ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY最新文献

{"title":"Not Anger but Sorrow: Minnijean Brown Trickey Remembers the Little Rock Crisis","authors":"Elizabeth Jacoway, Minnijean Brown Trickey","doi":"10.2307/40018557","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/40018557","url":null,"abstract":"MINNIJEAN BROWN WAS ONE OF THE LITTLE ROCK NINE who integrated Central High School in 1957. Targeted by segregationist students because she would respond to their taunting, she spilled chili on a group of white boys in December and was finally expelled in February 1958, allegedly for calling a girl \"white trash. \" This resulted in an image of Brown as the angriest of the Little Rock Nine, even among those sympathetic to her plight. Vice Principal for Girls Elizabeth Huckaby, for instance, wrote: \"It was not volatile, natural Minnijean that was our problem. It was just that she and our impossible situation would not mix. \"' In an interview conducted in September 2003 in Little Rock, Minnijean Brown Trickey challenged this characterization and offered her own reflections on the crisis, its aftermath, and its impact on her life. Elizabeth Jacoway: You just said that the person I'm talking to now is not the person I've read about, that all the character assassination was done on. Minnijean Brown: Right, exactly. EJ: So what is different about Minnijean Brown from the portrait that was painted? MB: I don't really know. I've spent, what, forty-seven years trying to get to it. Somebody brought a whole scrapbook to the [Central High National Historic Site museum], a donation. Somebody's wife had kept this whole thing, and my daughter [who works at the museum] was so excited. She said, \"Do you want to read it?\" and I said, \"No.\" My mother said, \"Not only can she not read it, but don't you read it either because it's so vicious.\" And I hadn't even remembered it because when you're in that situation you are really too busy to think about whether somebody likes you at the newspaper or not, but then my daughter did read some of it. She said, \"Well, did you do this, and did you do that?\" And I said, \"I told you not to read it because you can't ask me those questions because it's too close to me. It hurts too much when you ask me those questions.\" It was very puzzling to her because she knows me, and then she's reading this portrayal of me. She said \"I don't get it, but it's very persuasive.\" I've thought a lot about it and come to the conclusion for this week that who I am was really too much for them, whether assuming they had to build a whole character around me to justify hating me. So it was kind of cruel when I kind of figured that out. And the other thing, a documentary was made, a Canadian production, and the producer-researcher found all this footage for us to look at, and I saw this one of one of our first press conferences. [Reporters] said, \"Why do you want to go to Central?\" and I couldn't think of any reason so I said, \"Everything is okay as long as we [African Americans] are giving our lives in the war and working hard, but, when it comes for equalization, we are turned down.\" I was exactly fifteen at that time, and when I saw that about four years ago I said, \"Oh that explains who I am.\" I was there already, and I was that person and had an anal","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"45 1","pages":"1"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/40018557","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68687581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fent Noland: The Early Years","authors":"G. Lankford","doi":"10.2307/40018558","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/40018558","url":null,"abstract":"ON THE FIRST DAY OF 1858, sitting in a silent, empty house on Main Street in Batesville, Arkansas, a slender man, between coughing spells, penned a letter to his nephew in far-off Virginia: I am the sole tenant of the old mansion, sleep in it and write from a room filled with a thousand memories of the past. Were I a believer in spiritualism and a medium, I could conjure up many beloved forms, who have passed from this to a better world. I do not ever feel lonely-a pleasant and sad feeling comes over me-soothing in its influence than otherwise. . . . What will the year 1858 do? How many who enter it full of life and hope are destined ere its race is over to sleep in the cold and silent grave. . . . I have scarcely the shadow of a hope that I shall be able to visit Virginia. I am beginning to feel old and somehow or other have not managed to have me a home. I shall build this summer and then I expect to pass quietly away the life it may please a kind providence to grant me.1 In another man, such musings might have seemed morbid affectation. From Charles Fenton Mercer Noland, they were an honest assessment of his circumstances. He was back in Batesville to handle the depressing business of disposing of his father-in-law's estate. John Ringgold had recently vanished from the dark deck of a steamboat on the Mississippi River. Despite Ringgold's financial success-he was known as one of the most important businessmen in north Arkansas-the Panic of 1857 and his unexpected death had conspired to