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The state that I choose from the southern region is Texas.

Rakiah

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I can do Georgia :)

- Isabella

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I’ll do Louisiana :)

- yasmina

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I can do arkansas.

-Key'Rra

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first person of African descent arrived in Texas in 1528 with Spanish explorers and settlers; Estevanico, (Moorish slave from Azamor, Morocco) - helped settle Spanish Texas.

by 1792, African people in Texas comprised 13 % of the population (most arrived enslaved)

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PDF - cont. history of AA in area & what they did in TX

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PDF - cont. history of AA in area & what they did in TX

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Tenth Street Historic District - "one of the few remaining freedmen’s towns that still retains a significant amount of its original construction" (thc article)

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Freedman Settlements are significant communities founded across the South, including Texas, from 1865 to 1930

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The Handbook of Texas is your number one authoritative source for Texas history. Read this entry and thousands more like it on our site.

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Queen City Heights Historic District, Deep Ellum Historic District, The 1867 Settlement Historic District, Clarksville Historic District, & Zion Hill Historic District ... more on thc article

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Demographics of TX during the Antebellum Period

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Demographics of TX during the Antebellum Period

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-As cotton was a labor intensive crop, southern immigrants brought increasing numbers of slaves, census of the state in 1848 reported 42,455 slaves in the state. But just two years later, the U.S. Census of 1850 counted 58,161 slaves.

- Census of 1860 showed that sixty-four counties had 1,000 slaves or more

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Demographics of TX during the Antebellum Period

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Demographics of TX during the Antebellum Period

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According to the U.S. census, over 212,000 people lived in Texas in 1850. By 1860 the number had increased to over 604,000. Anglo Americans made up most of Texas’s population.

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Demographics of TX during the Great Migration

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Demographics of TX during the Great Migration

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Black History Is Texas History - Every Texan

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This Black History Month, we celebrated Black Texans across the state because Black history is Texas history. Explore our Storymap Data Brief on Black Texans.

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Great Migration info for Southern States (everyone)

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Great Migration info for Southern States (everyone)

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again, an article that could be helpful to all of us

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New Great Migration: Black Americans Return South

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Explore the modern migration of Black Americans back to the South and its historical context.

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Demographics of TX during the Antebellum Period

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Demographics of TX during the Antebellum Period

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"From independence to early statehood the Texas population continued to swell, exceeding 212,000 inhabitants (154,034 whites, 58,161 slaves, and 397 freed African Americans) in the new state's first U.S. Census in 1850."

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Texas Politics - The Transformation of the Texas Economy

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From independence to early statehood the Texas population continued to swell, exceeding 212,000 inhabitants (154,034 whites, 58,161 slaves, and 397 freed African Americans) in the new state�s first U.S. Census in 1850.

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Bethany Blankley | The Center Square contributor

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Census: Texas, Harris County have largest black population in U.S.

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(The Center Square) – According to new U.S. Census Bureau data, Texas has the greatest number of Black Americans in the U.S.

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Great Migration Info for Southern States (everyone)

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Great Migration Info for Southern States (everyone)

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I think this article would be good for all of us to utilize for the question concerning the demographics during the GM

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Boys outside of the Stateway Gardens Housing Project on the South Side of Chicago, May, 1973 (NAID 556163) The Great Migration was one of the largest movements of people in United States history. Approximately six million Black people moved from the American South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states roughly from the 1910s until the 1970s. The driving force behind the mass movement was to escape racial violence, pursue economic and educational opportunities, and obtain freedom from the oppression of Jim Crow.

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Great Migration Info for Southern States (everyone)

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Great Migration Info for Southern States (everyone)

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"The Great Migration was an outpouring of six million African
Americans from the South to the North and West. It was, in many ways, what I call
a defection from the Jim Crow caste system; the system that ruled the lives of all
people—even White people—who were living in the South. This caste system held
everyone in a fixed place. And so there was an outpouring of people who left the
South for all points North and West from 1915 to 1970, when the initial reasons for
the migration were no longer in effect—meaning the caste system essentially came to an end, legally" - interview w. I. Wilkerson (class reading)

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Motivation for the Great Migration (everyone)

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Motivation for the Great Migration (everyone)

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"When it comes to the motivation for the Great Migration, I think the overarching desire was to escape a caste system that controlled their lives from the moment that they awoke
in the morning to the time that they went to sleep; that determined, for example, that
it was illegal for a Black person and a White person to play checkers together." - Wilkerson interview (class reading)

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"the stratification that they met once they arrived. People who were there before them did not want them there. Industries wanted them there because, actually, they were recruited. They did not just show up out of nowhere. The migration began because the
Northern industry needed labor during World War I. World War I cut off, to a great
degree, immigration from Europe, which had been providing the labor for Northern
industry. They were looking for the cheapest labor available, and they found African Americans and began recruiting them." - interview with Wilkerson (class reading)

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"In this essay, I think about the conceptual work of black geographies and the plantation, noticing that the latter is a meaningful historical
geography that has provided a theoretical framework for thinking about the ways black life and black
histories link to post slave conceptualizations of geographic violence." - plantation futures (class reading)

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"The uninhabitable—in particular, the landmasses occupied by those who, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were unimaginable, both spatially and corporeally—is the geographic (non)location through which the plantation emerged." - Plantation futures (class reading)

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"The colonial enactment of geographic knowledge mapped “a normal way of life” through measuring different degrees of humanness and attaching different versions of the human to different places." plantation futures (class reading)

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“people who were there before them did not want them there” (Wilkerson, 260)

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No African experience in the colonies was exactly the same. African people found themselves in different physical and social environments in the Chesapeake, the Lowcountry, Louisiana, and the Northern Colonies. Africans asserted new identities, created their own cultures, and resisted enslavement, while helping to build the physical, cultural, and intellectual foundations of colonial North America.

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A Story of Pride. A Story of Courage. Louisiana Civil Rights.

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Civil Rights activists of the '50s and '60s inherited a legacy of courage and resilience passed on through the generations. On the Louisiana Civil Rights Trail, discover the real-life heroes who strategized, organized, preached, marched, boycotted, stood up, sat down, and sang for change. Real people who dedicated themselves and their lives to Making Rights Real.

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Chainlink Chronicle: Celebrating Black History in Louisiana - JSTOR Daily

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An exploration of one prison newspaper’s commitment to celebrating Black History with a unique focus on its home state.

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In September 1868, a dispute over a column published in an Opelousas, Louisiana partisan newspaper provoked one of the bloodiest incidents of racial violence in the Reconstruction era. The attackers' goal: to reverse dramatic political gains made by Black citizens after the Civil War, intimidate them from exercising their newly found rights and restore the racial hierarchy of the slavery era.

The Opelousas massacre remains one of the harshest examples of African American voter suppression in U.S. history, with estimates of the dead ranging from several dozen to several hundred. Occurring in the run-up to the 1868 presidential election, which pitted conservative Democrat Horatio Seymour against Republican war hero Ulysses S. Grant, the killings also underlined the importance of partisan media in shaping the postwar political discourse.

Throughout American history, political parties have used partisan newspapers to influence the electorate, starting with the Federalist party's Gazette of the United States, founded in 1789. (Motto: " He that is not for us, is against us.") After the upheaval of the Civil War, newspapers became a hotly contested space for Democrats and Republicans to communicate their competing visions for the political, economic and social futures of some 4 million formerly enslaved people. While Republicans used their newspapers to advocate expanding Black people's rights and privileges, Democratic papers aligned with the slogan of their party's presidential nominee Seymour: "This is a White Man's Government," one that hoped to keep Black Americans in perpetual bondage-or at least perpetual servitude.

In Opelousas, the seat of Louisiana's St. Landry parish, The St. Landry Progress served as the official organ of the local Republican Party-one of 73 Republican papers in the state. And in fall 1868, a strongly worded editorial, penned by a precocious young editor, ignited a firestorm.

In the South, Postwar Politics Hinged on Rights for the Formerly Enslaved

That year hadn't been good for Louisiana Democrats. The state's white planter class, beset by labor shortages and repeated crop failures, was suffering financially. Politically, their world order was crumbling as formerly enslaved people gained new rights. In April, Louisiana's new state constitution, one of the most far-reaching pieces of Radical Reconstruction legislation, passed on the strength of Black Republican support, granting full citizenship to Black men with equal civil and political rights, while banning segregation in public schools and on public transportation. In July, the Fourteenth Amendment gave African Americans equal status under federal law.

"The April election returns left white leaders fully cognizant of the radical Black voting strength and the future implications that strength had for the Democratic party," wrote Carolyn DeLatte, an early historian of the Opelousas massacre.

But while Black voters immediately after the Civil War skewed largely Republican, they weren't a monolithic group. Some did join the Democratic party-a fact that, in St. Landry parish, drew ire on both sides. In early September 1868, a rumor circulated among local Democrats that Republican Blacks were going to reclaim Black Democrats for the party, if they had to do it "at the point of a bayonet."

These rumors led to a mostly peaceful standoff on September 13, 1868 between Black Republicans and white Democrats, where leaders of each party gave speeches and negotiated a peace accord between the two parties that banned guns at gatherings. It also required the editor of the St. Landry Progress, Emerson Bentley, to refrain from making "incendiary" comments about the Democrats in the paper or in speeches.

