Home to Eudora
Like many children in a landlocked state, my sister and I wanted to go to the beach each summer. Our father, who spent long weeks during the school year traveling Arkansas and selling athletic goods to high school coaches, didn’t want to drive any farther than he had to once summer arrived.
Our beach trips were always to Biloxi, Miss., the closest beach. We had no idea that those beautiful blue waters existed a few hours to the east in the Florida Panhandle. Gulfport and Biloxi were “the beach” for us.
I’m not complaining. I have wonderful memories of trips there—eating my first raw oyster at Friendship House, taking the tourist boat to Ship Island, buying shrimp off the dock.
On the way home, we would cross the Louisiana border into Arkansas. The first town we entered was Eudora. That Delta town and its surrounding row-crop farms were a far different place from our home in the pine trees at Arkadelphia. Still, we would shout “we’re home,” because we were back in Arkansas.
We knew folks from Eudora. One of our friends in the Ouachita Hills neighborhood of Arkadelphia, the well-known Ouachita Baptist University basketball coach Bill Vining, hailed from there. As an elementary school student, my first theater experience came in a Ouachita production of “Our Town” in the Verser Drama Center.
The center was named after Earl E. Verser, a prominent Eudora farmer and businessman (owner of the Verser Ford dealership, among other things).
Verser had donated $50,000 toward the building project. I was living in Washington, D.C., in October 1986 when word came that Verser had been murdered in his home during a robbery attempt. He served 12 years on Ouachita’s board of trustees, and the Verser name is still known on the campus. By 1986, Eudora was already beginning to decline economically.
On New Year’s Eve, I passed through Eudora again on the way home from a holiday trip to the Gulf Coast with my wife and two sons. Out of habit, I proclaimed “we’re home,” not knowing that a lengthy article about Eudora would grace the pages of The New York Times the following day.
Here’s how the article by the Times’ Southern correspondent Rick Rojas began: “In the small city planted in a seemingly endless spread of flat Arkansas farmland, the sense of danger had been building. There had been shootings, home invasions, teenagers without driver’s licenses going on joy rides that ended in crashes. The police had been run ragged.
“Then, on Christmas Eve, a bullet pierced Martene Frazell’s window as she closed her curtains. The holiday feast she had been preparing was still on the stove as Ms. Frazell, a 47-yearold known for being a constant presence at her church, lay bloodied and dying on the floor.
“Her killing crystallized the fear and frustration over violence in Eudora, pushing city officials to reach for a drastic measure last week, an emergency curfew restricting the roughly 1,700 residents from being outside their homes after 8 p.m. Exceptions would be made only for work or medical reasons, the officials said. … The police say they have traced the turbulence mostly to young people, many of them high-school age, who have been out on the streets at night, and skirmishes between cliques that escalate into violence.”
Mayor Tomeka Butler posted an online video Dec. 27 in which she pleaded: “Please help us bring these senseless acts of crime to a stop.”
Across our state, young Black men continue to shoot each other. Shootings in larger cities such as Little Rock and Pine Bluff draw media attention. But Black-on-Black crime is also rampant in communities across the Arkansas Delta.
“Local TV broadcasts lead with shootings more often than not—even if they have to send crews to Pine Bluff or Hot Springs to film crime scenes,” Gene Lyons recently wrote in his nationally syndicated newspaper column. “That’s only occasionally necessary, however. Young Black men are killing each other on Little Rock streets at an epidemic rate.
“Indeed, unless it’s a particularly grotesque incident—houses strafed with automatic weapons, a 7-year-old girl killed in crossfire on her way to the zoo, a 3-year-old grievously wounded because her mother left her in a car with a loaded pistol—they’re normally one-day stories.”
In bigger cities, there are job opportunities if those young men will take advantage of them. In the little Delta communities, that’s not the case. The economy of these towns was based on the sharecropping and tenant farming system. Thousands of people once lived close to towns such as Eudora and came there to shop, visit the doctor, go to the bank and take care of other business. With the mechanization of agriculture, those people no longer reside in the Delta.
Because there’s no economic reason for these communities to exist, many will cease to exist over time. There’s no government solution to this decades-long trend. There aren’t easy answers. But explanations of broad economic and demographic trends do little to help those still living in places such as Eudora.
Eudora had a population of 3,840 as recently as 1980. By the 2020 census, there were 1,728 residents. Chicot County’s population was 27,452 in 1940 when sharecropping and tenant farming were prevalent. That was down to 10,208 by 2020.
Rojas said of Eudora: “The streets are dotted with shuttered storefronts, abandoned churches and overgrown properties. The high school closed. Sgt. Joe Harden of the Eudora Police Department remembered when Eudora had its own Little League. What remains, residents said, is a void that has allowed discord and crime to fester.
“The troubles in Eudora afflict many rural towns across the South, where an absence of opportunity and resources has contributed to violence. Almost 60 miles north, in Dumas, a community festival in March erupted into gunfire, becoming one of the country’s largest mass shootings in 2022 with one person killed and 26 others wounded.”
“I’m tired of the senseless violence,” Harden told the Times. “I actually care. I just want things to change for the better.”
Rev. David Green Sr., the 62-year-old pastor of St. Peter Missionary Baptist Church, was raised in Eudora. “There’s so much conflict in a little town—unnecessary conflict,” he said.
On the night Frazell was shot, Green went to her home and sat with her, waiting for an ambulance to arrive. That ambulance was too late. “I held her hand ‘til the last moment,” Green said.
In an emergency town meeting the final week of December, the mayor said: “The elderly, my people of wisdom, are afraid. If you can’t feel safe at home, then what are we doing? It’s time to wake up.”
Rojas wrote: “The meeting grew tense and loud as residents stood up one after the next, asking why the police had not done more to share information about crimes and demanding that city officials push harder for outside help. ‘Our city is under siege,’ one woman said. … The police department is strapped for resources. Its vehicles are breaking down. Chief Michael Pitts’ ballistic vest is a hand-me-down. He and the officers have to rely on their own binoculars.”
“The criminals have better guns than what we’ve got,” Pitts said. “We’re asking —we’re pleading—for help. I don’t have an ego about this.”
Rojas ended his story by quoting Eudora resident Alilesha Henderson. Four bullets were fired into her house in December, leaving holes in the wall inches above where her 6-year-old son was playing video games.
“We’ve got to face the facts,” Henderson said. “We as Eudora people should be used to being the underdog. Lives are at stake. People are trying to turn people against people. God is not pleased. Eudora needs to get back to being Eudora.”
I spent four years with the Delta Regional Authority, trying to help towns like this. The obstacles were so great that defeats outweighed victories during those years. I wish I had an answer.
I weep for Delta towns like Eudora. It’s all I know to do.