In this history of African American society from the end of Reconstruction to the end of World War I, Fon Louise Gordon focuses on dissent within Arkansas's black community. In particular, Gordon studies friction between elites and the agricultural and laboring classes over ideological and procedural aspects of their response to the caste strictures of Jim Crow. Because opinions on how to oppose segregation and disfranchisement ran along class lines, Gordon is also able to offer one of the most discerning portrayals to date of that era's black society. It was, Gordon demonstrates, a society apart from mainstream America, yet similar in its stratification. Through individual profiles and numerous examples, Gordon shows how class within the black community was determined by skin color, family background, and education in combination with such indicators of status as occupation and religious affiliation. At the same time, Caste and Class tells two concurrent and closely linked stories. One story is of the rise, growing self-absorption, and finally flagging influence of Arkansas's first black middle and upper classes. Primarily urban, professional, and conservative, these elites were relatively insulated from white oppression and supported the conciliatory race policies of Booker T. Washington. The other story Gordon tells is of the long, arduous emergence of the working classes, which was brought on in part by an exposure to a wider range of opportunities during and after World War I and the birth of the New Negro Movement. Overwhelmingly rural, these blacks were isolated from black middle-class culture and values and were oriented toward agitation and protest. In general, Gordon shows, the upper classes sought stability and prosperity apart from the white power structure, while the lower classes sought to improve their lives in spite of it. Within the context of national trends and events, Gordon discusses such topics as the myth and reality of Arkansas as a promised land of racial tolerance, the antebellum roots of black stratified society, the formation of Arkansas's all-black communities, and the emigration of the lower classes to Africa and the industrial North and Midwest. Caste and Class moves beyond monolithic views of white oppression and black victimization to portray African American community-building in the era that saw the collapse of agriculture as the dominant way of life for African Americans.

Drawing on court records, newspaper accounts, penitentiary records, letters, and diaries, White Man’s Heaven is a thorough investigation into the lynching and expulsion of African Americans in the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kimberly Harper explores events in the towns of Monett, Pierce City, Joplin, and Springfield, Missouri, and Harrison, Arkansas, to show how post–Civil War vigilantism, an established tradition of extralegal violence, and the rapid political, economic, and social change of the New South era happened independently but were also part of a larger, interconnected regional experience. Even though some whites, especially in Joplin and Springfield, tried to stop the violence and bring the lynchers to justice, many African Americans fled the Ozarks, leaving only a resilient few behind and forever changing the racial composition of the region.

Bullets and Fire is the first collection on lynching in Arkansas, exploring all corners of the state from the time of slavery up to the mid-twentieth century and covering stories of the perpetrators, victims, and those who fought against vigilante violence. Among the topics discussed are the lynching of slaves, the Arkansas Council of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, the 1927 lynching of John Carter in Little Rock, and the state’s long opposition to a federal anti-lynching law. Throughout, the work reveals how the phenomenon of lynching—as the means by which a system of white supremacy reified itself, with its perpetrators rarely punished and its defenders never condemned—served to construct authority in Arkansas. Bullets and Fire will add depth to the growing body of literature on American lynching and integrate a deeper understanding of this violence into Arkansas history.

This collection of essays by leading American historians explains how and why the fight against unionism has long been central to the meaning of contemporary conservatism.

Published a decade and a half after the late Diane D. Blair s influential book Arkansas Politics and Government, this freshly revised edition builds on her work, which highlighted both the decades of failure by Arkansas's government to live up to the state s motto of Regnat Populus ( The People Rule ) and the positive trends of democracy. Since the first edition, Arkansas has seen the two-term U.S. presidency of a native son, the retirement of players who defined the state s politics in the modern era, the further realignment of the state s electorate, the passage of the nation s most extreme legislative term limits, the complete overhaul of the state s court system, and the declaration that the state s public education system was unconstitutionally inadequate and inequitable. While maintaining the basic structure of Blair s original work with its focus on important historical patterns and the ways in which the past continues to shape the present, the second edition details the causes and consequences of recent changes in Arkansas and asks whether they are profound and permanent or merely transitory variations in symbol and style. Jay Barth argues that although Arkansas currently expresses a healthier representative democracy than throughout most of its history, its political and governmental entities are still sharply limited as effective instruments of the people.

A dignified man with a Ph. D. from Johns Hopkins University, Brough was also known as a brilliant orator, a college professor with a photographic memory, an enthusiastic Baptist, yet a confirmed racist, unable to leave parts of the Old South behind.

Through the life of Benjamin Ryan Tillman (1847-1918), South Carolina's self-styled agrarian rebel, this book traces the history of white male supremacy and its discontents from the era of plantation slavery to the age of Jim Crow. As an anti-Reconstruction guerrilla, Democratic activist, South Carolina governor, and U.S. senator, Tillman offered a vision of reform that was proudly white supremacist. In the name of white male militance, productivity, and solidarity, he justified lynching and disfranchised most of his state's black voters. His arguments and accomplishments rested on the premise that only productive and virtuous white men should govern and that federal power could never be trusted. Over the course of his career, Tillman faced down opponents ranging from agrarian radicals to aristocratic conservatives, from woman suffragists to black Republicans. His vision and his voice shaped the understandings of millions and helped create the violent, repressive world of the Jim Crow South. Friend and foe alike--and generations of historians--interpreted Tillman's physical and rhetorical violence in defense of white supremacy as a matter of racial and gender instinct. This book instead reveals that Tillman's white supremacy was a political program and social argument whose legacies continue to shape American life.

The Great Depression emboldened Americans to tolerate radical experimentation in search of solutions to seemingly overwhelming economic problems. Amongst the thorniest of those was rural southern poverty. In Trouble in Goshen, Fred C. Smith focuses on three communities designed and implemented to meet that challenge. This book examines the economic and social theories--and their histories--that resulted in the creation and operation of the most aggressive and radical experiments in the United States. Trouble in Goshen chronicles three communitarian experiments, both the administrative details and the struggles and reactions of the clients. Smith covers the Tupelo Homesteads in Mississippi, the Dyess Colony in Arkansas, and the Delta Cooperative Farm, also in Mississippi. The Tupelo Homesteads were created under the aegis of the tiny Division of Subsistence Homesteads, a short-lived, "first New Deal" agency. Dyess Colony was the largest of the Resettlement Administration's efforts to transform failed farmers into Jeffersonian yeoman farmers. The third community, the Delta Cooperative Farm, a product of the active cooperation between the Socialist Party of America and a cadre of liberal churchmen led by Reinhold Niebuhr, attempted to meld the pieties, passions, propaganda, and theories of Jesus and Marx. The equipment, facilities, and management styles of the projects reveal a clearly delineated class order among the poor. Trouble in Goshen demonstrates the class conscious angst that enveloped three distinct levels of poverty and the struggles of plain folk to preserve their tenuous status and avoid overt peasantry.