An 18-year-old Ohio native, Bentley also served as secretary of the local Radical Republican party and taught at a Methodist school for Black students. Deemed by local Democrats a " carpetbagger," a derogatory term used for Northerners who came South after the war to profit economically or politically, Bentley regularly received threats. But he himself expressed religious motivation for his politics, crediting his "Christian spirit, and a desire to do something for the general good."

'They Are Killing Mr. Bentley!'

On September 19, 1868, Bentley broke the truce by lambasting Democrats in a Progress editorial. "The assembly of armed men from all parts of the parish did not indicate peaceful intentions, but a total blindness to the interests of the people," he wrote. Declaring a measure of moral authority over the Democrats, Bentley added that Republicans "do not plot in the dark; we do not assassinate inoffensive citizens or threaten to do so; we do not seek the lives of political opponents; we do not seek to array one class against another; but we do intend to defend our just rights at all hazards." In the article, he appealed to Black Democrats to rejoin the party that didn't seek to intimidate them with violence.

On September 28, Bentley was teaching at the Methodist church on the outskirts of Opelousas when three Seymour Knights, the local branch of the white supremacist organization, came to confront him about his "incendiary" article.

"You have a published a report which is both false and malicious," said one of the Seymour Knights, according to an account in the New Orleans Advocate.

"Do you mean to say that I lied in that report?" Bentley asked.

The Seymour Knight replied, " Yes sir, God Damn you, I do," and then began hitting Bentley with a cane on his back and shoulders.

"They are killing Mr. Bentley!" the Black children shouted, running from the schoolhouse.

Before leaving, the Seymour Knights forced Bentley to sign a retraction of the story. When word spread about the attack, Republicans, fearing for their lives, assembled in Opelousas. Rumors spread among white citizens that armed Black locals were plotting an uprising. After signing an affidavit with legal authorities about the attack and then hiding overnight in a barn behind the Progress office, Bentley left town. Eluding a white mob with help from numerous Republican party safe houses, he eventually made his way to New Orleans.

The Ultimate Goal: Destroying the Republican Party

As Bentley fled, white mobs began a killing rampage that lasted several weeks, targeting Opelousas' Black citizens-ostensibly to keep them from organizing. "Colored men were not allowed to stand in groups upon the sidewalks," according to the New Orleans Advocate. "Each day new victims fell." In St. Landry parish, dozens of black bodies were found scattered in shallow graves. The Republican party estimated casualties at between 200 and 300, while Democrats put it between 25 and 30. An Army investigation cited 233.

Over time, the real agenda-of demolishing St. Landry parish's Republic party-became clear. Several white party leaders were hunted and killed, with one corpse displayed outside the local drugstore as a warning. Mobs destroyed the Progress office's press and ransacked the Methodist school. "The Negroes all over the Parish have been disarmed, and have gone to work briskly," declared the Franklin Planter's Banner, a Democratic party paper. "Their Loyal League clubs have been broken up, the scalawags have turned Democrats...and their carpet-bag press...have been destroyed."

Republicans who weren't killed fled or switched parties.

Back in April 1868, when they'd voted to ratify the new state constitution, Bentley and a very active local Black Republican party had looked excitedly to the November presidential election, when they would support Ulysses S. Grant over white supremacist Horatio Seymour. But they never got to cast those ballots. The former Union Army general didn't receive a single vote in St. Landry parish.

"I am fully convinced that no man on that day could have voted any other than the Democratic ticket," said the parish voter registration supervisor, "and not been killed inside of 24 hours."

HISTORY Vault: Black History

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The 1868 Louisiana Massacre That Reversed Reconstruction‑Era Gains | HISTORY

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The Opelousas Massacre terrorized African American voters and stopped local Black political progress in its tracks.

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Courtesy of the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University.

In the late nineteenth century, many white Louisianans attempted to reverse the gains African Americans had made during Reconstruction. The implementation of Jim Crow-or racial segregation laws-institutionalized white supremacy and Black inferiority throughout the South. The term Jim Crow originated in minstrel shows, the popular vaudeville-type traveling stage plays that circulated the South in the mid-nineteenth century. Jim Crow was a stock character, a stereotypically lazy and shiftless Black buffoon, designed to elicit laughs with his avoidance of work and dancing ability. By 1880, however, "Jim Crow" came to signify a model of race relations in which African Americans and white Americans operated in separate social planes. Almost one hundred years would pass before civil rights workers were able to reverse these laws.
The Origins of Jim Crow, 1865 to 1890
In the five years after the Civil War, the Republican-controlled Louisiana Congress enacted powerful civil rights legislation aimed at securing African Americans their political rights. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, respectively, abolished slavery, recognized African Americans as citizens, and guaranteed African American men the right to vote. The Fourteenth Amendment was particularly significant because it guaranteed African Americans the same rights of citizenship that white Americans had, including equal protection under the law. By 1875 African Americans across the South, supported by the federal government, had established nearly four thousand schools for Black students. In addition, more than fifteen hundred had run for office as state and national representatives.

Instituting Jim Crow was a gradual process before 1880, especially during Reconstruction, when it appeared that African Americans enjoyed some protection from the federal government. But in 1865, the Louisiana legislature began implementing "black codes," laws that formed the basis for racial segregation. Originating in the eighteenth century, black codes regulated and restricted the movement of enslaved people. More generally, they reinstated the antebellum southern social order, in which white people occupied a higher social rung than Black people. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, black codes limited Black life in numerous ways. They determined the types of businesses African Americans could own and the time of day they could visit downtown. The codes stipulated that no more than three African Americans could ever assemble in one place, and gave white people legal authority over Black people when no police officer was present. Though black codes were found in every parish, they were most vigorously enforced in the northern and eastern parishes of Louisiana.

In southern Louisiana, African Americans were allowed much more freedom, largely owing to the racial demographics of southern Louisiana in general and New Orleans in particular. By 1860, New Orleans could be divided into three discernable racial groups: whites, free people of color, and enslaved people of African descent. In New Orleans, free people of color, who often had a mixed racial heritage, traditionally enjoyed a measure of freedom in their businesses and social interactions not found in other parts of the state.

By 1877, deepening distrust between white people and African Americans led to the lowest point in race relations in American history. At the beginning of Reconstruction, Louisiana sent several Black politicians to the US House of Representatives, and one African American, P. B. S. Pinchback, served as governor from late 1872 to January 1873. By the time federal troops were officially removed from Louisiana in 1877, however, all of these politicians had been defeated; all hopes for improved racial relations, or federal intervention on behalf of Black Louisianans, seemed to have evaporated.

As Reconstruction ended, most African Americans in Louisiana rented small plots of land, hoping to become self-sufficient farmers. Formerly enslaved people tended to stay geographically close to their former owners, usually living no more than fifty miles away. In place of slavery, white Louisianans developed an agricultural system called sharecropping. White property owners gave African American farmers access to land with the understanding that these farmers would give the landowner part of the crop as "rent." Sharecropping quickly evolved into an exploitative relationship between farmers and landlords. Often illiterate and uneducated, sharecroppers rarely understood the written contracts they were compelled to sign. Further, landlords set the price of the crop, often ignoring its market value, while Black farmers with left without recourse. Sharecropping undergirded Black poverty in Louisiana-profits were scarce, weather and climate were often uncooperative, and corruption was rampant. While there were attempts to unify white and Black farmers in the immediate postbellum period, sharecropping allowed class and racial distinctions to persist.
Institutionalizing Jim Crow
By 1890, the Democratic Party hatched a scheme to completely remove the Republican Party from the South by disfranchising southern Black men, the most ardent supporters of the Republican Party. White Louisianans implemented poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements, and "understanding" clauses to prevent Black people from registering to vote. Despite the rights guaranteed them by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, African Americans were systematically excluded from the political process. Social segregation soon followed.

In 1891, the Louisiana legislature had officially segregated the railroads within the state. In 1892, Homer Plessy, an active member of a New Orleans civil rights organization, the Comité de Citoyens, bought a first-class ticket on a train and attempted to sit among whites. After he was arrested for breaking the law, Plessy sued the railroad company, his lawyers arguing that segregation denied him equal protection under the law as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1896, however, the US Supreme Court upheld Louisiana law in its decision on . Speaking for the majority, Justice Henry Brown stated that segregation did not deprive Plessy of his rights, nor did it make him an inferior person. The justices argued that states could establish "separate but equal" facilities; if Black and white people were treated equally, segregation would be allowed to stand. Yet, in almost all public facilities-schools, hospitals, trains, restaurants, hotels, parks, cemeteries, the armed forces, and jury duty-white people received priority over African Americans. Following the decision, some institutions excluded African Americans altogether.

Two years after the Plessy decision, Louisiana passed one of the first laws officially stripping Black men of the right to register to vote. In essence, everything that could be segregated in Louisiana was. Public facilities for adults, including restaurants, hotels, night clubs, and cemeteries, were strictly segregated, as were public facilities for children such as amusement parks, playgrounds, and schools. By 1900, the line separating white and Black people had become deeply entrenched in Louisiana's culture. After 1902, New Orleans streetcars were segregated. A 1908 state law prohibited cohabitation (in marriage or domestic situations) between white and Black men and women. Racial segregation in jails was required in 1920. Even in New Orleans, tolerant (if not friendly) interactions between white and African American residents all but disappeared. The Catholic Church established a segregated parish in downtown New Orleans, the Congregation of Corpus Christi.

