ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY最新文献

{"title":"Desegregating the University of Arkansas School of Law: L. Clifford Davis and the Six Pioneers","authors":"J. Kilpatrick","doi":"10.2307/j.ctt1ffjmrt.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1ffjmrt.8","url":null,"abstract":"THE FIRST AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDENT ADMITTED to the University of Arkansas after Reconstruction was Silas H. Hunt, who enrolled at the School of Law in January 1948. That simple fact, and the university's story of how this early instance of desegregation was achieved, have been related in prior articles and books.1 Less well-known to students of civil rights or Arkansas history are the stories of some other African-American pioneers-one who preceded Silas Hunt in challenging segregation at the law school and the five who quickly followed in Hunt's footsteps. By admitting Silas Hunt, the University of Arkansas intended to forestall a suit. Robert A. Leflar, the dean who admitted Hunt, was concerned that the university's reputation and relations between African-American and white Arkansans would be harmed by such a suit.2 The United States Supreme Court had decided in 1938 that, in the absence of a state-supported black law school, the University of Missouri must admit an African American, Lloyd Gaines, to its School of Law.3 Two other suits, against the University of Oklahoma School of Law and the University of Texas School of Law, were in progress. Leflar's concerns were valid, then, since Arkansas, too, lacked a black law school.4 All three cases had been brought by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as part of its attack on the \"separate but equal\" doctrine established in 1896 by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson.5 Leflar had to convince the university's board of trustees, its incoming president, and Arkansas governor Ben Laney that desegregation, at least at the graduate level, was inevitable. His argument succeeded, but it depended on the school maintaining a form of internal segregation. African- American students would be taught in a separate classroom, work in a separate study room, and not have direct access to the library or use of the school's student bathrooms. As much as possible, the rituals of segregation would apply.6 On January 30, 1948, the University of Arkansas announced it would admit \"qualified Negro graduate students.\"7 But it was not Silas Hunt as much as L. Clifford Davis who prompted this action. The announcement stated that Davis, a young man who had repeatedly attempted to enroll at the school, would be admitted if he appeared on the first day of classes. L. Clifford Davis had been born in Wilton, Arkansas, on October 12, 1924, the youngest of seven children born to Augustus and Dora Duckett Davis. The Davises were farmers, owning their own land and renting additional acreage from other landowners. Despite the fact that neither parent had been able to obtain much education, they strongly encouraged their children to continue in school. Wilton, in Little River County in southwestern Arkansas, provided public schooling only through the eighth grade for African Americans, but the Davises sent all their children to Little Rock to attend Dunbar High School. With the help of a relative","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"68 1","pages":"123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68717460","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 Search of the Blues","authors":"Robert W. Cochran","doi":"10.5860/choice.45-6685","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.45-6685","url":null,"abstract":"In Search of the Blues. By Marybeth Hamilton. (New York: Basic Books, 2008. Pp. 309. Illustrations, acknowledgments, notes, index. $24.95.) The primary attention of Marybeth Hamilton's In Search of the Blues is directed not to blues or to blues musicians but to those twentieth-century collectors and enthusiasts whose researches shaped subsequent appreciation and understanding of the music and its makers. The \"stars\" of Hamilton's book are for the most part figures known to students of American music-Howard Odum, Dorothy Scarborough, John and Alan Lomax, Frederic Ramsey, and Samuel Charters. But in this study the researches into blues of all but John Lomax are accorded a more sustained examination than anything available in prior scholarship, and the whole group is linked by what Hamilton calls \"an emotional attachment to racial difference\" (p. 22), a \"sense of awe at the strangeness and singularity of the black voice\" (p. 20). (The elder Lomax's life and career are carefully and judiciously examined in Nolan Porterfield's 1996 biography [reviewed in AHQ 57: 356-358].) The resulting analyses have several strengths and weaknesses, but In Search of the Blues earns praise first of all for its painstaking and groundbreaking attention to the researchers themselves. Hamilton's study follows a generally chronological order, opening with the pioneering work of Odum, who made his initial recordings in 1907, more than a decade before the release of the first commercial blues recording, and the blues researches of Scarborough, who to this point has been more appreciated for her collecting of Anglo-American ballads. In both instances, Hamilton's accounts are based on extensive reading in unpublished papers (Odum's at the University of North Carolina, Scarborough's at Baylor). Her extended discussion of Frederic Ramsey and his friends-Hamilton calls them \"the Jazzmen cohort\" from the title of a 1939 book Ramsey edited with Charles Edward Smith-is another highlight, as are the briefer treatments of Samuel Charters and the self-styled \"Blues Mafia\" gathered around the obscure figure of James McKune (p. 167). For all her careful research, though, Hamilton's writing is surprisingly impressionistic, typically introducing each section by recreating a pivotal or climactic moment. Scarborough is introduced witnessing a 1921 banjo and dance