A troubled past

One of the joys of the six years I spent on the Arkansas Humanities Council was getting to know top-notch scholars. Two of the best with whom I served were Cherisse Jones-Branch, a history professor at Arkansas State University, and Ken Barnes, who recently retired as a history professor at the University of Central Arkansas.

Earlier this year, the University of Arkansas Press released books written by these historians. Taken together, the books provide fascinating insight into an often troubled period in our state’s history.

Jones-Branch’s “Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women’s Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914-1965” is the first major study of activism by Black females outside the state’s largest cities. Jones-Branch highlights home demonstration agents, teachers and others who confronted economic, educational and political obstacles.

Barnes’ “The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas: How Protestant White Nationalism Came to Rule a State” examines the power the KKK wielded at one time with more than 150 state chapters and tens of thousands of members. People such as Grand Dragon James Comer and head of Women of the KKK Robbie

Gill Comer were considered leading Arkansans at the time. Little Rock was a Klan seat of power that was second only to Atlanta in the South.

“The modern reader would be surprised at how public the Klan made its activities,” Barnes writes.

“The KKK frequently sent letters to local newspapers, describing the organization’s goals and activities. Many small-town newspapermen were members of the Invisible Empire, as the Klan called itself.”

When Barnes’ mother was a girl, she found her father’s Klan robe. Barnes’ grandfather, William “Manie” Bird, tried to tell his daughter that the Klan only did good things.

“As an example, he described an evening in which Klansmen went to the home of an habitual drunkard in the community who neglected his family,” Barnes writes. “The hooded figures tied the man to a fence post, whipped him and threatened that if he did not lay off liquor and get a job to support his family, they would return and use stiffer measures. My grandfather would have been a part of the Morrilton Klan No. 46 in Conway County.

“Grandfather Bird owned a general store in the Birdtown community, about 15 miles northeast of Morrilton. His conversation with my mother probably took place in the late 1920s— she was born in 1918—by which time the Morrilton Klan was no more. But he still had his robe. . . . For as long as I can remember, I’ve known that my grandfather was a Klansman. He died before I was born, so I never knew him.”

Barnes wrote a previous book titled “Who Killed John Clayton?: Political Violence and the Emergence of the New South and Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910-1960.”

“Authors, even historians, write about things that have personal meaning to them,” Barnes writes. “My previous book that led me to the 1920s Klan was an attempt to understand the deeply seated prejudices my parents held toward Roman Catholics. As as child, I was mildly traumatized by angry conversations about religion when my older brother, as a teenager, converted to Catholicism.

“In researching anti-Catholicism, I learned about how the Ku Klux Klan institutionalized and propagandized hate toward Catholics and others. My purpose is not to disgrace those who, like me, have connections with a shameful past, but instead to better understand ourselves and the road that brought us to the present.”

Barnes’ book starts on July 4, 1924, which he describes as “the high point of the Ku Klux Klan in Arkansas and nationwide.” Special trains brought members from across Arkansas and seven other states to Little Rock. There was a full day of festivities in the capital city.

“Railroad companies provided a reduced Klan rate,” Barnes writes. “Accompanied by a band playing ‘Dixie,’ Little Rock Klansmen met out-of-town arrivals at the city’s railroad stations. They placed printed signs in the windows of the vehicles that read ‘Klansmen, Hop In’ and shuttled the guests to the Little Rock Klan Tabernacle at 17th and Main, where they registered for the day’s events.

“With standing room only in the auditorium, which seated 4,000, speakers held forth, while vendors sold cold drinks, sandwiches and Klan items in the vestibule. In the afternoon, a boxing exhibition entertained the guests, including one bout ‘of the midget class.’ Exhibition baseball games provided further diversion.”

Barnes says the Klan provided an organized way for white Arkansans to “promote what they saw as traditional, patriotic and moral values. But these Klan groups were also asserting the supremacy of white, Protestant, native-born ‘One Hundred Percent Americans’ over other groups labeled as inauthentic Americans: people of color, immigrants, Jews and Roman Catholics. This conversation about ‘America’ for Americans’ wasn’t new to the 1920s. And of course the discussion still continues today.”

This was an Arkansas we rarely discuss, the state where the Black women profiled by JonesBranch showed such courage.

“All of the women considered in this book had an acute understanding of the difficulties African Americans endured as they enacted change in rural spaces,” Jones-Branch writes. “In many instances, they were compelled to couch their efforts in terms that did not alienate or infuriate white landowners or the larger white community. But individual Black women activists such as Elveria Heard and Annie Zachary Pike had few reservations about challenging existing racial and gender hierarchies.

“Collectively and individually, these women assumed responsibility for improving food insecurity, health and sanitary conditions, and political and educational access in rural Black communities because they understood that hungry, sick, illiterate and uninformed people could not very well focus on being politically viable.”

Most earlier studies of rural Black women in the South focused on enslaved laborers and those who left the region, taking their culture with them to Northern cities.

“I understand well the reasons why rural African American women migrated to urban communities and even Southern ones,” JonesBranch says. “In doing so, they sought increased social, cultural and educational opportunities for themselves and their families. They were often freer and safer to engage in political, economic, educational and community activism.

“As Black women, they also left the South because they knew they could not expect protection from physical and sexual abuse from either white or Black men. And so they salvaged their womanhood and migrated to urban spaces that offered increased protection and opportunity, though these were limited due to their race and gender. But many rural Black women remained in the South either by choice or circumstance.”

Jones-Branch says these poor and uneducated women “understood their communities better than anyone else possibly could and were best positioned to speak to the changes their communities needed and to demand the help they required.” She says her book is an attempt to ”lift these women from the obscurity of Arkansas’ rural history.”

“African American women’s rural uplift activism throughout Arkansas resulted from the groundswell of grassroots networks they cultivated and utilized. . . . Whether they were professional, educated landowners or poor, illiterate agricultural laborers, Black women developed strategies that informed their activism in the rural communities where they worked, lived and loved to realize impactful change.”

Anyone interested in 20th-century Arkansas should read Barnes’ and Jones-Branch’s books. These dedicated historians have uncovered people and events that allow us to better understand how we reached the point we are now in Arkansas.