Not coincidentally, lynchings increased dramatically after 1900, primarily in the northern parishes of Caddo, Ouachita, and Morehouse. Between 1900 and 1931, more than half the lynchings in the state occurred north of Alexandria. The numbers of African Americans lynched are in the thousands, though detailed statistics are skewed because police officers in the northern parishes rarely considered lynchings as homicides. Still, lynchings and the threat of lynching contributed to the maintenance of Jim Crow.
The Civil Rights Movement Builds
As the century turned, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) became increasingly active in Louisiana. Between 1909 and 1930, the NAACP was a decentralized organization that focused on ending lynchings. In the 1930s, however, the organization retooled itself for the purpose of challenging the doctrine of "separate but equal" that formed the base of the Jim Crow laws.

In 1930s Louisiana, the NAACP counted New Orleans attorney A. P. Tureaud as one of its most important assets. Tureaud, a Howard University Law School graduate and colleague of Thurgood Marshall, sought to dismantle segregation in Louisiana's public schools. Tureaud believed that segregated education, and the meager resources allotted for African American children, perpetuated poverty and inequality across generations. With the assistance of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Tureaud sued the state of Louisiana for paying African American teachers lower salaries than their white counterparts. Tureaud's 1940 victory in Joseph P. McKelpin v. Orleans Parish School Board led to pay equity among all public schools.

World War II ushered in a number of legal and social changes that further weakened the structure of segregation. Nearly one million Black men and women served in the armed forces, and about five hundred thousand served in Europe and Asia. African Americans understandably believed that their willingness to die for their country abroad proved their worthiness for expanded political rights at home. Faced with an emergent civil rights movement, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981 in 1948, fully desegregating the armed forces.

In Louisiana, the fight for desegregation took place in another social arena: public accommodations. Long before Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, African Americans in Baton Rouge initiated a bus boycott of their own in 1953. Baton Rouge segregated the buses so that the first ten rows were reserved for white passengers, though African Americans accounted for 80 percent of the riders. A leading minister in the city, T. J. Jemison, spoke before the Baton Rouge City Council, testifying that it was unfair to force African American riders to stand in the back of the bus while the seats in the front remained empty. In June, African Americans in Baton Rouge formed the United Defense League (UDL) and organized a bus boycott. After one week, the city council and the UDL reached a compromise. The first two rows on the buses were reserved for white passengers but, after that, African Americans could sit where they wanted. Though segregation was still in effect, the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott provided a model for other cities to follow.

Memorable and vital successes over racial segregation continued in Louisiana and the rest of the South throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In response to a pending lawsuit, segregation was abolished at Louisiana State University; the first African American undergraduate enrolled in 1953. The Plessy decision was finally overturned the next year, when the US Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The court found legal segregation unconstitutional in all public accommodations, especially public schools. Though met with massive resistance, the decision transformed the southern way of life. The "whites only" screens on New Orleans's streetcars were officially removed in 1958. In 1960, the New Orleans School Crisis erupted over the desegregation of public schools. But in 1961, desegregation continued peacefully.
Jim Crow's Demise
In 1964, the Civil Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination and segregation in schools, restaurants, hotels, and universities. Signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Civil Rights Act also prohibited unequal application of voting requirements, ended discrimination in interstate commerce, barred discrimination by state and city governments, and outlawed discrimination in private companies that take federal dollars. The 1965 Voting Rights Act went a step further and outlawed numerous tactics used to disenfranchise African Americans and other groups. Officially, the era of Jim Crow had ended. After nearly one hundred years of economic, political, and social demoralization, African Americans occupied the same levels of citizenship as white people, at least in the eyes of the law.

For Louisiana, desegregation in public schools would come slowly. In 1965, only five Louisiana parishes submitted plans for integration. By 1967, thirty parishes still had made no arrangements to desegregate. In 1970, forty-five parishes were ordered to come up with a legitimate plan or risk the loss of federal funding; full integration of Louisiana's public schools did not come until the mid-1970s. Similarly, Louisiana was ordered-on at least ten occasions between 1965 and 1998-to integrate segregated universities and professional schools or compensate the state's historically Black colleges and universities for generations of neglect.

The impact of segregation on Louisiana's culture and history continues to linger. One lasting consequence of Jim Crow is the persistence of extreme poverty among African Americans, particularly in the northern parishes bordering the Mississippi River. The decline of cotton and sugar production, the source of Louisiana's wealth prior to the Civil War, has left behind impoverished communities unable to find suitable alternatives. In twenty-first century, "stealth racism," or subtle long-term racism, remains in Louisiana, particularly as racial attitudes harden in the midst of economic instability.

Author
Nikki Brown
Suggested Reading

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1989.

Fairclough, Adam. Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999.

Fischer, Roger. The Segregation Struggle in Louisiana, 1862 to 1877. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974.

Germany, Kent. New Orleans After the Promises: Poverty, Citizenship, and the Search for the Great Society. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007.

Hahn, Steven. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005.

Hill, Lance. The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

Sartin, Lee. Invisible Activists: Women of the Louisiana NAACP and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1915-1945. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007.

Scott, John H., and Cleo Scott Brown. Witness to the Truth: My Struggle for Human Rights in Louisiana. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008.

Additional Data

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In the late nineteenth century, the implementation of Jim Crow-or racial segregation-laws institutionalized white supremacy and Black inferiority throughout the South.

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How New Orleans became the breeding ground for a uniquely American art form.

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black history: congo square, new orleans - the heart of american music - AFROPUNK

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By Nick Douglas*, AFROPUNK contributor On the 300th Anniversary of the founding of New Orleans all American musicians owe a debt to a national treasure: Congo Square. When Wynton Marsalis said “Every strand of American music comes directly from Congo Square,” he couldn’t have been more correct. Congo Square began to grow into the literal heart […]

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Black people make up 15.1 percent of Arkansas' population due to the 2020 census. They have been in the state since way back in the European settlement.

Black people were first brought to Africa as slaves and ever since then they have been a big influence in Arkansas' culture as well as their history. In 1820, in which is a about a decade after Arkansas became a part of the US, the Black population consisted of 1,617 slaves as well as 59 black people that were free

After the colonial period, the Black population declined to 12 percent.

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African Americans constitute 15.1 percent of Arkansas's population, according to the 2020 census, and they have been present in the state since the earliest days of European settlement. Originally brought to Arkansas in large numbers as slaves, people of African ancestry drove the state's plantation economy until long after the Civil War. African Americans have exerted a profound influence upon all aspects of the state's history and culture.

European Exploration and Settlement through Early Statehood
In August 1721, a party of Frenchmen employed by John Law's Compagnie d'Occident established a new colony near the banks of the Arkansas River, a few leagues upstream from where it empties into the Mississippi River. Shortly thereafter, French colonial officials conducted a census for their new outpost. Dated February 18, 1723, it showed forty-seven colonists including six Black slaves and an unknown number of children. Black slaves, as well as free Blacks, continued to appear in subsequent censuses for Arkansas carried out during the French and Spanish colonial eras; one of the last such censuses, conducted in 1798, listed 393 colonists including fifty-six slaves.

Following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, Arkansas became part of the United States, and settlement quickened. By 1820, Arkansas's population had risen to 14,255, including 1,617 slaves and fifty-nine free Blacks. As a percentage of the total population, however, the Black population had declined slightly from the earlier colonial period, to twelve percent of the total. One explanation for the lack of increase in the Black population was the hesitancy of slave owners to move to Arkansas until its future status as a slaveholding area was resolved. Once the Missouri Compromise of 1820 made it clear, however, that Arkansas's fate was linked to that of the slaveholding South, both the general population and the Black population of Arkansas grew quickly. Arkansas had enough inhabitants to qualify for statehood by 1836, and, by 1860, the population of Arkansas had leapt to 435,450, of whom 111,115 were slaves and 144 were free Blacks.

Although slavery had become firmly established in Arkansas, the institution was not evenly distributed within the state. Slaveholding and cotton plantations were especially concentrated in the fertile river bottom lands of eastern Arkansas's Mississippi River Delta and in southern Arkansas's Gulf Coastal Plain, which together held seventy-four percent of the state's slave population by 1860. In 1860, 12,131 slaves (eleven percent) belonged to white families owning from one to four slaves, while about 48,000 (forty-three percent) belonged to owners who held from five to twenty-four slaves. For slaves who resided on small or medium-sized farms, the work regimens and material circumstances may not have differed radically from those of their white owners. Very different were the lives of the over 51,000 slaves (forty-six percent) working on the large estates owned by the nine percent of Arkansas slaveholders who possessed from twenty-five to over 500 slaves. Here, slaves generally had less direct contact with their white owners, and the disparity in living conditions was much greater.

While slaves working on large plantations had less opportunity to develop individual ties with their masters, they also had more autonomy. It was on these larger units that true slave communities began to develop and flourish, including African tribal-influenced religious services, traditional folk medicine, and West African folk stories involving animals such as the famous "Brer Rabbit." The plantation slave communities functioned as extended families. There was no such thing as legal marriages for slaves, and the immediate family could be shattered at any moment by slave sales or estate distributions. Under such circumstances, the personal ties that could develop within the slave communities and the system of mutual practical and emotional support that the slave communities could offer were invaluable.

