooke and others also played in the venues along the highway and at others in Northeast Arkansas. The region served as an incubator for a new sound that was popularized in the 1950s, according to music historians. This new, rock ’n’ roll sound was a combination of rockabilly, primarily performed by whites in the Ozark hills that combined blues and jazz elements primarily performed by Black artists in the Mississippi Delta Region.
The divergent sounds merged into modern day rock ’n’ roll and Elvis Presley became one of if not the first musicians to bridge the racial and cultural divide. This crossover was the first cultural salvo fired in the lead up to the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s, according to historians.
Eddie Mae Herron Center
Businessman C.C. Scott endeavored to do what many Black men in the South couldn’t do in the post-Civil War era. The Alabama native wanted to own a farm and businesses.
He moved to Randolph County and acquired more than 1,000 cropland acres. He started a church and a school. He started a ferry service on the Current River. Little was known about Scott, who died in 1926, until Eddie Mae Herron Center founder Pat Johnson and board member Mary Clark began to conduct research.
The Eddie Mae Herron Center was known as the Pocahontas Colored School during segregation and Johnson attended school there starting in 1954. First opened in November of 2000, the center commemorates Black history in Randolph County, a history that dates back to slaves being brought there with the first settlers of European descent in the early 1800’s. The center is named for one of Johnson’s first mentors.
The center archives other local history such as Black cemeteries in the area, schools, and other notable historic tidbits.
One mission for the organization is to bring to light unknown Black history in this part of the state, Clark said. Part of that will be a proposed history trail they are working on and it is centered around the exploits of Scott, Johnson added. His tombstone has been in the museum for years after it was discarded into a ditch when the cemetery he was buried in was plowed by a farmer. Johnson said they plan to place the stone along this history trail path that will include historic plaques detailing other local Black people’s accomplishments.