El Dorado museum debuts ‘Hunger Wall’

EL DORADO — The South Arkansas Historical Preservation Society will be holding its first Black History Month exhibit since the organization’s inception in the 1970s.

The exhibit will feature the “Hunger Wall” mural that developed during Martin Luther King Jr’s Poor People’s Campaign in the late 1960s, right before his assassination. The exhibit will also feature other national artifacts and pieces that are commissioned by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, as well as local artifacts and stories central to Black people in El Dorado.

“When I first walked into the museum and gallery of history, there wasn’t a lot of color,” Steve Biernacki, South Arkansas Historical Preservation Society executive director, said.

“As a biracial man myself, I felt like that was a travesty. We live in El Dorado, where our high school ratio is 60-40, Black to white; yet minorities are not being represented at the Newton House museum or here at the gallery.”

Biernacki, who started as executive director with the South Arkansas Historical Preservation Society in September of 2020, has made it a priority to have the museum be more reflective of the people living in El Dorado. One of the first events held under his leadership was a Pow Wow commemorating Native American History Month in November last year.

“As a Christian man, as a man who grew up with friends from numerous ethnicities, it was one of those things where I was like, ‘guys, what are we doing?’” Biernacki said. “How are we not celebrating our brothers and sisters of color.”

With the help of South Arkansas Historical Preservation Society curator Darrin Riley, Biernacki forged ahead with putting together a Black History Month exhibit for the museum.

Riley, who is a self-proclaimed ‘history nut’, said his passion for the subject, and this exhibit in particular, began stirring when he first came to El Dorado.