performance by John Allan Wyeth, a white Confederate veteran whose nostalgias leave her, she reports, \"transported to an old plantation of days before the War\" (p. 60). John Lomax, for his part, appears as \"a portly white man in a Stetson hat\" driving up to the gates of the Louisiana penitentiary at Angola in 1933, his momentous encounter with Huddie Ledbetter just ahead (p. 92). Ramsey is pictured with two friends in the late 1930s, climbing the stairs of a rundown Washington, D.C., building to a dingy nightclub called the Jungle Inn. At the bar, mixing a drink for a customer, is Jelly Roll Morton. Each of these accounts is vividly","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"68 1","pages":"108"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71121146","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":"Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas","authors":"Karen L. Anderson","doi":"10.5860/choice.44-1732","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.44-1732","url":null,"abstract":"Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas. By Grif Stockley. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Pp. x, 340. Acknowledgments, illustrations, notes, index. $30.00.) In Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas, Grif Stockley paints a picture of a deeply flawed woman who led the NAACP in Arkansas during the crucial years of the Little Rock school desegregation crisis. A person whose origins remain cloaked in obscurity, Daisy Bates presented herself to the public both as a civil rights heroine and as a woman whose family life exemplified conventional mores. In fact, her relationship with her husband, L. C. Bates, departed from those norms in significant ways, and her success as a leader in 1950s Little Rock depended more on the efforts of others than she was willing to admit. Stockley's research into Bates' early years reveals a woman whose parents' names and fates are hard to determine. The story of her mother's murder that she related in her 1962 autobiography (The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir) proved impossible to confirm with public records. Similarly, her accounts of her early relationship with her husband leave out the fact that he remained married to another woman for several years after the initiation of their relationship. Her motives in entering into that relationship remain obscure, though it is clear that L. C. enabled her to get out of the poverty and hopelessness that a life in Huttig, Arkansas, would have meant for a poorly educated African-American woman of her generation. In the early 1960s, Daisy Bates left for New York City, where she stayed for some time. Thereafter, she and L. C. divorced, each accusing the other of infidelity, and then remarried. Though Stockley acknowledges that Bates' opponents would have used information about her private life against her, he does not adequately place her life in the context of African-American women's history. As historian Darlene Clark Hine has noted, the sexual vilification and exploitation of black women has been so systematic and damaging in American history that they have developed a \"culture of dissemblance\" to preserve some measure of personal privacy and credibility for their public actions [\"Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women\" in Women's America: Refocusing the Past, ed. Linda K. Kerber and Jane Sherron De Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)]. Stockley's failure to acknowledge this context makes his personal revelations about her appear almost prurient. A woman whose public confidence masked a considerable insecurity, Bates often overstated her role in the civil rights conflicts in these years. In fact, the most significant contribution of Stockley's biography is its illumination of contributions of many actors, most of them African Americans, to the civil rights struggle in Little Rock in the 1950s. …","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"68 1","pages":"94"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71113577","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":"After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875-1915","authors":"C. Owen","doi":"10.5860/choice.46-0492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.46-0492","url":null,"abstract":"After Redemption: Jim Crow and the Transformation of African American Religion in the Delta, 1875-1915. By John M. Giggie. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xvii, 315. Abbreviations, prologue, introduction, epilogue, notes, bibliography, index. $74.00, cloth; $31.95, paper.) In After Redemption, John Giggie of the University of Alabama has produced an intriguing interpretation of black religion in the Deep South. The author suggests that the period of African-American history from Reconstruction to World War I has too often been neglected. Yet, says Giggie, this period \"was a time of intense religious transformation\" in which \"rural African Americans\" helped create the New South and were not just \"quiet, distant observers\" (pp. 5, 58). In the best tradition of historical scholarship, Giggie recreates a lost and almost forgotten world. Focusing on the Arkansas- Mississippi Delta, his book goes beyond political and denominational history to look at how modern technology, new business techniques, and non-church organizations affected the development of black religion. The author's use of sources is impressive, both in quantity and quality. He has dug deeply into private manuscripts, visiting more than fifteen separate repositories. The monograph also relies on insights garnered from more than fifty newspapers, most published by African-American religious bodies. Giggie rightly recognizes the richness of these periodicals and their importance for the self-understanding of black believers. The author also makes good use of government documents, denominational records, and scholarly secondary literature. Much development in the black religious ethos, according