Although most Arkansas slaves lived in rural areas on farms or plantations, there were also within the state urban slaves. Their number was always small, however, given Arkansas's overwhelming rural character. Even by the eve of the Civil War, only four percent of the state population (15,502 of 435,450) resided in towns and cities; Little Rock (Pulaski County), the state capital and Arkansas's largest urban center, had a grand total population of 3,727. Of the 111,115 Arkansas slaves in 1860, only 3,799 were situated in urban locales. Most of the urban slaves were used not so much as revenue producers but simply as help: as cooks, maids, nurses, houseboys, gardeners, stable boys, and coachmen.

Although present from colonial times onward, the number of free Black persons in Arkansas before the Civil War was always small, reaching a maximum of 608 in 1850; two-thirds of these individuals were "mulattoes," strongly suggesting blood ties to the whites who manumitted them. Unlike the situation in some Southern states, most free Blacks in Arkansas resided in rural areas, most notably Marion County. Clearly an anomaly in a slaveholding society, the free Blacks were viewed with suspicion and distrust by the white majority, as the example they set through their very existence introduced a subversive element into the established social order. Although they were permitted to own real estate, they could not vote or testify against white people in the courts; while not prohibited by statute from owning slaves themselves, public opinion frowned upon the practice, and only a handful ever did.

Fear of possible slave insurrections intensified during the 1820s and 1830s because of the rise of Northern abolitionism and because of the Denmark Vesey conspiracy uncovered in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822, as well as the famous Nat Turner Rebellion that occurred in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831. In response, as early as 1825, Arkansas instituted a system of slave patrols to prevent slaves from wandering from their plantations without a pass, and the same impulse that lay behind this measure also led the General Assembly to adopt a law in 1842 prohibiting the immigration of any additional free Blacks into the state after March 1, 1843. Mounting sectional tensions during the 1850s led finally to enactment of a measure in 1859 expelling all free Blacks over the age of twenty-one from Arkansas; any remaining after January 1, 1860, would be subject to enslavement. Even so, the Federal Census of 1860, taken several months after the new law became operative, disclosed that 144 free Blacks still lived in Arkansas. Perhaps conceding the law's harshness, in 1861, the General Assembly adopted a measure suspending its further operation until January 1, 1863. As events would have it, this was the very day on which another measure would take effect-President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

Civil War through Reconstruction
Throughout the American Civil War, thousands of slaves escaped from bondage in Arkansas and made their way to the Union army encampments. The exact number has never been determined, but anecdotal reports indicate that hundreds, perhaps thousands, died from malnutrition and disease in fetid, unsanitary, hastily constructed "shanty towns" and settlements.

The escaped slaves in their midst created a dilemma and a headache for the Union commanders. One obvious and at least partial solution was to enlist able-bodied adult males into the military itself. In April 1863, Brigadier General Lorenzo Thomas, adjutant general of the U.S. Army, issued an appeal to the freedmen to volunteer for service, and many quickly flocked to the colors. The army immediately recruited three Black companies in Helena (Phillips County), and they became the nucleus for the First Arkansas Volunteer Infantry Regiment (African Descent) Its new commander was Captain Lindley Miller, an abolitionist from a New York regiment. Eventually, over 5,000 former slaves in Arkansas joined the Union army.

White Confederates were incensed at the sight of Black soldiers wearing blue uniforms. Even the notion of Black men fighting for the Confederacy and donning the gray aroused intense ire. Throughout the Confederate States of America (CSA), slaves were sometimes used to help construct earthworks or other military fortifications and were used as cooks, servants to Confederate officers, or in similar capacities, but they were not permitted to enlist. Arkansas's most brilliant Confederate commander, Major General Patrick Cleburne, learned to his own detriment how great was the opposition to the idea of slaves bearing arms, even if for the Rebel cause. In the winter of 1863-64, facing the Union's overwhelming numerical superiority and the growing possibility of the Confederacy's defeat, Cleburne recommended that slaves be recruited into the army and given their freedom in return. Historian Thomas A. DeBlack noted that Cleburne's proposal, though quietly rejected, damaged his career. The CSA did adopt a similar policy in 1865, but by then it was too late.

The revulsion against the idea of slaves or former slaves bearing arms also affected Rebel attitudes and actions toward Black soldiers serving in the Union army. Lieutenant General Edmund Kirby Smith, the Confederate commander in the Trans-Mississippi West, encouraged those serving under him to treat "armed negroes and their officers" not as regular soldiers protected by ordinary rules of civilized warfare but as runaways and armed insurrectionists. Smith's policy led directly to the slaughter of captured Black Union soldiers at the Engagement at Poison Spring in south Arkansas on April 18, 1864. Southern white savagery bred more savagery. Soon after, at the Engagement at Jenkins' Ferry, fought on April 30, 1864, soldiers of the Second Kansas Colored Infantry, the companion unit to the First Kansas Colored Infantry regiment whose survivors had been massacred at Poison Spring, executed a new command of their white officers to "take no prisoners as long as the Rebels...murder our men."

When the guns of war finally fell silent in Arkansas in May 1865, the circumstances of Black Arkansans had already undergone radical transformation. Slavery had not only collapsed as a practical matter but had been legally abolished in the constitution of a new Unionist state government established in Little Rock during the spring of the previous year. In some respects, however, the new constitution, largely the creation of white Unionists from the Ozark Mountain country of northwest Arkansas, left Black Arkansans in a kind of legal limbo: they were no longer bondsmen, but they were not yet fully free men and women enjoying all the rights of American citizens. While the Unionist state constitution of 1864 eliminated slavery and repudiated secession, for instance, it did not extend the right to vote or hold public office to any Black citizens, not even to those who were literate, owned property, or were soldiers in or veterans of the Union army. One provision in the constitution was reminiscent of the antebellum statutes against free Blacks; it specified that no Blacks not already living in Arkansas could establish residence in the state, except by authority of the government of the United States or under proclamation of the president of the United States.

Conditions worsened further insofar as Black equality was concerned when ex-Confederates gained control of the Arkansas General Assembly following the August 1866 state elections. The new "rebel" legislature of 1866-1867 adamantly refused to ratify the proposed Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Moreover, the legislature proceeded to adopt a new "Black Code" that contravened the notion of equal protection. Although the code did extend to the freedmen some rights that they had never enjoyed as slaves-including the right to form legal marriages, to enter into legal contracts, to hold property, to sue and be sued, and to give evidence in court-it also imposed upon them special proscriptions: Blacks could not vote or hold public office, serve on juries or in the militia, or attend schools with or intermarry with whites.

Similar actions occurred in other Southern states as well, and eventually these provocations brought about a Northern backlash. Between March and July 1867, Congress passed three new Reconstruction Acts. These new measures set into motion a process whereby the Southern state governments were dismantled and replaced by new, more radical state governments in which Black men could vote, hold public office, and enjoy full political equality.

Former Arkansas slaves immediately seized these new opportunities. Most of the adult Black males who were eligible participated in a new registration of voters conducted by the U.S. Army. Since many ex-Confederates boycotted the registration in protest against the Reconstruction Acts, at its conclusion, Black men constituted thirty-five percent of the state's new electorate, even though they made up twenty-five percent of the state's population. Eight Black men served as delegates to the new state constitutional convention of 1868 and actively participated in its deliberations. Under the new Reconstruction state government established by the 1868 constitution, Black men exercised significant political power. Two Black men held cabinet-level state positions. Joseph C. Corbin, a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio and founder of what is now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB), served as superintendent of public instruction from 1873 to 1874, while William H. Grey, a native of Washington DC, held the post of commissioner of immigration and state lands from 1872 to 1874. At the height of Reconstruction in 1873, twenty Black men were serving in the Arkansas General Assembly, and numerous Black county and local officials served in the Black-majority counties of the east Arkansas Delta.

Black officeholders used their influence to advance the interests of their people. Those who served in the constitutional convention of 1868 were able to enshrine in that document provisions guaranteeing Black voting and office-holding and creating a system of public schools; they also succeeded in blocking provisions prohibiting interracial marriages. Subsequently, African Americans serving in the General Assembly helped obtain ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Further, they also worked successfully for two new state civil rights statutes in 1868 and 1873. The 1873 measure required owners or proprietors of businesses providing public accommodations, including those involving transportation and entertainment, to provide services to all without unequal treatment. Failure to comply could result in stiff fines and possible imprisonment. Another section of the act required that school districts furnish Black children facilities equal to those given white children. The civil rights laws were infrequently enforced, but their presence slowed the development of segregationist practices.

Post Reconstruction through the Gilded Age
These gains continued after Reconstruction ended in Arkansas in 1874. The various rival political alignments that emerged in Arkansas between 1872 and 1874 may have been bizarre, but Arkansas at least managed to avoid the intense racial and political polarization that characterized the collapse of Reconstruction in many other Southern states.

When white conservatives convened a new state constitutional convention on July 14, 1874, to bring Reconstruction in Arkansas to an end, eight Black delegates attended, and the final document included provisions that allowed for the continuance of Black suffrage, Black office-holding, and the new Black school system. In addition, the document even contained a "Declaration of Rights" that was reminiscent of the "equal protection" clause of the U.S. Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment.

