Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas: New Perspectives ed. by John A. Kirk

Abstract

Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas: New Perspectives. Edited by John A. Kirk. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2014. Pp. [xvii], 215. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-55728-665-9.) The authors featured in edited volume Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas: New Perspectives explore episodes that have shaped state's racial and ethnic history (p. xi). The first section considers African American experiences during slavery through late nineteenth century. In chapter 1, Kelly Houston Jones offers a more racially nuanced follow-up to Orville W. Taylor's book Negro Slavery in Arkansas (Durham, N.C., 1958). Slavery was fluid, Jones explains, in terms of literal movement via the second middle passage and in terms of work, community building, and negotiation of master/slave and white/black relationships (p. 4). Jones concludes that enslaved people brokered more power than Orville Taylor presented (p. 16). While examples of that power sometimes feel overstated, Jones presents a convincing argument. Carl H. Moneyhon offers a detailed examination of postemancipation of blacks in Arkansas to gain (p. 17). He finds that African Americans connected their freedom to economic independence, education, landownership, and right to life. Black Arkansans found their struggles to attain autonomy hampered by a simultaneously mutable and intransigent racism. Still, according to Story Matkin-Rawn, prevalent racism was not enough to stop African Americans from migrating to Arkansas from other places in South. Pushed by violence and drawn by labor recruitment and wages sufficient to make landownership possible, African Americans came to Arkansas in large numbers in late nineteenth century. Part 2 explores racialized violence. Guy Lancaster's essay analyzes terror practices of white Arkansans in towns, recounting particularly egregious examples of forced expulsion of African Americans and refusal to let them settle in certain areas. Lancaster argues that we must consider historic acts of racial cleansing in communities that continue to represent legacy of past hostilities, even if they are not explicitly labeled as sundown towns (p. 57). Jacqueline Froelich opens her chapter with details of a 1905 riot in Harrison, Arkansas, during which white residents attacked and drove off their black neighbors. Froelich also discusses Harrison citizens' ongoing attempts at racial unification and healing. Grif Stockley's look at a 1959 fire at a state school that caused deaths of twenty-one black boys is particularly compelling. Stockley shows that efforts to dismiss fire as unintentional and simply result of neglect ignore system that put boys into school and social structure that allowed facilities for African Americans to be so carelessly managed. …