to the author, happened outside church walls. As railroads penetrated the delta, for example, trains became significant to the material lives and in the symbolic imagery of black locals. On the one hand, trains provided opportunity. They symbolized freedom and modernity, including the possibility of escape from the region's violent racism. Railroads also provided opportunities for evangelical outreach, for black ministers to travel, and for churches to relocate to rail centers. On the other hand, segregation on trains also humiliatingly reinforced the second-class social status of African Americans. Giggie then shows the powerful impact of black fraternal lodges on the African-American religious experience. Such groups as the Odd Fellows and the Knights of Pythias promoted \"an ethic of self-help\" and \"alternative routes to dignity and status\" (pp. 62-63). These groups put forth inspiring interpretations of African history, demanded decorum, and provided insurance benefits. Although initially suspicious of the lodges, black churches eventually reached accommodation with them. Churches began to provide similar self-help groups, many aimed at women, who were excluded from the lodges. …","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"67 1","pages":"308"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71121676","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":"Mr. Lincoln's Brown Water Navy: The Mississippi Squadron","authors":"Mark K. Christ","doi":"10.5860/choice.45-2802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.45-2802","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"67 1","pages":"306"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71119033","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":"American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II","authors":"J. Howard","doi":"10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim130070017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim130070017","url":null,"abstract":"American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II. By Eric L. Muller. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 216. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, $27.50.) After eviction from their homes, expulsion from the West Coast, detention in makeshift compounds, and indiscriminate incarceration in ten longer-term concentration camps, Japanese Americans in 1943 were then questioned about their national allegiance-and were fully expected to demonstrate it. This ludicrous exercise and its many related absurdities are deftly examined by legal scholar Eric Muller, who exercises calm, sober restraint throughout. As his insightful monograph shows, this American Inquisition necessarily revealed a great deal more about the intentions of interrogators than the loyalties of captives Muller's focus, therefore, is on the \"loyalty bureaucracy,\" the four federal entities that assessed tens of thousands of cases (p. 2). The Western Defense Command (WDC), which had ordered removal, judged any potential return. In the interim, the Provost Marshal General's Office (PMGO) weighed suitability for employment in sensitive war industries; the War Relocation Authority (WRA) determined whether inmates could be released at all or were to be further segregated-that is, isolated at the reconfigured Tule Lake camp for so-called disloyals. For a time, the interdepartmental Japanese American Joint Board (JAJB) attempted to coordinate the efforts of all three. Historians have long appreciated the significance of the federal government's ill-conceived registration program-\"by any measure,\" Muller suggests, \"a disaster\" (p. 36). The form filled out by all adult inmates, particularly questions twenty-seven and twenty-eight about military service and national loyalty, divided households and multiplied dissent from behind barbed wire. What became of the forms-how they were used and misused-makes for fascinating reading. Muller maneuvers through the mountains of midlevel managerial memoranda to reveal farcical systems administered by agencies often at odds with one another. For the WDC, the forms were unnecessary and potentially embarrassing, for \"if the military now took the position that the loyalty of Japanese Americans could be [individually] ascertained, the public would want to know why\" costly WRA camps had been established for wholesale confinement, \"rather than screening the Japanese American population in the summer of 1942\" (p. 33). Still, the questionnaires were answered, and the PMGO devised a point system to assess them. Since \"perceived cultural assimilation [w]as a proxy\" for loyalty, a second-generation birthright citizen of the United States would be awarded two points if \"a Christian,\" for example, but deducted two points if able to read, write, and speak \"Japanese good [sic]\" (p. …","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"67 1","pages":"209"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2008-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64413448","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":"From French Community to Missouri Town: Ste. Genevieve in the Nineteenth Century","authors":"G. Lankford","doi":"10.5860/choice.44-7043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.44-7043","url":null,"abstract":"From French Community to Missouri Town: Ste. Genevieve in the Nineteenth Century. By Bonnie Stepenoff. