Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Little left of Southland College
There are no remnants of Southland College in the fields of rural Phillips County.
No echoes of call-andresponse singing across the invisible campus.
No ruins to remember a beacon to black students throughout the Mississippi River Delta.
Established in 1864 as the Helena Orphan Asylum, Southland College became the first institution of higher education west of the Mississippi River for black students. Now, it’s just a memory along Arkansas 242 about 3 miles east of Lexa.
But 300 miles away in Fayetteville, the University of Arkansas library has a trove of Southland College material — 31 boxes of materials that a UA professor found in an Indiana attic in 1985.
The Southland College papers have been open to the public since 1987, but now
53 photographs and documents from the collection are available to anyone with a computer and an Internet connection.
On Monday, a digital exhibit of Southland College material was posted online at https://goo.gl/Shf8iD.
“It’s open to anyone around the world,” said Joshua Youngblood, research and outreach librarian in the university’s Special Collections Department. “It’s going to raise the profile of the college, and it’s going to spark renewed interest in the history of the college, which has a fascinating history. It’s a little known story of African-Americans in education in Arkansas.”
Southland was started by Indiana Quakers to care for lost and abandoned black children during the Civil War, according to an Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture entry written by the late Thomas Kennedy, the professor who found the dusty attic papers and documented the story in his book, A History of Southland College.
It was initially a school for the orphans.
William Billingsley, 79, of Sacramento, Calif., said his father, Alfred Billingsley Sr., attended elementary school at Southland.
“Thank God for the Quakers because my father indicated that during Reconstruction there were a lot of orphans,” Billingsley said. “Eight- and 9-year-old kids just running wild.”
Billingsley said his father was probably passing down information he heard from his father.
Southland was educating the orphans, and others took notice.
The newly freed people wanted to learn to read and write, and there were few educational opportunities available for black students in the Arkansas Delta, according to the encyclopedia entry.
“Southland quickly began to attract the children of local black farmers as well as a smattering of boarding students from throughout the Mississippi River Valley, including the mulatto children of white planters,” wrote Kennedy.
Southland was producing much-needed black teachers.
According to a circular for the 1880-82 school year, Southland was organized in 1869 as a “Normal Institute for training teachers.” It was chartered as Southland College in 1873 and graduated its first class in 1876.
“Given the simple course of study required for graduation, ‘college’ was probably always a misnomer,” wrote Kennedy. “Still, those trained at Southland were undoubtedly better prepared than the vast majority of individuals teaching in what passed for a black educational system in Arkansas.”
By the mid-1880s, Southland had five permanent buildings and about 300 students.
With leadership changes and financial problems, enrollment dropped to 100 in 1902, then increased to more than 400 a decade later.
In 1917, a national Quaker body renamed the school Southland Institute and declared that it “should cease to serve only a local clientele and strive to become a Quaker academy of national standing along the lines of the Tuskegee and Hampton institutes,” wrote Kennedy.
But that was not to be. Financial problems persisted, and Southland Institute closed in 1925.
In the 1930s, the land was sold to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which operated a school called Walters-Southland Institute, wrote Kennedy. It closed after World War II.
A tiny rural community called Southland still exists in Phillips County, but no physical evidence of the school remains, he wrote.
The college thrived, periodically, during a turbulent time for black people in Arkansas and in America. Southland Institute was just 25 miles north of Elaine, where one of the nation’s bloodiest racial conflicts occurred in 1919.
Some graduates of the various iterations of Southland made an impact on education across Arkansas. One of those was Anna Strong, a 1903 graduate of Southland College, who also attended Tuskegee Institute and Columbia University.
Strong began teaching at the age of 13. She was principal at Robert R. Moton High School in Marianna for many years. She also worked for the Arkansas Department of Education, where her specialty was improving rural black schools.
Strong was president of the Arkansas Teachers Association in 1929, the second woman to hold that post. She helped establish the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers in 1926 and later was vice president of the American Teachers Association, the black equivalent of the National Education Association. Strong also was president of the National Congress of Colored Parents and Teachers in 1942-45.
The entire collection of Southland College Papers at the library in Fayetteville includes correspondence, financial records, minutes and photographs.
In one of the exhibition documents, Mildred E. White of Indiana wrote about teaching at Southland Institute in 1918-19.
“Things had gone badly with the school the year before,” she wrote. “The electric wires were down on the ground being run over by the wagon.”
But White described a “pleasant” campus with good food. But seldom did they get fresh meat. Instead, they were served bacon or “canned salmon from Sears & Roebuck.”
“All the children in the school loved music,” wrote White. “In the school body of 350, there was not one monotone. The very small children would sing alto with unconscious ease.
“On weeknights after supper, the boarders would sit out on the steps of their dormitories and sing spirituals and old plantation songs. They had some sweet solo voices. Sometimes they sang antiphonally across campus.”
At Southland, students also were instructed in character and etiquette.
“Indecent and profane language, card playing and the use of intoxicating liquors or tobacco are forbidden,” according to the 1923-24 catalog.
A 1923 invoice from Helena Wholesale Dry Goods Co. indicates the school bought gloves for the girls and ties for the boys.
Southland students didn’t have to be Quakers, but they were expected to study the Bible and attend religious ceremonies at the school.
The library had more than 1,000 books in addition to current magazines in the reading room.
“The Institute endeavors to develop strong bodies as well as strong minds,” according to the 1923-24 catalog. “Such games as football, basketball, volleyball, baseball, tennis, track and field are open to students.”
Most schools for black pupils in the Delta taught only through the fourth grade, which is one reason Southland was so desperately needed, wrote White.
Despite financial hardships, the teachers could see that Southland Institute was a “great thing” for the region, she wrote.
“Many of our students had never done anything but chop cotton or hoe corn or pick cotton or work in the cotton mill,” wrote White. “Their hands were rough and calloused and joints rather stiff to handle books. Yet they learned many refinements there and most of all they got a steady, consistent character training.”
According to a 1922 commencement brochure in the exhibit, Southland Institute’s motto was “Finished, yet beginning.”