eat up much of his wealth. Ringgold's wife, Elizabeth, had died two years earlier, and the couple's daughters had married, leaving the brick house empty. Noland's own circumstances were happier, with a beautiful wife and a thirteen-year-old son. Thanks to two decades of publishing letters that had been embraced by a national audience, he was famous. As a legislator, public official, and newspaperman, he had also become a luminary among Arkansas's Whig minority. He was about to build in Little Rock the first home he had ever owned. Yet there were aspects of his life that dimmed the brightness of the future he hoped for. At forty-seven, he had enjoyed little financial success of his own, despite years of seeking the right endeavor, one that would be worthy of his enthusiasm and abilities and bring material rewards. He had lived in Little Rock for two years, and he had worked in three jobs, none of which proved satisfying to him. In addition, there was his persistent bad health. For more than two decades, he had been weakened by \"consumption\" and had several times been ill to the point of expecting to die. By 1858, his health was worse than ever, and he knew it. His words to his nephew were prophetic-before six months had passed, he would \"sleep in the cold and silent grave,\" in a donated plot in Little Rock's Mount Holly cemetery. His son, Lewis Berkeley Noland, would marry and manage to live through the Civil War, only to die childless in 1870 after a fall from hi","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 1","pages":"27"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/40018558","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68687642","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Wilderness Journey: The Life of William Clark/William Clark and the Shaping of the West","authors":"D. Sloan","doi":"10.5860/choice.42-2996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.42-2996","url":null,"abstract":"Wilderness Journey: The Life of William Clark. By William E. Foley. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. Pp. xiv, 326. Preface, acknowledgments, epilogue, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.) William Clark and the Shaping of the West. By Landon Y. Jones. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. Pp. xi, 394. Maps, prologue, notes, bibliography, acknowledgments, index. $25.00.) This assignment looked like an easy day at the office: two biographies of the soldier, explorer, businessman, and administrator William Clark, one by William Foley, who brings to the project a lifetime of scholarship on frontier zones, the other by Landon Jones, former managing editor of People magazine. Praise the first for its careful scholarship, trash the second for popularizing, case closed, work done, early lunch? No. Jones, it turns out, has been doing People as a day job, spending his off hours as a scholar of the early national period. And while this may irk the lazy reviewer, to readers it is fine news, for the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase now becomes the occasion for not one but two very strong studies of an individual whose life is well worth the time. It must be said first, however, that most readers will find that time passing much more enjoyably in the company of Jones. With Foley, the war against cliche has lost a skirmish. Deaf ears get turned, or get lent sympathetically; people don't die of disease if they can succumb to its ravages; \"intents\" never travels without \"purposes\"-the reader starts to search and count (and to wonder what it is that an editor does). Jones's prose gets a boost by comparison, but it is plenty good on its own. His talent for characterization is striking. A short paragraph on Nicholas Biddle, for example, conveys the depth of the man who took over the journals of the overland expedition. When Jones discovers in the minor figure Judge John B. Lucas not only an angry man but a brilliantly vituperative one, he knows to give him room to lambaste Clark, creating for the reader a better feel for both of them. In Foley's hands, Clark's world has only people; Jones gives it a cast. Much of this he does on his own, but when he finds help he uses it, and with the superb observers passing through the landscapes of Clark's life-Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, Alexis Tocqueville, among others-there is much help available. And Jones doesn't limit himself to the big names. Henry Marie Brackenridge, small stuff beside Dickens, certainly, but a fine journal keeper, delights in the image of the conniving entrepreneurial sharpie Manuel Lisa out on the Missouri reading Don Quixote, and, through Jones, the reader does too. But Foley sticks to his work, and his conventionality is often a strength. Though Clark is nineteen years old by the second chapter of both books, Jones more or less gives birth to him at that age, having used his first chapter to introduce William's famous older brother, George, the hero-turned-drunken-burden who stagg","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 1","pages":"106"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71104295","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Patriotism, Pledging