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 232. Preface, acknowledgments, illustrations, bibliography, index. $29.95.) Ste. Genevieve, a small Missouri town on the bank of the Mississippi River, is of permanent interest to American and Arkansas historians. It was founded around 1750, but a great flood forced it to move to its current location in 1785, where it has been a permanent fixture under French, Spanish, and then American governments. As an old town, it was an actor in and a witness to events during those decades of change, a fact that makes its history inherently important. At the same time, it was itself changing, adapting to meet the new regimes with their new rules and new opportunities. How its citizens, old and new, got along, what they decided to bring with them from their various traditions, and what institutions and customs they invented to create a new future together are topics that can shed light on the larger processes of social change in the territory of the Louisiana Purchase. Such dynamic processes can and should be studied close to the centers of power, such as St. Louis. They may look a bit different in the smaller towns, though, because of the smaller number of players and the personal nature of the negotiations. Ste. Genevieve is that kind of historical locus. For historians of Arkansas, it offers an important case study of the Americanization process also experienced at Arkansas Post and smaller French and Spanish settlements. Its story has been studied by many scholars, particularly for the French and Spanish periods preceding the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Less attention has been paid to Ste. Genevieve's American nineteenth century, and the lacuna has helped create the questionable assumption that Americanization came fairly routinely with the change of flags and governmental officials. This volume is an attempt to help fill that lacuna with details of life in American \"Ste. Gen,\" as it came to be called. Bonnie Stepenoff is a history professor at Southeast Missouri State University in nearby Cape Girardeau. For eight summers (1997-2004), she took her students to Ste. Gen for a historic preservation field school sponsored by her university and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. They toured, heard lectures, participated in archaeological excavation, and did research in cemeteries and public records. In the process, they generated a significant amount of data. The archaeological material has been published in the 1999 volume of Ohio Valley Archaeology. This volume presumably contains most of the remaining information and insights. Given the kind of research done by classes, this book could have been expected to be filled with biographical information from local records, and that is the case. It thus serves as a local history, but it is local history done in a famous and much-studied town, so it ","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 1","pages":"491"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71117138","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":"Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement","authors":"Graeme Cope","doi":"10.5860/choice.45-0457","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.45-0457","url":null,"abstract":"Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement. By George Lewis. (London: Hodder Arnold, 2006. Pp. vi, 254. Acknowledgments, notes, select bibliography, index. $29.95, paper.) Over the last twenty years, studies of the civil rights movement have been hugely enhanced by a change of focus from national protest organizations and their leaders to local groups and unsung community activists. Scholars such as John Dittmer, Charles Payne, and J. Mills Thornton III have demonstrated that the movement was a much more diverse and variegated phenomenon than earlier research suggested. Lewis's work represents a belated but comparable trend in examinations of the movement's opponents. Massive resistance, he concludes, was such \"a multi-headed Hydra\" that \"[i]t is . . . essential to envision [it] not as a single homogeneous movement but as a conglomeration of concomitant conversations of resistance\" (pp. 8, 185). Drawing on a solid range of secondary literature, his own knowledge of border-state archival resources, and the \"White Resistance and Reprisals\" reels of the microfilmed papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Lewis treats the development of massive resistance as a multifaceted evolution, from its first mention by Virginia senator Harry Flood Byrd in February 1956 to the rebirth of many of its less overtly racist ideas in national neoconservative discourse from the mid-1960s. Although he extends the notion of massive resistance beyond its common association with school desegregation to include campaigns against the civil rights movement at large, his treatment of events in such theaters as Albany, Georgia, Oxford, Mississippi, and Birmingham, Alabama is more limited and much less dependent on primary sources than the robust consideration of school matters and, more broadly, events before 1960. Lewis argues for a three-phase evolution of massive resistance, with each phase not so much strictly chronological as distinguished by the outlook and methods of the particular resistance group or groups most active at a given time. In the wake of the May 1954 Brown decision outlawing school segregation, Lewis suggests, while state leaders blustered and floundered, grassroots organizations such as the citizens' councils seized the initiative and carried the burden of opposition. The appearance of the Southern Manifesto in March 1956 signalled not only a more sophisticated intellectual defense of the southern way of life but also a period of legislative vigor designed to thwart both local activism and what was seen to be federal intrusion into traditional state responsibilities, contrary to the provisions of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution. …","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 1","pages":"501"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71117556","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":"\"It Was the Wrong Time, and They Just Weren't Ready\": Direct-Action Protest in Pine Bluff, 1963","authors":"Holly Y. McGee","doi":"10.2307/j.ctt1ffjfsx.