Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Tackling tradition
What if an idea to make things better works so well that it’s no longer needed?
The student body of Arkadelphia High School called for an end to a long-standing homecoming tradition that was created to ease the transition out of segregation 50 years ago. Will their votes for homecoming queen be a step forward, or a return to racial tensions of the past?
Elders don’t think the town is ready to ditch this tradition. High school students disagree. The future will be written in the fall of 2021.
I graduated from Arkadelphia High School in 1988. While I wasn’t a candidate for homecoming queen, I’ve always carried a bit of pride about our tradition of switching each year between Black and white homecoming queens: on even years the queen was Black, odd years white.
For a town that was one-third Black and two-thirds white, this seemed like an equitable solution. Everyone got a chance to see someone who looked like them with a crown on her head.
In 2018, I was back in Arkadelphia for my 30th high school reunion. At the football game several classmates, who still live in town, laughed that when people move to Arkadelphia, they think that switching queens is the oddest thing they’ve ever heard. But for those who grew up there, it seems normal, accepted, and how it’s always been. I am a documentary filmmaker. This past summer I was speaking with my filmmaking partners about the Arkadelphia tradition. One of them, a Latina, was scandalized that students had to identify their race for the ballot. The other partner, a Black man, saw equity in making sure everyone had a seat at the table. I am white, and though I try to be conscious of race-related issues, it’s easy to forget to ask important questions when something is “just how we’ve always done it.” I never questioned where this tradition came from, who it benefited, or why it was created. I needed to know more before we could pursue filming.
A couple of years ago someone forwarded me TV news pieces that featured a woman who was
leading a petition to have the practice ended. On both ABC and Fox, Amber Goven stated that she didn’t feel “the kids need a forced segregation to make their court diverse.” Parents interviewed in the parking lot gave a variety of perspectives, but it was clear that not everyone was happy about it.
To learn more, I called my sophomore-year Algebra II teacher Rev. Johnny Harris. He is Black. When he answered the phone, I found that I’d made the right call. Harris’ brother Mac was instrumental in starting the homecoming tradition. In 1969, Arkadelphia public schools fully integrated. That fall school administrators struggled to bring the town’s two high school cultures together. They found it was manageable for the boys to play football together, but couldn’t manage to find a solution to students dancing together.
So, the school canceled all homecoming festivities. Some white parents took it upon themselves to provide a celebration for their children. They planned a private homecoming dance at the local country club. After the game, several Black football players showed up at the dance, but they were turned away from the whites-only event.
My admittedly limited understanding of integration was that Black students gained access to better-resourced schools. What Harris’ retelling of this incident in 1969 taught me was that there was also a loss for Black students. When Arkadelphia’s Peake High School (which served the African American community) closed, it lost its mascot and its student leaders, as well as administrators and teachers who believed in them.
The city’s formerly white-only high school felt unwelcoming and unsafe. Teachers did not expect Black students to do well. On top of all of that, losing their own homecoming was a flashpoint for Black students’ grievances. They walked out of the school.
Two weeks into the boycott, two male student council members, one Black, one white, were asked to negotiate peace. Mac Harris and Wesley Kluck weren’t asked to solve racism, but they were tasked with coming up with something that would get Black students back to school. Their solution was this symbolic gesture of switching between homecoming queens.
The older generation in town, both Black and white, takes pride in this tradition. “Race relations are measurably better here than in surrounding towns,” says class of 1971 alumnus Rev. Johnny Harris.
I was excited to learn how closely the story of the homecoming tradition is tied to homecoming itself. I was starting to think about how we would pitch our documentary: This is a story of race in the South, but it’s not the story you presume it will be. What if someone had an idea to make things better and it worked so well that it was no longer needed?
With a population of roughly 10,000, Arkadelphia is the largest town in Clark County. Its economy revolves around two colleges: Henderson State University and Ouachita Baptist University.
Its citizens have always thought of their town as a little more educated and sophisticated than surrounding communities. They changed the town’s name in 1838 from Blakelytown to Arkadelphia, creating a connection to Philadelphia, which was, at the time, the cultural center of the United States. To be clear, Arkadelphia is no racial utopia. Sunday church services are mostly segregated, but socially the landscape has changed. Sleepovers, birthday parties, dances and dating all happen with little comment as to the race of the kids involved.
