Black and white of it
It’s a marvelous summer day to be in Marianna. People have driven from across the state for the formal reopening of Jones Bar-B-Q Diner, the first Arkansas restaurant to receive a coveted James Beard Award.
On the final Sunday morning of February, a fire destroyed Jones’ smokehouse and did significant damage to the restaurant. The news about the fire even resulted in a New York Times story. Two weeks later, an online account set up by the Venture Center of Little Rock had raised $67,000 for repairs.
I compliment James Harold Jones, 76, on the quality of the work.
“It’s all because of that fire,” he says softly. “The money started coming in that day.”
On this hot Wednesday, red tablecloths cover outside tables (there are only two tables inside the restaurant) that have been set up for the occasion. Blues music plays in the background. There are red and white balloons.
Politicians in attendance range from Marianna Mayor Jimmy Williams to Arkansas Land Commissioner Tommy Land to Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Barbara Webb.
Local leaders such as Steve Edwards, owner of the Edwards Food Giant chain of grocery stores, and former state
Sen. Steve Higginbothom help set up for the ceremony. Jones is Black.
Most of the politicians and business leaders are white.
In a town and county long known for racial strife, I’m struck with the thought that food can bring the races together.
James Harold Jones isn’t just a famous pitmaster. This man of so few words is also a uniter and healer.
In 1868, Marianna was within one of the counties placed under martial law by Gov. Powell Clayton because of terrorist acts by the Ku Klux Klan.
“In April 1873, legislation to create Lee County was moved through the General Assembly by William Furbush, an African American Republican who represented Phillips County in the state House of Representatives,” writes historian Blake Wintory. “The county incorporated parts of four neighboring counties—Phillips, Monroe, St. Francis and Crittenden. Furbush most likely selected Lee, honoring Gen. Robert E. Lee, to show his allegiance to Democratic backers around Marianna.
“After an appointment to the office of sheriff by Republican Gov. Elisha Baxter, Furbush orchestrated a fusion political compromise between Lee County’s economically powerful Democratic minority and its black Republican majority. The parties shared political power and offices and avoided the most violent political confrontations. However, in 1878, when Democrats intimidated Republicans during elections, the tenuous alliance ended, paving the way for a Democratic sweep of nearly all the county’s races.”
Furbush switched parties and was elected to the Legislature as a Democrat in 1878. He became the first Democratic legislator who was Black. Populism was a force in Lee County during the 1880s and 1890s. “One of the first movements began in February 1882 with the arrival of a charismatic African American named John W. Niles,” Wintory writes. “Niles arrived from the all-Black town of Nicodemus, Kan., which was founded in 1877 during the Exoduster movement, in which Southern African Americans fled to Kansas as Reconstruction ended. Niles, under the banner of the Indemnity Party, preached a message of indemnity (reparations for former slaves) and the dream of Progress, an all-Black town in northern Lee County.
“The ideas resonated with the Black sharecropping majority and the waves of Black immigrants streaming in from the Southeast. The Indemnity Party faded following the arrest of Niles in June 1882 for selling liquor without a license.”
Lee County was the site of a cotton pickers’ strike in 1891 that was organized by the Colored Farmers’ Alliance and the Cotton Pickers League. The strike was planned across the South and was to last until planters raised pay from 50 cents to $1 for every 100 pounds of cotton picked.
“The only strike to emerge was in Lee County,” Wintory writes. “Violence ensued with the deaths of two Black pickers, a white plantation manager and 15 strikers. The violence hurt the credibility of the alliance, reducing its membership and authority.”
There were highly publicized lynchings of Black men in Marianna in 1883 and 1919.
“Street paving began in 1908, at least in white neighborhoods,” according to the Central Arkansas Library System’s Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “When representatives of Volunteers in Service to America arrived in Marianna in the 1960s to aid the poor of the county, they encountered fierce resistance from whites in their attempts to establish a health clinic to serve African Americans. With the leadership of Olly Neal Jr., the clinic became a reality and began operating in March 1970.”
In 1969, Lee Academy was established in response to desegregation. The vast majority of white students still attend the academy rather than public schools, which serve mostly Black students.
A boycott of white-owned businesses by Blacks began in June 1971. Fights broke out, and Gov. Dale Bumpers sent in the National Guard and ordered a curfew. A study by the University of Arkansas at Little Rock put the economic damage in the millions of dollars. A city that had a population of 6,196 in the 1970 census was down to 4,115 by the 2010 census.
Black students began a school boycott in January 1972. Noted Arkansas author Grif Stockley once wrote: “Marianna in the heart of the Delta epitomized the racial problems of the state in the late 1960s and early 1970s.”
Now, a kind, humble barbecue legend known locally as Mr. Harold brings us together.