Allegiance, and Public Schools: Lessons from Washington County in the 1940s","authors":"S. Smith","doi":"10.2307/40018559","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/40018559","url":null,"abstract":"THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE, first composed in the nineteenth century, has once again become a topic of considerable editorial comment and political posturing in the twenty-first century, as seventeen states have enacted new pledge laws or amended existing statutes.1 Nonetheless, there is little evidence that many citizens or elected officials are aware of the history and consequences of attempts by patriotic organizations, local school districts, and state governments to define and require expressions of appropriate sentiments about the nation's flag. This essay examines incidents at two schools in Washington County, Arkansas, during the early 1940s, when public school children refused to pledge allegiance to the flag because of their religious beliefs and suffered the consequences. While these were certainly not the only instances of controversy over the flag salute in Arkansas schools in that period, the Washington County episodes serve as an effective case study. They suggest something of the motives, actions, and experiences of those involved in similar incidents across Arkansas and the nation. The school flag movement began in 1888, when James Upham, head of the premium department of Youth s Companion magazine, launched a four-year campaign to encourage the display of United States flags in school classrooms, in order both to sell flags and to promote \"American patriotism.\" The following year, Col. George Thatcher Balch introduced an American flag salute in his New York City kindergarten class, requiring students to stretch their right arm forward while pledging, \"We give our heads and our hearts to God and our country; one country, one language, one Flag.\" Balch spread his ideas for inculcating Americanism by publishing a book, Methods of Teaching Patriotism in Public Schools, in 1890. Youth's Companion had already sold over 25,000 flags to public schools when it first published the Pledge of Allegiance in its issue of September 8, 1892. It wished to promote nationalism in the schools during the celebration of that October's 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas. Written by Francis Bellamy, a thirty-year-old assistant to the editor of the magazine, the Pledge originally read, \"I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands: one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.\" Leaflets containing the Pledge were distributed to public schools, and an estimated twelve million students recited the Pledge on Columbus Day, 1892.3 The drums of war, as always, found public officials and professional patriots ready to seek national unity through the force of law. In 1898, as the United States went to war with Spain, the New York legislature passed the first statute mandating that each public school day open with a salute to the flag and other patriotic exercises. What had begun as a youth magazine's publicity campaign to promote patriotism and sell flags had become a ritual required by law. During World ","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 1","pages":"48"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/40018559","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68687774","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Arkansas Listings in the National Register of Historic Places: Fraternal Buildings of Little Rock's Ninth Street Business District","authors":"Zackery A. Cothren","doi":"10.2307/40028051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/40028051","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"64 1","pages":"317"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2005-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/40028051","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68724305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In the Storm: William Hansen and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas, 1962-1967","authors":"Brent E. Riffel","doi":"10.2307/40023657","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/40023657","url":null,"abstract":"STUCK INSIDE A JAIL CELL IN ALBANY, GEORGIA, in July 1962, civil rights activist William Hansen was having trouble meeting with his attorney. He had been arrested for participating in a demonstration, but when the attorney, C. B. King, insisted on seeing his client, Dougherty County sheriff \"Cull\" Campbell became enraged. \"Nigger, haven't I told you to wait outside?