From 1969 through today, there are no competing private schools of any significant size in the area. The high school serves nearly all the town’s 500 high school-aged students. There is reason to be proud of the school: The marching band has been state champions for five years running, the football team was state champion in 1979, 1988 and again in 2017, and there is a history of academic excellence, with a high number of AP classes taken and National Merit scholarships earned.
This fall, like so many before, Arkadelphia proudly turns out for Badger football games on Friday nights. The stands reflect the school’s changed demographics: 37% Black, 9% Latino, 2% Asian, 2% mixed race and 50% white.
Let’s talk about how the homecoming selection has been done for decades.
A few weeks before homecoming, all senior girls are informed that they will be on the ballot for homecoming court and queen. If they want, they can go to the office and ask for their names to be taken off the ballot. Two weeks before homecoming the student body votes.
Here is where it shifts: the 14 spots on the court are demographically determined, meaning seven go to white girls, seven go to minority-identified girls (since the student body is 50% white and 50% people of color).
Homecoming queen is decided by who gets the most votes, as long as it’s her group’s year. There is a position called “maid of honor” that goes to the top vote-getter from the group that is out of the running for queen that year. A girl in Arkadelphia who dreams of being homecoming queen knows from the get-go whether she has a chance: Is it her group’s turn the year she is a senior?
Let’s take a wide shot, a drone’seye view of this racial-balancing-act tradition. It is not unique. A town in Mississippi chose their queen in a similar fashion until 2001. As did one in Alabama until a judge told it to stop in 2012.
A community member in Arkadelphia could have challenged this tradition in court. It wouldn’t have held up, even for a minute. But no one did. For 50 years the town has made the choice to require inclusivity. Over time, demographics changed and the social fabric of the town also changed. Black candidates became mayors, high school principals, and business leaders.
Today, the town’s kids don’t believe there is a need for a raciallydetermined ballot. It doesn’t match their reality. They feel the impact of being divided up into segments more than they fear being left out. And for mixed-race girls, they no longer want to choose one race over another.
One mom of a 2015 homecoming royalty daughter said, “I didn’t have the heart to ask my daughter which one she chose. It was too painful for me that she had to choose between her dad’s identity or mine.”
The school administration listened. This fall, for the first time ever, the homecoming court and queen will be chosen by who gets the most votes. Town elders, who were there at the start and still see problems in the community, sound a warning: “Now that racial guarantees have been dropped, it’s possible for the queen to go for years without a representative from one group or another. How will that feel? We have to admit that’s a risk.” “Are we prepared, if the court and queen are all minority?” asked one high school parent.
As we get close to the homecoming game, this would be when we’d be filming the events in Arkadelphia instead of writing about them, but the school’s administrators didn’t feel this was a good time for filming.
I asked if it was due to covid concerns and was told that it was not. I am left to read between the lines and form my own opinion. I think the stakes are just too high. What if the makeup of the court and queen turn out to be problematic?
But I think the reason goes deeper. It’s hard to talk about race. Perhaps I should caveat that by saying it’s hard for white people to talk about race. As Rev. Harris told me, “I talk about race all the time. It affects me more than it does white people.”
I understand that allowing filmmakers to record history in the making is a risk. Everyone in a town has an opinion about how the schools are run, and rarely are they shy about giving those opinions to the administration. Why add one more thing?
But to me, talking about race is how Arkadelphia got to this moment. In 1969, Black students were hurting. The administration agreed to a solution that was created by both Black and white students coming together through dialogue and compromise. The current administration listened when students asked for the plan to be scrapped. Isn’t this what we need in order to make the world a better place: to listen to each other, acknowledge hurting, alleviate it as best we can and then keep listening to see if the solution need tweaking?
I believe in Arkadelphia. I want to believe that this community has outgrown a solution it once needed. I will be watching, excited to see the homecoming royalty on Oct. 8, even if I am not there filming it.