The first governor elected under the new constitution in 1874, white Democrat and "Redeemer" conservative Augustus H. Garland, promised during his gubernatorial campaign that, if elected, he would retain the Civil Rights Act of 1873 and protect Black citizens' access to the ballot and to free public schools. In his first proclamation as governor, he struck a conciliatory note, asking the different races to unify for the continuing greatness of the state. Garland even encouraged white Democrats in the predominantly African American counties of the Delta to share offices with African Americans through an arrangement known as the "fusion principle." By this device, political party county committees met before the day of voting and allotted each other places on the ballot. Each party agreed not to contest those positions assigned to the other, and a "compromise ticket" would then be presented at the forthcoming election. Thanks to the operation of this system, Black men continued to vote and hold many local county offices and seats in the state legislature until the early 1890s.

This measure of political equality helped some Black men to realize a degree of economic and social mobility. This was particularly true in the state's rapidly developing cities and towns, especially in Little Rock, where the population increased from 3,727 in 1860 to 38,307 in 1900. During this same time span, the city's Black population increased from twenty-three to thirty-eight percent of the city's total. Most of Little Rock's Black populace, refugees from the plantations, had limited education and few advanced skills. Toiling as day laborers, porters, and domestic servants, they earned bare subsistence incomes. Even so, a number of factors in Little Rock's urban milieu opened avenues for potential advancement. These included a more cosmopolitan population possessing at least a modicum of "urbanity" and tolerance for difference; a vigorous multi-party system in which Republicans, Democrats, and members of third parties vied for African Americans' votes; a well-financed public school system that offered a full nine-month school term, a high school program, and a more diverse curriculum for children of both races; and a white business establishment that prized enterprise, initiative, bustle, and ability, particularly the ability to raise capital and make money, and that was willing to accord a degree of recognition to individual African Americans who demonstrated these qualities.

Thanks to these various factors, urbanization facilitated the appearance of something entirely new in the history of Arkansas race relations: an authentic Black bourgeoisie. By the turn of the century, a thriving Black commercial district had emerged along Little Rock's West Ninth Street, where a small class of independent Black artisans, craftsmen, and merchants operated their places of business. Similar districts emerged in several other large towns scattered across the state. Above the tradesmen and the shop owners, at the head of Black society, were thriving entrepreneurs and professional men, some of whom had acquired substantial wealth. One notable example was businessman Wiley Jones of Pine Bluff. By the early 1890s, he owned the city's racetrack, one of its two streetcar systems, extensive rental properties, and was a partner with several prominent whites in one of Pine Bluff's major real estate development companies; his net worth at that time was estimated to be approximately $300,000.

Education and religion were two spheres, greatly intertwined, in which Black Arkansans were rapidly developing their own institutions. The first state-supported Black institution of higher education in the state was Branch Normal College in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), now UAPB, which was established in 1873 and opened in 1875. Following it, Black religious groups created three other colleges in the following few years: Philander Smith College, established as Walden Seminary in Little Rock in 1877 for the training of Black Methodist ministers; Arkansas Baptist College, founded as Minister's Institute by the Colored Baptists of the State of Arkansas in 1884, also in Little Rock; and Shorter College, originally Bethel University, established in Little Rock in 1886 by the African Methodist Episcopal Church but later moved to North Little Rock (Pulaski County). Within the Methodist and Baptist circles, African Americans often organized their own denominations separate from whites, and a few ministers in Arkansas rose to positions of prominence within their respective groups. Elias Camp Morris of Helena, for instance, was elected president of the National Baptist Convention in 1895.

During the same decades in which the lot of some Black urbanites was improving, that of many rural whites was deteriorating. White farmers became restless not only because of the erosion of traditional caste lines that they encountered when visiting the cities and towns, but also because they were increasingly caught up in the same economic mechanisms (e.g., the crop lien, verbal contracts between sharecroppers and landlords, and the convict lease system) used to subjugate rural Blacks. By 1900, of 178,694 farms in Arkansas, 81,140 (45.4 percent) were operated by landless tenants or "croppers" (among Black farmers only, the percentage was seventy-five percent). Of the total number of tenants and sharecroppers in 1900, 34,997 (forty-three percent) were Black, and 46,178 (fifty-seven percent) were white. With the bottom falling out of the cotton market, significant numbers of whites were being placed in economic circumstances that resembled closely those of the most exploited class of Blacks.

By the late 1880s and the early 1890s, large numbers of angry white farmers threatened to "kick over the traces," leave the Democratic Party, and bolt toward new independent agrarian third parties, such as the Union Labor and Populist organizations. Alarmed Democratic Party elites attempted to prevent defections and distract attention from the troublesome economic and class issues that were beginning to divide the white vote by stoking the flames of racial division.

One way of implementing this strategy was to call for enactment of new " Jim Crow" laws mandating segregation of the races. Responding to a resolution adopted during the preceding year by the Arkansas Democratic state convention, in 1891, the General Assembly passed a new measure requiring separate passenger coaches for the races on railway trains and separate waiting rooms in railway train stations. Though the device of segregated coaches and waiting rooms was new, its intent was to preserve the old caste lines. Arkansas's urban middle-class Black leadership organized a vigorous though unsuccessful effort to defeat it. Of the twelve Black lawmakers then serving in the General Assembly, all but one voted to reject the separate-coach bill.

At the same time the separate-coach law was enacted, the legislature also centralized Arkansas's voting system, appointing voting officials in Democratic-controlled state and county boards and impeding illiterates from voting, while also passing a bill proposing a new state constitutional amendment that would require a yearly one-dollar poll tax. Together, these two disfranchisement devices virtually revolutionized Arkansas politics and effectively eliminated the political and civil rights gains won by African Americans during the earlier Reconstruction era. Overall, 65,000 fewer people voted in 1894 than in 1890, an almost one-third drop in elector participation. Republican and third-party candidates naturally suffered most from this decline, particularly so in the state's six most predominately Black counties where African Americans constituted approximately seventy-five percent or more of the inhabitants. In these areas, the combined opposition lost almost eight times as many votes as the Democrats, enabling the latter to regain complete ascendance. Throughout the eastern Arkansas Delta, Black politicians were swept from local and county offices; moreover, following the session of 1893 until 1973, not a single Black lawmaker served in either house of the Arkansas legislature.

Early Twentieth Century
As the twentieth century dawned, Black Arkansans had little choice but to attempt to achieve group advancement through economic initiatives and pursuit of education (especially the vocational and industrial training programs increasingly demanded by whites) rather than through electoral politics. Some special successes were achieved. The Mosaic Templars of America (MTA), a Black insurance and fraternal organization founded in Little Rock in 1882, grew by the 1920s to become one of the largest Black business enterprises in the United States. However, in an increasingly segregated world, Black entrepreneurs found themselves more than ever shut out of the larger commercial sphere and denied access to the capital needed to finance expansion and growth.

Forced removal of Black politicians from normal political life further constricted opportunities for advancement and success by adversely affecting schooling. As late as the early 1890s, the State of Arkansas was still appropriating roughly the same amount of money per year per Black school child as per white school child. Once disfranchisement was in place, funding for the segregated Black schools began to dwindle. By 1930, Arkansas was spending more than twice as much per year to educate a white child as a Black child in its public school system.

Incidents of lynching, an extra-legal form of group violence, were prevalent in this era; one scholar estimated that, during its peak in the state (roughly the 1860s to the 1930s), at least 318 documented lynchings occurred, 231 victims of which were Black. Perhaps Arkansas's most notorious lynching is that of John Carter. In April 1927, Little Rock witnessed mob violence against African Americans following the murder of a twelve-year-old white girl. The alleged murderer was taken out of the city to avoid the growing mob of angry whites in the capital. Then, on May 4, 1927, thirty-seven-year-old Black Little Rock resident John Carter was accused of assaulting a local white woman and her daughter. Enraged whites scoured the area in search of Carter. He was found late in the day, hanged from a telephone pole, and shot. Later, his body was set ablaze and dragged through the streets of Little Rock to the corner of Ninth and Broadway-the heart of the city's Black community.

African Americans were subject to other forms of collective violence as well. Following Reconstruction, some communities broke out into full-fledged " race riots," in which white mobs committed acts of violence against groups of African Americans, especially those believed to be seeking political, legal, or economic parity with whites. Throughout the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, African Americans were also subject to " night riding" or "whitecapping," acts of vigilantism carried out by masked men for the purposes of driving Black workers off land or out of industries. Some communities even expelled all or most of their Black population to become all-white towns known as " sundown towns."

Notwithstanding the above, it is noteworthy that even during this era, often referred to as the nadir in the history of modern American race relations, the earlier traditions of Black activism and political protest did not entirely disappear. For instance, in 1903, when a bill was introduced in the legislature requiring racial segregation on urban streetcar systems, Black citizens in Little Rock held a mass protest meeting. When the measure became law anyway, mass boycotts of the newly segregated streetcars were organized in Little Rock, Hot Springs (Garland County), and Pine Bluff. Initially, Black traffic on the streetcar lines dropped by over ninety percent in Little Rock, and it appears to have fallen precipitously in Pine Bluff and Hot Springs as well; in all three cities, the boycott continued for weeks. Similarly, when in 1905 a measure was proposed to "segregate" state school taxes so that only revenues collected from Black taxpayers could be used to finance Black education, African Americans spoke out in opposition. John E. Bush, a co-founder of the MTA, formed an unusual coalition with eastern Arkansas planters who feared possible discontent among their plantation labor force if the bill should pass. It was stopped in its tracks, but had it been adopted, it could have destroyed educational opportunities for Arkansas's Black children.