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1ffjfsx.7","url":null,"abstract":"WHETHER BY DESIGN OR FATE, the first sit-in conducted by the Pine Bluff Student Movement (PBSM) occurred on February 1, 1963, the first day of Black History Month, established thirty-seven years earlier, as well as the third anniversary of the Greensboro, North Carolina, student sit-in. Thirteen students of Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical & Normal College (AM&N) entered the F. W. Woolworth store in downtown Pine Bluff a little after 2:00 P.M., carrying textbooks and dressed in their Sunday best. As soon as the students sat down at the lunch counter, a waitress-apparently by prior arrangement-turned off the lights, closing the counter for business. For more than two hours, the thirteen students silently sat in the semi-darkness as word spread through downtown that a sit-in was in progress. Curious onlookers filed into the Woolworth to watch. After being identified by the police as the leader of the PBSM, Robert Whitfield, a AM&N junior from Little Rock, was approached by store manager T. W. Harper and asked into Harper's office for a private meeting. As the other students continued the demonstration, Whitfield spoke with Harper for more than one hour, no doubt trying to reach an amicable compromise.1 At 5:30 P.M., when Harper announced the store was closing more than two hours early, the A&MN students quietly rose from the lunch counter and left the store. This sit-in, the first in Pine Bluff history, broke a number of barriers. The city's black community was large and vigorous but existed apart from white institutions. Situated in the heart of the black section of Pine Bluff, the campus of AM&N and its students were largely self-sufficient. More generally, black entrepreneurs-operating everything from financial institutions to eateries and beauty shops-offered a range of services unavailable to the black citizenry via most whiteowned establishments in the city. The sit-in, however, bridged this divide. The city's daily newspaper, the Pine Bluff Commercial, placed a photograph of three unidentified protesters-two men and one woman-on its front page. Prior to the publication of the photograph, pictures of African Americans had rarely appeared on the front page of the Commercial. Certainly, pictures of black ministers, university officials, and community leaders had appeared, but they were buried deep within the newspaper. Most importantly, prior to the student sit-ins, news relating to the black community had not appeared on the paper's front page. Instead, the Commercial largely confined its coverage to basketball games between historically black colleges, a segregated obituary column entitled \"Negro Deaths,\" and infrequent, token articles about presumably good race relations. Henceforth, stories associated with the AM&N sitins would regularly appear on the front page. Over the course of a few months, a small group of student activists changed the face of race relations in their community. There is much more to the story of Arkansas during the c","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 1","pages":"18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68715259","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":"Elias Cornelius Boudinot: A Life on the Cherokee Border","authors":"Alice Taylor-Colbert","doi":"10.5860/choice.44-3472","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.44-3472","url":null,"abstract":"Elias Cornelius Boudinot: A Life on the Cherokee Border. By James W. Parins. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. Pp. 252. Acknowledgments, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $60.00.) Elias Cornelius Boudinot might have been subtitled Cherokee Robber Barren except that Boudinot's get-rich quick schemes never brought him the wealth he desired. As historian James Parins points out, Boudinot's personal heritage marked his life. His father, Buck Oo-watie, who had adopted the name Elias Boudinot, and his uncle Major Ridge and cousin John Ridge had been assassinated by followers of Principal Chief John Ross in 1839, following their support of the Treaty of New Echota, which led to the Cherokee removal on the Trail of Tears. The murders and the hasty exodus by his family and other members of the Treaty party from Indian Territory to Arkansas left an indelible impression on Elias Cornelius. Eike his family, Boudinot was determined to stand up for what he believed in, regardless of the enemies it created. Parins shows that Elias Cornelius Boudinot consistently supported Cherokee \"progress toward civilization,\" as his elders had. For him, \"progress\" meant the end of tribal sovereignty and governance, the building of railroads through Indian Territory, and the opening of the territory to whites to bring in trade, tourism, and greater economic prosperity. Parins analyzes Boudinot's strategies to accomplish his objectives, including newspaper editorials and classical rhetoric, which he used to persuade a variety of audiences that his perspective was the only legitimate one. Obviously, most white Americans needed little persuasion to accept his arguments and transform them into official policies. However, as Parins so adeptly reveals, the majority of Cherokees branded Boudinot, as they had his father, a traitor to his people. The reader knows the ultimate outcome. The railroads came through Indian Territory in the late 180Os, and whites overran the territory, grabbed lands legally and illegally, and soon pushed the territory into statehood as Oklahoma, leaving little power and less prosperity for the Cherokees. What the reader will learn from Parins' work is that Boudinot facilitated these developments through political lobbying, expert networking amongst the railroad and business communities, and powerful oratory on speaking tours around the country. The reader will also learn that Boudinot's political and economic ambition fueled his quest for this \"progress\" for his people. …","PeriodicalId":51953,"journal":{"name":"ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"66 1","pages":"79"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2007-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71114893","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}