Arkansas by Jeannie M. Whayne

Author:Jeannie M. Whayne
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610756617
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

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Mosaic Templars: A burial and insurance agency for African Americans, which, by the early twentieth century, included a hospital and building and loan association.

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While blacks in Little Rock found safety in numbers, blacks in the Arkansas countryside remained relatively isolated and vulnerable. Although groups of blacks occasionally resisted whitecapping activities visited upon them, they found local law enforcement officials unsympathetic to their attempts to defend themselves. Whitecapping, which emerged in the 1890s, was a phenomenon connected to competition between whites and blacks for places on the area’s expanding plantations. Some whites, determined to secure plantation jobs, took matters into their own hands and sought to drive out black labor by force. Planters preferred black to white labor, for black laborers were cheaper and, because of disfranchising and segregation measures, more vulnerable. Ironically, some planters emerged as defenders of black sharecroppers in the face of the whitecapping activities of landless whites. Many watched in horror as black labor departed, disillusioned with the laws aimed at relegating them to a second-class status. Some went to Kansas, others to Africa, but no matter where they went, they left planters in desperate need of another source of cheap labor.

The reign of terror against blacks together with the imposition of segregation and disfranchisement created problems for Arkansas planters, but by defeating the populist challenge and erecting a legal structure that effectively relegated blacks to an inferior position, the Democratic Party guaranteed its ability to hold on to power in Arkansas for another seventy-five years. Yet at least the last two governors of the nineteenth century, James Clarke and Daniel Jones, had embraced some of the populist platform, particularly that stressing the monetization of silver, so that they constituted a shift from the conservative Democrats to a new kind of Arkansas Democrat. In holding on to power, the conservative Democrats had departed from the party line and ultimately made room for a politician who spoke the language of populism. Jeff Davis, who became governor in 1901, was clearly a renegade Democrat who was able to secure election precisely because of the primary election process that democratized the selection of candidates. As an outsider identified with populism, he would never have won the Democratic nomination under the old system, dominated as it was by cronyism. He was able to build on the continuing ferment among Arkansas’s discontented white farmers by striking out at the old clique of Democratic Party politicians and what he termed the “high collared roosters of Little Rock.” He also engaged in a virulent racist rhetoric representative of the extreme view of certain whites toward African Americans, and he carried that point of view into the twentieth century, perpetuating it and elaborating upon it.

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