Another MTA leader, Scipio A. Jones, fought bravely against racial oppression. In 1919, a bloody upwelling of violence against Black citizens occurred near the town of Elaine (Phillips County) after local Black tenants and sharecroppers attempted to unionize. In the end, twelve black men were sentenced to death in show trials for what is now called the Elaine Massacre. Despite the personal risk involved, Jones defended the men and won their freedom.

The persistence of Black activism and protest also fostered continuing involvement in electoral politics. In 1928, Dr. John Marshall Robinson, a Black physician in Little Rock, founded the Arkansas Negro Democratic Association to combat the 1906 "white primary" rule that barred Black voters from participating in the state's Democratic primaries, which had become the state's only meaningful elections. Not until 1944 did the U.S. Supreme Court, in the case Smith v. Allwright, declare "white primaries" unconstitutional.

World War II through the Faubus Era
A true "Second Reconstruction," however, did not appear until the end of World War II. During the war, many Black newspapers carried the "double V" on their mastheads, and their readers understood what this meant: victory abroad and victory at home. Thousands of Black service men and women saw the world, broadening their horizons and increasing their aspirations. Arkansas's original Tuskegee Airmen were a part of a segregated group composed of African American Army Air Corps cadets, personnel, and support staff known as the Tuskegee Airmen. There were twelve Arkansans documented who performed and maintained various roles at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Approximately 992 pilots were trained at Tuskegee, 450 of whom saw action overseas during the war; four of those were Arkansans.

During and after the war, revelations of the Nazi Holocaust brought racism into increasing disrepute. Energized by these developments, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched a series of court challenges against Jim Crow. Its efforts reached a dramatic culmination in 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, abandoned its previously enunciated "separate but equal" doctrine, declaring racially segregated public schools to be in violation of the "equal protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Initial reaction to the Brown decision within Arkansas was surprisingly mild. Governor Francis Cherry remarked that Arkansans had always obeyed the law and would continue to do so, and in the fall of 1954, school districts in the towns of Charleston (Franklin County) and Fayetteville (Washington County) quietly integrated their school classrooms. The following year, however, segregationist groups such as the White Citizens' Council launched a program of "massive resistance" against implementation of the Brown decision. When the Hoxie (Lawrence County) school board admitted twenty-one Black students to its white schools, white supremacists protested and carried out a campaign of fear and intimidation. School board members eventually were required to obtain a federal court restraining order to ensure that school integration could proceed. In the 1956 election, a majority of Arkansas voters approved a proposed "interposition" amendment and a pupil assignment measure, both directed against integration. Also, the Arkansas General Assembly in early 1957 proceeded to enact four new segregation laws.

Several months transpired, however, before the first great battle of the modern civil rights struggle occurred-the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. Blocking implementation of a gradual school integration plan, and in open defiance of orders of the federal courts, Governor Orval E. Faubus placed units of the Arkansas National Guard around Central High School on September 2, preventing nine Black students from entering. Faubus's dramatic action eventually compelled President Dwight D. Eisenhower to federalize the Arkansas National Guard and dispatch detachments from the 101 st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army in order to dispel the most serious state challenge to federal authority since the time of the Civil War. Escorted by federal troops, the Little Rock Nine then entered Central High and managed to endure the remainder of what was often a nightmarish year with the constant encouragement and moral support of Daisy Bates, who was president of the Little Rock chapter of the NAACP and who, along with her husband, Lucious Christopher (L. C. ) Bates, published the Arkansas State Press, a newspaper dealing primarily with civil rights and other issues in the Black community. Segregationists succeeded in closing the Little Rock public schools during the 1958-59 academic year, known as the " Lost Year," but white moderates, galvanized by the newly formed Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC) and supported by most Black voters, regained control of the Little Rock School Board, enabling integration of the Little Rock schools to recommence in August 1959.

Other racial barriers quickly began to fall throughout Arkansas and the South. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. led the March on Washington, where he delivered his "I Have a Dream" address. The next year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and old segregated arrangements began to disappear. During that same year, Arkansas voters approved an amendment to their constitution that replaced the poll tax with a voter registration system. Fifty-six percent of the electors supported the amendment, and the climate of public opinion in the state had so changed that it was endorsed by Governor Faubus as well as by his Republican gubernatorial challenger, Winthrop Rockefeller. A new Federal Voting Rights Law in 1965 further secured democratic access to the ballot box for Black voters.

Anti-miscegenation laws, edicts enacted in the early nineteenth century that made it unlawful for African Americans and white people to marry or engage each other in intimate relationships, remained part of the state civil code until 1968. However, even before their eradication, the state appeared to have been frustrated in its limited attempts to enforce the laws.

Although full social and economic equality had yet to be achieved, most of the formal political and civil rights originally won during the era of the first Reconstruction had finally been restored.

Nonetheless, resistance to the efforts of the Black community to obtain racial justice persisted, albeit now often in more subtle and less overt forms. Arkansas's capital city, for one, provides examples of this tendency, as has been shown in a careful study by historian Ben Johnson. To avoid the consequences of newly mandated school integration, city housing authorities, ironically often acting through the city's " urban renewal" program, intentionally began to concentrate African Americans in separate neighborhoods. Moreover, city officials, in conjunction with the Arkansas Department of Transportation, approved a plan to build a new east-west expressway, now Interstate 630. The plan in essence encouraged the movement of middle-class whites out of central city neighborhoods to new developments farther west. In consequence of these actions, by the year 2000, housing in Little Rock was far more residentially segregated than it had been one hundred years earlier in 1900, a situation that has continued on into the twenty-first century.

Increasingly, a similar pattern developed with regard to education. Segregation of students by race sometimes reoccurred within ostensibly integrated schools through internal student assignments, with many whites students and only a few Black students being tracked into so-called gifted and talented classes. In other instances, white parents avoided placing their children in integrated settings by simply withdrawing them from the public schools. As reported in a work by historian Grif Stockley, by the year 2000, slightly more than forty-eight percent of white K-12 students in Little Rock were attending private schools; by contrast, only four percent of Black children of the same age were attending private institutions. Between 1970 and 2000, white public school enrollment in the city had declined by fifty-three percent. This development in Little Rock only mirrored statewide trends, especially in heavily Black school districts in the eastern Arkansas Delta, and even mirrored to some degree what was occurring nationally. In the twenty-first century, the growth of charter schools exacerbated segregation, especially in Little Rock, by drawing away more and more white students-along with the attendant state dollars that go with enrollment-and leaving behind a public school district that became both poorer and less representative of the municipal population, with a higher concentration of non-whites.

In the economic realm, racial disparities and inequalities within Arkansas continued or intensified. Despite a notable increase in the number of African Americans who had entered the middle class, in 2006, the estimated median household income for whites in Arkansas was $40,009, while for Black it was $23,265 (estimated median household income for the state as a whole was $36,599). Regarding unemployment, in 2007, some 4.4 percent of whites were officially listed as unemployed, while the figure for Blacks was 11.4 percent (for the state as a whole, the official unemployment rate was 5.4 percent). By the end of 2016, the overall unemployment rate had dropped to 3.8 percent, but the disparity remained, with whites reporting 3.5 percent unemployment and Blacks reporting 6.7 percent. The tradition that Black employees would be "the last hired and the first fired" seemed to be alive and well. Changes in the national and state economy, limited educational opportunities, and significant school dropout rates further exacerbated the unemployment situation. The above factors all likely had an adverse impact on Black family stability, giving rise to social problems and inflicting serious harm on many Black communities.

Recognition, Preservation, and Celebration of African American Culture in Arkansas
The Arkansas Black Hall of Fame was founded in 1992 as a means of recognizing the best and brightest African Americans with Arkansas roots. The hall of fame inducts six members each year. The Mosaic Templars Cultural Center (MTCC) opened on September 20, 2008, as the first publicly funded museum of African American history and culture in Arkansas. The MTCC derives its name from the Mosaic Templars of America Black fraternity. The museum stands at the corner of Ninth Street and Broadway in Little Rock on the site of the National Headquarters of the MTA. It houses the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame on the third floor, as well as a facsimile of the original MTA ballroom, a historic community space for the Ninth Street district. The MTCC also holds events each year for Juneteenth, a celebration during the month of June in Arkansas and throughout the nation to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States.

Established in 2011 by the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Anderson Institute on Race and Ethnicity, the Arkansas Civil Rights Heritage Trail honors those who made significant contributions to civil rights in Arkansas. As names are added, bronze markers are placed in the sidewalk for each honoree. The trail begins in front of the Old State House on Markham Street and is planned to extend to the William J. Clinton Presidential Center and Park and other points throughout downtown.

In 2017, Arkansas PBS produced a documentary, Dream Land, about Little Rock's West Ninth Street Black business and entertainment district. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Taborian Hall housed important Black businesses, including professional offices and the Dreamland Ballroom. Taborian Hall, which is on the National Register of Historic Places and is undergoing long-term renovations, is the only remaining historic structure from the Ninth Street district.

