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Arkansas is a landlocked state in the West South Central region of the Southern United States. It borders Missouri to the north, Tennessee and Mississippi to the east, Louisiana to the south, Texas to the southwest, and Oklahoma to the west. Its name derives from the Osage language, and refers to their relatives, the Quapaw people. The state's diverse geography ranges from the mountainous regions of the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains, which make up the U.S. Interior Highlands, to the densely forested land in the south known as the Arkansas Timberlands, to the eastern lowlands along the Mississippi River and the Arkansas Delta.
Lee County is a county located in the U.S. state of Arkansas. With its eastern border formed by the Mississippi River, it is considered to be part of the Arkansas Delta. As of the 2020 census, the population was 8,600. The county seat is Marianna.
Pine Bluff is the tenth-most populous city in the US state of Arkansas and the county seat of Jefferson County. It is the principal city of the Pine Bluff Metropolitan Statistical Area and part of the Little Rock-North Little Rock-Pine Bluff Combined Statistical Area. The population of the city was 41,253 in the 2020 census.
The University of Arkansas is a public land-grant research university in Fayetteville, Arkansas, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Arkansas System. Founded as Arkansas Industrial University in 1871, classes were first held in 1872, with its present name adopted in 1899.
The Elaine massacre occurred on September 30 – October 2, 1919, at Hoop Spur in the vicinity of Elaine in rural Phillips County, Arkansas where African Americans were organizing against peonage and abuses in tenant farming. As many as several hundred African Americans and five white men were killed. Estimates of deaths made in the immediate aftermath of the Elaine Massacre by eyewitnesses range from 50 to "more than a hundred". Walter Francis White, an NAACP attorney who visited Elaine shortly after the incident, stated "... twenty-five Negroes killed, although some place the Negro fatalities as high as one hundred". More recent estimates in the 21st century of the number of black people killed during this violence are higher than estimates provided by the eyewitnesses, and have ranged into the hundreds. The white mobs were aided by federal troops and local terrorist organizations. Gov. Brough led a contingent of 583 US soldiers from Camp Pike, with a 12-gun machine gun battalion.
William Grant Still Jr. was an American composer of nearly two hundred works, including five symphonies, four ballets, nine operas, over thirty choral works, art songs, chamber music, and solo works. Born in Mississippi and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, Still attended Wilberforce University and Oberlin Conservatory of Music as a student of George Whitefield Chadwick and then Edgard Varèse. Because of his close association and collaboration with prominent African-American literary and cultural figures, Still is considered to be part of the Harlem Renaissance.
The Deep South or the Lower South is a cultural and geographic subregion of the Southern United States. The term was first used to describe the states which were most economically dependent on plantations and slavery, specifically Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. After the American Civil War ended in 1865, the region suffered economic hardship and was a major site of racial tension during and after the Reconstruction era.
In the history of the United States, carpetbagger is a largely historical pejorative used by Southerners to describe allegedly opportunistic or disruptive Northerners who came to the Southern states after the American Civil War and were perceived to be exploiting the local populace for their own financial, political, or social gain. The term broadly included both individuals who sought to promote Republican politics and individuals who saw business and political opportunities because of the chaotic state of the local economies following the war. In practice, the term carpetbagger often was applied to any Northerners who were present in the South during the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877). The word is closely associated with scalawag, a similarly pejorative word used to describe native white Southerners who supported the Republican Party-led Reconstruction.
Daisy Bates was an American civil rights activist, publisher, journalist, and lecturer who played a leading role in the Little Rock Integration Crisis of 1957.
The University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB) is a public historically black university in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Founded in 1873, it is the second oldest public college or university in Arkansas. It was one of about 180 "normal schools" established by state governments in the 19th century to train teachers for the rapidly growing public common schools. UAPB is part of the University of Arkansas System and Thurgood Marshall College Fund.
John Harold Johnson was an American businessman and publisher. Johnson was the founder in 1942 of the Johnson Publishing Company, headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Johnson's company, with its Ebony (1945) and Jet (1951) magazines, was among the most influential African-American business in media in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1982, Johnson became the first African American to appear on the Forbes 400. In 1987, Johnson was named Black Enterprise Entrepreneur of the year. in 1996, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Southern Arkansas University (SAU) is a public university in Magnolia, Arkansas.
John B. McLendon Jr. was an American basketball coach who is recognized as the first African American basketball coach at a predominantly white university and the first African American head coach in any professional sport. He was a major contributor to the development of modern basketball and coached on both the college and professional levels during his career. He has been enshrined three times in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, and also inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.
Lavenski R. Smith is an American lawyer who has served as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit since 2002, serving as chief judge from 2017 to 2024. He previously served as an associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court from 1999 to 2000.
The Arkansas Delta is one of the six natural regions of the state of Arkansas. Willard B. Gatewood Jr., author of The Arkansas Delta: Land of Paradox, says that rich cotton lands of the Arkansas Delta make that area "The Deepest of the Deep South."
The Little Rock Nine were a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Their enrollment was followed by the Little Rock Crisis, in which the students were initially prevented from entering the racially segregated school by Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas. They then attended after the intervention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The Arkansas State Press was an African-American newspaper published from 1941 to 1959. Dubbed "Little Rock's leading African-American newspaper," its owners and editors were Daisy Bates and L. C. Bates. According to historians, the newspaper was "believed by many to be instrumental in bringing about the desegregation of the Little Rock public schools."
Edith Irby Jones was an American physician who was the first woman president of the National Medical Association and a founding member of the Association of Black Cardiologists. She was honored by many awards, including induction into both the University of Arkansas College of Medicine Hall of Fame and the inaugural group of women inducted into the Arkansas Women's Hall of Fame. She was the first African American to be accepted as a non-segregated student at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and the first black student to attend racially mixed classes in the American South. She was the first African American to graduate from a southern medical school, first black intern in the state of Arkansas, and later first black intern at Baylor College of Medicine.
John Carter was an African-American man who was murdered in Little Rock, Arkansas, on May 4, 1927. Grabbed by a mob after another Black man had been apprehended for the alleged murder of a white girl, Carter was hanged from a telephone pole, shot, dragged through the streets, and then burned in the center of the city's Black part of town with materials that a white crowd of perhaps 5,000 people had looted from nearby stores and businesses.
African Americans have played an essential role in the history of Arkansas, but their role has often been marginalized as they confronted a society and polity controlled by white supremacists. As slaves in the United States, they were considered property and were subjected to the harsh conditions of forced labor. After the Civil War and the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, African Americans gained their freedom and the right to vote. However, the rise of Jim Crow laws in the 1890s and early 1900s led to a period of segregation and discrimination that lasted into the 1960s. Most were farmers, working their own property or poor sharecroppers on white-owned land, or very poor day laborers. By World War I, there was steady emigration from farms to nearby cities such as Little Rock and Memphis, as well as to St. Louis and Chicago.
References
- ↑ Christopher Warren Branam (2011). ""The Africans Have Taken Arkansas": Political Activities of African-American Members of the Arkansas Legislature, 1868-73". University of Arkansas Theses and Dissertations.
- ↑ Foner, Eric (1993). Freedom's Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. ISBN 978-0-19-507406-2 – via Oxford University Press.