Discrimatory legislation

Intolerance and bigotry have lurked around the halls of Arkansas state government like evil spirits, surfacing every few years to call forth our worst instincts.

Let us start with the legislature's 1891 disfranchisement of black voters. We could begin by recalling how our ancestors displaced the Indians and later nearly obliterated their cultures. Or how free blacks were expelled from the state in 1859. And then there's the sad story of how for years elected officials thwarted attempts to extend the vote to women. But nothing compares with the legislature's adoption of the election law of 1891.

The law resulted from the growing strength of a strange Republican-Labor-Farmer coalition which threatened the hegemony of the Arkansas Democratic Party. This was the time of the "agrarian revolt" when farmers and laborers throughout the West and South challenged the status quo. The agrarian rebels and the Republicans made strange political bedfellows, but I suspect most historians would agree that the unlikely coalition probably won the elections of 1888. The Democrats refused to accept defeat and mounted an audacious campaign of voter intimidation and ballot fraud to cling to power.

The Democratic establishment, an informal alliance of businessmen and landowners along with some church and legal leaders, responded to the growing threat by simply adopting a new election law which effectively excluded black voters--the backbone of the GOP. Ingeniously, the proposed law was sold as a reform measure.

This law, along with the adoption of a poll tax in 1892, had a profound impact: black voter participation dropped more than 70 percent almost immediately. Voting by whites also declined sharply because the law was subtly designed to weed out illiterates and the poor, and the state still had many poor illiterate whites in 1890.

Another instance of the legislature adopting purposefully hurtful racist legislation was a measure sponsored in 1911 by Rep. M. B. Kersh of Lincoln County to outlaw interracial cohabitation. The bill passed easily and was reinforced in 1947 when the General Assembly made love across the color line punishable by up to three years in prison. University of Arkansas historian Charles Robinson has documented that interracial cohabitation--as well as legal marriage--was amazingly common. For example, 27 interracial couples lived together in Pulaski County in 1870, and most were legally married.

Robinson also documented that the state had almost no luck in enforcing the Kersh law. Indeed, perhaps many Arkansans agreed with one delegate to the 1868 Reconstruction constitutional convention who said in response to an "anti-miscegenation" proposal: "When we shall have reached the period when legislative enactment shall be necessary, as to the arrangement of my parlor or my bed-chamber, I hold that the . . . legislature will have passed beyond their legitimate domain."

The Posey Act of 1915, also known as the Convent Inspection Law, was one of the most egregious examples of hateful legislation to come from the Arkansas General Assembly. Sponsored by Rep. Robert R. Posey of Grant County, the bill addressed some of the virulent anti-Catholic sentiments of the day. Readers of such magazines as The Liberator, published at Magnolia, Columbia County, by a Landmark Baptist preacher named Joseph Addison Scarboro, were horrified to learn that Catholic priests raped women in confessionals, Protestant children were kidnapped, and nuns were held against their will--hence the need for official inspections of Catholic institutions. Embarrassed legislators quietly repealed the law in 1937.

I have saved for last a mention of discriminatory legislation adopted almost unanimously in 1943 to prevent Japanese Americans from owning property in Arkansas. When more than 10,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry were forcibly relocated to Arkansas from California in September 1942, Arkansas Gov. Homer Adkins was furious. Adkins, who launched his political career in 1922 as the Ku Klux Klan-endorsed candidate for Pulaski County sheriff, insisted that the relocatees be kept behind barbed wire enclosures with guard towers staffed only with white guards. He also demanded that federal relocation officials guarantee that all relocatees would be removed after the war.

Probably at the request of Gov. Adkins, Rep. Frank Williams of Mississippi County sponsored the bill to prohibit anyone of Japanese ancestry from buying land in Arkansas. The bill sailed unanimously through the state Senate, and only one representative voted against it in the House.

Another bill of 1943 would have prevented "all members of the Mongolian race" from attending white public schools. Sponsored by Sen. Richard Mason of Camden, this bill passed the state Senate but died in the House. The generally high regard accorded long-time Chinese residents of the Arkansas Delta, solid businessmen who had always sent their kids to white schools, helped defeat the Mason bill.

Interestingly, a small contingent of Japanese relocatees did remain in Arkansas, settling in eastern Pulaski County. About the only people who publicly spoke up for the relocatees were some Methodist clerics and faculty members at Hendrix College in Conway.

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Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living in Hot Spring County. Email him at Arktopia.td@gmail.com.

Editorial on 04/12/2015

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