September 2017 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the beginning of the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock. Events marked the occasion, with all the living members of the Little Rock Nine attending. Speakers at the events remarked on the progress for African Americans seen in the past sixty years and the progress yet to be made.

An exhibition of artifacts and photographs at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, Spirit in the Dark: Religion in Black Music, Activism, and Popular Culture, on display from November 2022 to November 2023, featured work from three Arkansas artists: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Al Green, and Maya Angelou. Photographs displayed were from the large photo archive from Ebony and Jet magazines of publisher John H. Johnson documenting Black life in the twentieth century.

In spite of all the gains that had been achieved during the earlier civil rights era and the efforts at preserving and recognizing the contributions made to Arkansas's culture by African Americans, clearly the burden of the state's long history of racism and discrimination continues to weigh upon the present. Before it can honestly be said that the African American people of Arkansas are "free at last" of this legacy, much still remains to be done.

For additional information:
Barnes, Kenneth C. Journey of Hope: The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Bates, Daisy. The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1987.

Beals, Melba Pattillo. Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High. New York: Washington Square Press, 1994.

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Branam, Chris W. "'The African Have Taken Arkansas': Political Activities of African Americans in the Reconstruction Legislature." Arkansas Historical Quarterly 73 (Autumn 2014): 233-267.

Bush, A. E., and P. L. Dorman, eds. History of the Mosaic Templars of America: Its Founders and Officials. With an introduction by John William Graves. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2008.

Carmichael, Maude. "Federal Experiments with Negro Labor on Abandoned Plantations in Arkansas: 1862-1865." Arkansas Historical Quarterly 6 (June 1942): 101-116.

Craig, Robert D., ed. Special Black History Issue, The Stream of History 53 (2020).

Demirel, Evin. African-American Athletes in Arkansas: Muhammad Ali's Tour, Black Razorbacks, and Other Forgotten Stories. N.p.: 2017.

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Freyer, Tony. The Little Rock Crisis: A Constitutional Interpretation. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984.

Giggie, John M. After Redemption: Jim Crow and The Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875-1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Gordon, Fon Louise. Caste and Class: The Black Experience in Arkansas, 1880-1920. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

Graves, John William. "The Arkansas Separate Coach Law of 1891." Arkansas Historical Quarterly 32 (Summer 1973): 148-165.

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Jacoway, Elizabeth. Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation. New York: Free Press, 2007.

Jones-Branch, Cherisse. Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women's Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914-1965. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2021.

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McNamee, Heather. "The Road to Respect: African Americans and the Fight for Equal Education in Jonesboro, Arkansas since 1920." PhD diss., University of Memphis, 2022.

McNeilly, Donald P. The Old South Frontier: Cotton Plantations and the Formation of Arkansas Society, 1819-1861. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000.

Murphy, Sara Alderman. Breaking the Silence: Little Rock's Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools, 1958-1963. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997.

Parry, Janine A., and William Miller. "African Americans in the Arkansas General Assembly: 1972-1999." In Politics in the New South: Representation of African Americans in Southern State Legislatures, edited by Charles E. Menifield and Stephen D. Shaffer. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005.

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Smith, C. Calvin, ed. "The Elaine, Arkansas, Race Riots, 1919." Special Issue. Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies 32 (August 2001).

Smith, C. Calvin, and Linda W. Joshua, eds. Educating the Masses: The Unfolding History of Black School Administrators in Arkansas, 1900-2000. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000.

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Stockley, Grif, Brian K. Mitchell, and Guy Lancaster. Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Massacre of 1919. Rev. ed. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2020.

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Williams, Carmen Lanos. "Arkansas in the African American Imaginary: A Rhetoric of Place." PhD diss., Arkansas State University, 2019.

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John William Graves
Henderson State University

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African Americans - Encyclopedia of Arkansas

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African Americans constitute 15.1 percent of Arkansas's population, according to the 2020 census, and they have been present in the state since the earliest days of European settlement. Originally brought to Arkansas in large numbers as slaves, people of African ancestry drove the state's plantation economy until long after the Civil War.

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May 1865 Slavery for Black people in Arkansas has been passed but this population still went through struggles. For example, they did not have the right to vote or own property like the rest of the citizens were able to do. In the early 19th century, lynching became a huge part of this era. For example, In May 1927 there was a man named John Carter that was accused of assaulting a white lady and her daughter. White people were looking for him due to him committing this crime. Later that day, he was found hung on a telephone pole and shot. In 2023 in Arkansas, they do not count taking AP African American studies towards credits to graduate high school as they can still take the course. The Arkansas Department of education states that until they can know whether or not it disrupts state law and teaches teachers Critical Race theory as well as indoctrination the state will not change their decision

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Several surviving members of the Little Rock Nine, a group of students who in 1957 integrated Little Rock Central High School under threats of violence from white segregationists, are denouncing the Arkansas Department of Education's restrictions on an Advanced Placement African American Studies course.

The state is not barring students from taking the class but has cautioned that the coursework may not count toward the state's high school graduation requirements. The Arkansas Department of Education has argued that since the course is still being piloted, it's unclear whether it runs afoul of a state law signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders in March banning the teaching of "critical race theory."

"I think the attempts to erase history is working for the Republican Party," said Elizabeth Eckford, who joined eight other Black teenagers in desegregating Little Rock Central High School nearly 66 years ago. "They have some boogeymen that are really popular with their supporters."

The Arkansas Department of Education defended its decision, saying in a statement that, "Until it's determined whether it violates state law and teaches or trains teachers in CRT and indoctrination, the state will not move forward. The department encourages the teaching of all American history and supports rigorous courses not based on opinions or indoctrination." The state already offers an African American history course, the department noted.

A spokesperson for Sanders did not immediately respond to a request for comment. When asked about the course on Fox News Thursday, Sanders responded by saying that she wants to focus on improving students' performance rather than pushing a "propaganda leftist agenda."

Central High offered the pilot version of the course last school year. It will continue to do so this school year, a representative said, as will several other Arkansas high schools.

The interdisciplinary course stretches from the African diaspora to the present and includes topics like slavery, the Black Power Movement and Reconstruction. The course framework mentions a protest song, "Fables of Faubus," about the unrest that exploded around the Little Rock Nine push, as an example in a unit about the Civil Rights Movement.

A photograph of a 15-year-old Eckford wearing sunglasses as a white teenage girl harasses her is one of the most recognizable images of the abuse inflicted on Black children during the racist resistance to school desegregation. In the fall of 1957, Arkansas' defiance of a court order that prevented Eckford and her peers from entering the high school culminated in President Dwight D. Eisenhower intervening by having federal troops escort the group.

Terrence Roberts, 81, another member of the Little Rock Nine, reflected on how the federal government's show of force wasn't always enough to protect Black children crossing the color barrier.

"All nine of us suffered physically and emotionally," he said of the first Black students attending Central High. One of the worst moments for Roberts was when a white student wielding a baseball bat called him the N-word, and said, "If you weren't so small," before dropping the weapon and backing off.

"I'm thinking, 'Wow, salvation by stature,'" he said.

Roberts knows that there are those who don't want to confront that history. At some commemorations of the Little Rock Nine, he said, there have been people who don't want old photographs of angry crowds shown. Roberts suspects that those who once harangued them as children don't want the evidence displayed.

But the truth of those turbulent times is one he's adamant that students need to know.

At a "bare minimum," he said, there shouldn't be "laws restricting their ability to learn, or what they could learn."

Roberts said he wasn't surprised at the state's pushback to the AP African American Studies course. He's watched the spread of laws across the country limiting the ways race is brought up in the classroom and called bans on critical race theory "ridiculous."

He welcomed the news that Central High School was continuing with the course, but acknowledged more battles lie ahead.

"I know there are voices pushing back," he said. "The question is, will they be successful?"

Ivory Toldson, the director of Education Innovation and Research at the NAACP, said officials censoring what can be taught are channeling their energy into the wrong battles.

Civil rights advocates and education policy experts have long highlighted racial disparities in AP course participation and access. Black children, Toldson said, often don't have the opportunity to sign up for the rigorous offerings, which can earn students college credits while they're still in high school.

"These are the larger issues I wish they would talk about as they go on defense about this issue," he said. "They really should be setting forth the plan to make sure all Black students in Arkansas have equal access to a quality education."

Toldson, who spoke this week with five members of the Little Rock Nine, said that they see the criticism of the AP course "as a broader attack on Black history."

Melba Beals, who participated in the call, also shared a reflection with the NAACP vowing that future generations would take up "the banner" for civil rights that the Little Rock Nine helped carry.

"​​Keep kicking," she wrote. "See how many more heroines and heroes you can build."

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They integrated Little Rock's schools - now they're slamming restrictions on AP African American Studies

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Several members of the Little Rock Nine pushed back on the Arkansas Department of Education's criticism of the Advanced Placement African American Studies course.

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Franklin and Washington county integrated schools in 1954. Lawrence county also put 21 Black students into white schools. White supremacists didn't agree with this idea and protested. Voters in Arkansas " “interposition” amendment and a pupil assignment measure, both directed against integration."