\" he said. ' Campbell then picked up a cane and began beating the attorney. The next day the New York Times published a photograph of King, his head bandaged, leaving the hospital.2 Hansen, however, had met with even harsher treatment. He had been thrown into a cell full of whites who were by no means sympathetic to the cause of civil rights and even less sympathetic toward a northern agitator like Hansen. He was savagely beaten, with his jaw shattered and several of his ribs broken. Only twenty-one years old at the time, Hansen had a long career as a political activist ahead of him. Hansen arrived in Little Rock, Arkansas, later that year to head up a new branch of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a grass-roots organization that sought to harness the rising tide of black political consciousness in the South. Hansen's organizational skills earned him appointment to the post, but his interest in civil rights and his desire to fight racism dated to his childhood. Born in Cincinnati in 1939, Hansen grew up in a strict working-class Catholic family. His religious upbringing helped propel him toward a life as a political activist. \"The extreme moral rigidity of American Catholicism in the pre-Vatican II days,\" he later recalled, \"had a way of leading in the direction I went with regard to race and politics .... Its rigid moral doctrine, if accepted, would lead logically toward a certain set of actions.\"3 Hansen's direct experience with African Americans also shaped his political outlook. He recalled how attending baseball games-sitting in the cheap bleacher seats at Crosley Field to see the Cincinnati Reds play-allowed positive interactions with black people: I was a ten to sixteen-year-old kid who made acquaintances with many of these older black men who, it seemed to me, knew everything about baseball. They took a liking to [me]. I remember at first not being able to figure out why all these Cincinnatians supported the Brooklyn Dodgers over their hometown team. I finally figured out it was because of Jackie Robinson. That realization told me something about the society I was being raised in. Like many people of his generation, Hansen also watched the aftermath of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, as well as the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, with rapt attention. He quickly found himself siding with civil rights activists, thinking \"it was dumb to be arrested for sitting in the wrong seat in a bus.\"4 Personal relationships with blacks also played a role in the development of Hansen's political consciousness. When he was seventeen years old, he became friends","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"63 1","pages":"404"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/40023657","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68705585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Prelude to Prairie Grove: Cane Hill, November 28, 1862","authors":"W. Shea","doi":"10.2307/40023655","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/40023655","url":null,"abstract":"ON THE DAY AFTER THANKSGIVING, 1 862, Union and Confederate forces clashed for eight hours in a spectacular twelve-mile running fight in northwest Arkansas. The battle of Cane Hill has attracted a modest amount of attention from historians in recent years, but the handful of published accounts have failed to place the episode in its proper context or make effective and judicious use of the available primary sources. This state of affairs is lamentable because Cane Hill was an important military engagement that had a significant impact on the course of the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi. It brought the war to within thirty miles of the Arkansas River, damaged a vital center of culture and education, and precipitated the battle of Prairie Grove.1 The story of Cane Hill began in May 1862, when Maj. Gen. Thomas C. Hindman arrived in Arkansas with instructions to restore order, rebuild Confederate military fortunes, and recover Missouri. Hindman worked feverishly to accomplish these goals and soon felt confident enough to launch what proved to be an overly ambitious offensive from his base of operations at Fort Smith. In early September, he crossed the Boston Mountains at the head of an ill-equipped and ill-trained force of about six thousand men known as the Trans-Mississippi Army. Hindman encountered no opposition in northwest Arkansas and pushed into southwest Missouri, but at this critical moment he was called to Little Rock. His army continued on without him. The Union commander in Missouri, Brig. Gen. John M. Schofield, was caught off guard by the unexpected Confederate incursion, but he responded with great energy and quickly cobbled together a makeshift force called the Army of the Frontier. After several sharp engagements, most notably at Newtonia, the Federals gained the upper hand and drove the Confederates back into northwest Arkansas. When Hindman resumed command in mid-October, he recognized that his gamble had failed. He sparred with Schofield for a few weeks, then fell back across the Boston Mountains to Fort Smith.2 Schofield concluded that the immediate threat to Missouri was over and returned to Springfield with two of his three divisions. Another Confederate offensive seemed unlikely with winter approaching, but Schofield was wary of the resourceful and unpredictable Hindman. Just to be on the safe side, he directed the commander of his largest division, Brig. Gen. James G Blunt, to remain in northwest Arkansas and keep a close watch on the Rebels. Blunt was a stocky amateur soldier from Kansas who often wore a business suit instead of a uniform. He drank too much and had other personal shortcomings, but he was a bold, resolute, and intrepid commander who liked nothing better than leading soldiers into battle. His lack of pretense and love of action made him immensely popular with his men. Blunt jumped at the chance to operate independently in hostile territory, but he chafed at the defensive nature of his assignment, for he wa","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"63 1","pages":"353"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/40023655","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68705091","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows/American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857","authors":"S. Bolton","doi":"10.2307/40038277","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/40038277","url":null,"abstract":"Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows. By Will Bagley. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002. Pp. xxiv, 493. Illustrations, maps, preface, acknowledgments, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95.) American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857. By Sally Denton. (New York: Knopf, 2003. Pp. xxiii, 306. Author's note, map, illustrations, notes, bibliography, acknowledgments, index. $26.95.) At dawn on September 7, 1857, at Mountain Meadows, a valley about thirty-five miles from Cedar City in southern Utah, a party of Mormons assisted by Paiute Indians opened fire on the California-bound Baker-Fancher wagon train which had come from Arkansas. The Arkansans fended off the surprise attack and withstood a siege for five days during which they lost 15 men from their party of at least 137 people, three-fourths of whom were women and children. Long out of water and running low on ammunition, on September 11 they accepted the word of John D. Lee, leader of the Mormons, who claimed that the attackers were Indians and that he and his men could lead the travelers to safety if they would give up their arms and leave their wagons. Divided into groups of men, women and children, and wounded, they walked a mile or so before they were massacred. In a few awful moments of shooting and throat-cutting, the men were killed by Mormons walking next to them, and the women and children were slaughtered by whites and Indians who had come out of concealed positions. The attackers allowed seventeen children to survive, reasoning that they were too young to be reliable witnesses. One girl was later butchered, though, when her captors decided she was mature enough to give a convincing account. The normally competent Mormon pioneers provided only a slipshod burial. A settler from the area described the scene a few weeks after the massacre: \"At one place I saw nineteen wolves pulling out the bodies and eating the flesh\" (Bagley, p. 173). Eighteen months after that, there was still abundant evidence of what had taken place: \"Human skeletons, disjointed bones, ghastly skulls and the hair of women were scattered in frightful profusion over a distance of two miles\" (Bagley, p. 173). Some of the surviving children, who were taken in by Mormon families, watched as their hosts used equipment that had belonged to their families and wore their parents' clothing. Brigham Young, who was the territorial governor of Utah as well as the revered leader and prophet of the Church of Latter-day Saints, declared that the event was an Indian massacre, although there was much available evidence to the contrary. Few people outside Utah accepted that version of events. Various federal officials, in particular the courageous Judge John Cradelbaugh, investigated the massacre and attempted to prosecute a number of Mormons, but their fellow churchmen and citizens uniformly refused to cooperate. Not until 1871, when a participant who had left the chu","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"63 1","pages":"320"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/40038277","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68754750","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Mirage and Reality: Economic Conditions in Black Little Rock in the 1920s","authors":"Gene Vinzant","doi":"10.2307/40038273","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/40038273","url":null,"abstract":"THE 1920s WITNESSED A DRAMATIC INCREASE in black businesses throughout the nation. The migration of rural blacks to northern and southern cities, combined with a new emphasis on \"race pride\" and selfhelp, led to this impressive rise in the numbers and types of businesses operated by African Americans. Timothy Bates, a scholar of black enterprise, calls the 1920s the \"golden years for urban black business.