As THE HEAT OF LATE JULY 1883 enveloped Arkansas, the attention of the state's press was focused the fruitless and exhausting attempts of authorities to apprehend members of the notorious Three-Corner Gang in the wild, mountainous country where Garland, Yell, and Montgomery Counties came together.' By the beginning of the following month, however, the rumblings of trouble that would pull attention away from the elusive outlaws began to come from the rich blacklands of southwestern Arkansas. A special telegram from Washington, Arkansas, to the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock brought disturbing news. Under the headline Rumors of War and Color Line Being Drawn in Hempstead a brief article the front page reported that blacks in northwestern Hempstead County were on the warpath. Ranging over fifteen miles, they had killed a white man named Wyatt as he plowed in his field.' In Arkansas during the 1880s, killings and shootings were not uncommon, and suspicions of plots among blacks were certainly not unheard of. The Arkansas Gazette had reported other rumors of uprisings in southwestern Arkansas in the year prior to the summer incidents, including news of planned insurrections at Prescott in Nevada County and Hope in Hempstead County. They had proven to be nothing, but whites were fearful.3 It was in this climate of pervasive racism, suspicion, and fear that what came to be known as the Howard County Race Riot occurred. Actually, the episode reached into two counties-Howard and Hempstead-and the profound differences between them would very much influence events. Hempstead was one of the oldest counties in the state. It had been the most southwesterly of the five counties Arkansas had when it became a territory in 1819. Commercial cotton-growing and plantation slavery came early to the county, such that by 1840 Hempstead was nearly 40 percent black. Since 1824 the county seat had been Washington, which became an antebellum trade center and the state's Confederate capital during the Civil War. By 1873, however, a new town, Hope, had been born as a station the Iron Mountain Railroad, which ran from Little Rock to Texarkana. By 1880 its population was already outstripping that of Washington, with 1,233 inhabitants as compared to Washington's 730. While Hope was a railroad center and had industry-a large planing mill and a factory that made wagons, buggies, and carriages-most county residents continued to engage in agricultural pursuits, primarily the raising of cotton and corn.4 Howard County, by contrast, was barely ten years old. Established in 1873, it had received much of its territory from portions of western Hempstead and eastern Sevier Counties. Other pieces taken from Polk and Pike Counties completed its northern perimeter along the edge of the Ouachita Mountains. In the early 1880s farmers in Howard were just beginning to explore the possibilities of fruit-growing, which would later become an important part of the county's economy. Mining for antimony and other mineral resources would also become significant later in the 1880s. Getting those fruits and minerals to market hinged finishing a long-delayed railroad. A year after the riot, Nashville, in the southeastern portion of the county near the Hempstead line, did become connected to the mainline at Hope with the completion of the Arkansas and Louisiana Railroad. But the county seat, Center Point, which was located in the uplands of central Howard, remained miles away from any railroad. These two counties were also markedly different in the size and composition of their populations. With 9, 917 inhabitants in 1880, Howard was less populous than Hempstead and more heavily white. Concentrated mainly in the southern parts of the county were 2,508 blacks, almost 34 percent of the total population. Hempstead, however, had 19,015 residents in 1880. About 49 percent of them (9,221 individuals) were black. As a resuit of substantial inward migration, the county's black population had increased more quickly than the white since 1870, a trend that seemed likely to continue. …
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Sep 23, 2016
Zuzana Jamberová + 6
Open Access