Augustus H Garland was the first governor elected under Arkansas' new constitution. Through his methods he helped Black men to vote and hold county offices. For example, he asked different races to come together for the state and encouraged the White democrats to share offices with Black people.

The Arkansas Black Hall of fame was founded in 1992 and it gives notice to the greatest Black people that are from Arkansas.

An all-white Central high school in Arkansas accepted 9 black students in the civil rights era. This was around the time that Brown Vs Board of Education allowed segregation to occur in the school system.

On September 4, 1957, the Governor Orval Faubus had called the national guard to block the Black students from coming in the school. In that month, the president, Dwight D Eisenhower sent some federal troops to take the little rock nine out of the school

This attracted attention towards the civil rights movement

There is a popular photo when one of the Little Rock nine, Elizabeth Eckford , was standing alone with a book in her hand while the white children stood around and ridiculed her.

They had a great first day of school, but they were bullied by their white peers the rest of the school year.

Another person from the Little Rock Nine, Minnijean Brown got expelled for fighting back against her peers

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Desegregation of Schools

In its Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, issued May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation of America's public schools was unconstitutional.

Until the court's decision, many states across the nation had mandatory segregation laws, or Jim Crow laws, requiring African American and white children to attend separate schools. Resistance to the ruling was so widespread that the court issued a second decision in 1955, known as Brown II, ordering school districts to integrate "with all deliberate speed."

Little Rock Central High School

In response to the Brown decisions and pressure from the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP), the Little Rock, Arkansas, school board adopted a plan for gradual integration of its schools.

The first institutions to integrate would be the high schools, beginning in September 1957. Among these was Little Rock Central High School, which opened in 1927 and was originally called Little Rock Senior High School.

Two pro-segregation groups formed to oppose the plan: The Capital Citizens Council and the Mother's League of Central High School.

Who Were the Little Rock Nine?

Despite the virulent opposition, nine students registered to be the first African Americans to attend Central High School. Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls had been recruited by Daisy Gaston Bates, president of the Arkansas NAACP and co-publisher of the Arkansas State Press, an influential African American newspaper.

Daisy Bates and others from the Arkansas NAACP carefully vetted the group of students and determined they all possessed the strength and determination to face the resistance they would encounter. In the weeks prior to the start of the new school year, the students participated in intensive counseling sessions guiding them on what to expect once classes began and how to respond to anticipated hostile situations.

The group soon became famous as the Little Rock Nine.

Orval Faubus

On September 2, 1957, Governor Orval Faubus announced that he would call in the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the African American students' entry to Central High, claiming this action was for the students' own protection. In a televised address, Faubus insisted that violence and bloodshed might break out if Black students were allowed to enter the school.

The Mother's League held a sunrise service at the school on September 3 as a protest against integration. But that afternoon, federal judge Ronald Davies issued a ruling that desegregation would continue as planned the next day.

Elizabeth Eckford

The Little Rock Nine arrived for the first day of school at Central High on September 4, 1957. Eight arrived together, driven by Bates.

Elizabeth Eckford's family, however, did not have a telephone, and Bates could not reach her to let her know of the carpool plans. Therefore, Eckford arrived alone.

The Arkansas National Guard, under orders of Governor Faubus, prevented any of the Little Rock Nine from entering the doors of Central High. One of the most enduring images from this day is a photograph of Eckford, alone with a notebook in her hand, stoically approaching the school as a crowd of hostile and screaming white students and adults surround her.

Eckford later recalled that one of the women spat on her. The image was printed and broadcast widely in the United States and abroad, bringing the Little Rock controversy to national and international attention.

Ronald Davies

In the following weeks, federal judge Ronald Davies began legal proceedings against Governor Faubus, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower attempted to persuade Faubus to remove the National Guard and let the Little Rock Nine enter the school.

Judge Davies ordered the Guard removed on September 20, and the Little Rock Police Department took over to maintain order. The police escorted the nine African American students into the school on September 23, through an angry mob of some 1,000 white protesters gathered outside. Amidst ensuing rioting, the police removed the nine students.

The following day, President Eisenhower sent in 1,200 members of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and placed them in charge of the 10,000 National Guardsmen on duty. Escorted by the troops, the Little Rock Nine attended their first full day of classes on September 25.

Numerous legal challenges to integration continued throughout the year, and Faubus repeatedly expressed his wish that the Little Rock Nine be removed from Central High.

Although several of the Black students had positive experiences on their first day of school, according to a September 25, 1957, report in The New York Times, they experienced routine harassment and even violence throughout the rest of the year.

Melba Patillo, for instance, was kicked, beaten and had acid thrown in her face. At one point, white students burned an African American effigy in a vacant lot across from the school. Gloria Ray was pushed down a flight of stairs, and the Little Rock Nine were barred from participating in extracurricular activities.

Minnijean Brown was expelled from Central High School in February 1958 for retaliating against the attacks. Harassment went beyond the students: Gloria Ray's mother was fired from her job with the State of Arkansas when she refused to remove her daughter from the school. The 101st Airborne and the National Guard remained at Central High School for the duration of the year.

Ernest Green

On May 25, 1958, Ernest Green, the only senior among the Little Rock Nine, became the first African American graduate of Central High.

In September 1958, one year after Central High was integrated, Governor Faubus closed all of Little Rock's high schools for the entire year, pending a public vote, to prevent African American attendance. Little Rock citizens voted 19,470 to 7,561 against integration and the schools remained closed.

Other than Green, the rest of the Little Rock Nine completed their high school careers via correspondence or at other high schools across the country. Eckford joined the Army and later earned her General Education Equivalency diploma. Little Rock's high schools reopened in August 1959.

Did you know? Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. attended graduation ceremonies at Central High School in May 1958 to see Ernest Green, the only senior among the Little Rock Nine, receive his diploma.

Little Rock Nine Aftermath

Several of the Little Rock Nine went on to distinguished careers.

Green served as assistant secretary of the federal Department of Labor under President Jimmy Carter. Brown worked as deputy assistant secretary for workforce diversity in the Department of the Interior under President Bill Clinton. Patillo worked as a reporter for NBC.

The group has been widely recognized for their significant role in the civil rights movement. In 1999, President Clinton awarded each member of the group the Congressional Gold Medal. The nine also all received personal invitations to attend the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009.

Jefferson Thomas became the first of the Little Rock Nine to die when he succumbed to pancreatic cancer at the age of 67 on September 5, 2010. After graduating from Central High, Thomas served in the Army in Vietnam, earned a business degree and worked as an accountant for private companies and the Pentagon.

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Little Rock Nine - Definition, Names & Facts | HISTORY

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The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine Black students who enrolled at formerly all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in September 1957. Their attendance at the school was a test of Brown v. Board of Education, a landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling that declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional.

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The Mosaic Templars Cultural Center is a museum that and is the first publicly funded museum that holds Black history and culture in Arkansas. The Ozark folk Centre is a place that showcases dancers and musicians. Local traditions also take place. For example, they have jewelry making, wood carving, and rug hooking. NWA Black district is a Black historic district in Fayetteville. They want to find the missing gaps of Black history and want to uncover the systematic racism and inequality that lingers in the society. They also are motivated to educating and promoting Black history in Arkansas.

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Welcome to NWA Black Heritage, where we are dedicated to preserving, documenting, and promoting the rich heritage and culture of Black communities in Northwest Arkansas. Our mission is to fill the gaps that exist in our documented history while exposing the systemic racism and inequality that continues to plague our society. Change doesn't happen overnight. It requires dedication, hard work, and collaboration. At NWA Black Heritage, we focus on the often overlooked and intentionally suppressed contributions and experiences of Black individuals in Northwest Arkansas.

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Join NWA Black Heritage in uncovering hidden histories, preserving Black heritage, and promoting equity in Northwest Arkansas. Our initiatives engage the community and empower Black voices. Learn more and get involved today.

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Cheese Dip is popular and originated in the North Little Rock Area in Arkansas. This dish is made with melted cheese, green chiles, and some spices. They are also known for their chicken fried steak. This is made by dipping a tenderized steak in seasoned flour and have it fry in oil. One musician from Arkansas is Al Green Al Green is an R and B from Forrest City, Arkansas. His biggest songs are "Let's Stay Together" and "Love and Happiness. Neyo is also and R and B singer from Camden, Arkansas.

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Hello Music Theory | Learn To Read Music

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16 Of The Greatest And Most Famous Musicians From Arkansas

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In this post, we’re going to take a look at the greatest and most famous musicians from Arkansas. From Johnny Cash and Louis Jordan to Glen Campbell and Al

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Today Arkansas is now known as a southwest state. At first it was a slave state. Arkansas was also the state that was a passageway for immigration, and it also was a state that engaged in settlement. Arkansas is a part of the streams of migration. Arkansas is separated by the Mississippi River.

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Arkansas’s regional identity is a complex affair, given that the state overlaps the cultural and geographical zones of the American South and Southwest…

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could be helpful to all of us

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Founder Editor- William Alexander Scott II

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Albany Movement - New Georgia Encyclopedia

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The Albany Movement began in fall 1961 and ended in summer 1962. It was the first mass movement in the modern civil rights era to have as its goal the desegregation of an entire community, and it resulted in the jailing of more than 1,000 African Americans in Albany and surrounding rural counties. M…