\" Others, most notably E. Franklin Frazier, have labeled the story of black business success a \"myth,\" however. Frazier contends that the growth of black business masked the poor condition of most African Americans in a segregated economy and that the black bourgeoisie employed the myth of success to sustain their own business interests and to assuage their feelings of inferiority to the white middle class.1 Unfortunately, the debate's focus on the national scene and the number of businesses in operation in the U.S. as a whole may obscure the realities of daily life for blacks in a particular location. Little Rock, Arkansas, might offer, therefore, a valuable test case. While the prominence of certain African-American enterprises and businessmen created the appearance of increasing prosperity among Little Rock's African Americans during the 1920s, a close examination suggests that there was not a substantial increase in the number of black-owned businesses over the course of the decade and that the economic condition of the typical black citizen remained quite bleak. For most of Little Rock's African-American community, there was little that was golden in the 1920s. Well before the 1920s, Little Rock's African-American leaders trumpeted the achievements of the businessmen and professionals in their community. In 1898, African-American physician D. B. Gaines wrote Racial Possibilities as Indicated by the Negroes of Arkansas, which emphasized the opportunities blacks enjoyed for success in Little Rock. He profiled the city's leading businessmen, ministers, educators, \"men of means,\" lawyers, and doctors, along with its churches and colleges. He also included a \"colored business directory\" and \"colored church directory.\" In Little Rock and Argenta (now known as North Little Rock), he found twenty-nine barbers, ten blacksmiths, fifteen shoe repairmen, twenty-six grocers, six lawyers, five doctors, a dentist, a druggist, and an undertaker, along with assorted black-owned restaurants, hotels, newspapers, wood and coal yards, tailors, confectioners, and jewelers. These businesses not only catered to the black community, Gaines said, but enjoyed \"a very extensive trade from the white citizens.\" Gaines paid particular attention to J. W. Walker, whose grocery store enjoyed the \"liberal patronage of many of the best white citizens,\" and J. H. Smith, a dentist with a \"large and lucrative practice among the wealthy white class.\"2 Writing almost a decade after Gaines, E. M. Woods, in his 1907 Blue Book of Little Rock and Argenta, Arkansas, also praised what he","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"63 1","pages":"261"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/40038273","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68755123","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Marion Butler and American Populism","authors":"Craig Thurtell","doi":"10.5860/choice.41-2381","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.41-2381","url":null,"abstract":"Marion Butler and American Populism. By James L. Hunt. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. xiii, 338. Acknowledgments, introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $49.95.) The Peoples' (or Populist) party was one of the most significant third-party movements in American history, and Marion Butler served as national chairman during its climactic years. Opinions about his role certainly vary, but for better or worse, he was an important figure. Until now, however, he has lacked a biography. James L. Hunt has corrected this deficiency with a solid and thorough account of Butler's life. Hunt notes in his introduction that he harbors little sympathy for Butler either personally or politically, but his overall objective is to rescue his subject from the dominant portrayal, articulated most influentially by C. Vann Woodward and Lawrence Goodwyn, of a shifty opportunist out of step with true and principled Populism. Hunt traces Butler's rise from his political beginnings as a rural schoolteacher in Sampson County, North Carolina. There he became a locally prominent Alliance man, Democrat, and editor of the weekly Caucasian, who, at the age of twenty-eight, dominated the proceedings of the \"Alliance legislature\" of 1891. A reluctant convert to the Peoples' party in 1892, Butler nevertheless filled the vacuum created by the sudden death of L. L. Polk and soon dominated the state organization. By 1896, he was national chairman. Hunt judiciously recounts Butler's trials as he attempted to hold the party together during the contentious 1896 campaign, earning enduring enemies in the process. As the Populist movement deteriorated amid bitter recriminations after 1896, Butler remained a central figure both nationally and in North Carolina. Having reluctantly led the North Carolina Populists into unwieldy coalitions with the Republicans in 1894 and 1896 (he always preferred working with the Democrats), he would wage a rearguard action against the resurgent Redeemers, opposing their disfranchising amendment in 1900 on the grounds that there existed no threat of \"negro domination\" and proposing instead a bar to black officeholding. With the demise of Populism, Butler gravitated toward the Progressive wing of the Republican party, formally joining in 1904. There he remained for the rest of his life, waging a quixotic struggle to bend the party toward the Omaha platform. Hunt argues that the Omaha platform, with its demands for nationalization of the railroads and telegraph, the subtreasury, greenbacks, and the free coinage of silver, among others, became Butler's political anchor. …","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"63 1","pages":"209"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2004-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71098841","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}