Based on reader comments, last Sunday’s column on interesting quotations about Arkansas struck a chord. It turns out that many Arkansans have favorite quotes about their home state, some of which are not suitable for this newspaper, while others encapsulate thoughts or sayings which illuminate and perhaps help define the Arkansas experience in funny or wise or profound ways.
One of my favorite 19th-century Arkansans was Mollie Brumley Williams, born in Mississippi in 1847 and orphaned by age 12, who grew up among relatives in north Arkansas. Mollie was 15 when her beau left for the Confederate army, and she was crushed upon hearing news of his death.
She later married another Confederate soldier, who was murdered on his way home from the war.
Mollie was still wearing her widow’s weeds when she discovered that her previous suitor had, contrary to rumors, survived the war and was back in the area. Disregarding the fact that the handsome V.H. Williams was now courting her cousin, Mollie decided to initiate a reunion—a somewhat brazen act for 1866.
She agreed to go to church in hopes of seeing her former beau: “I did not care to hear of the angels that lived in an ethereal home beyond the clouds; my mind was more interested in a raven-haired masculine angel, who proudly trod the material ground with firm and manly step, and who was a creature of flesh and blood of the very best quality.”
Don’t forget this memoir was being penned by a matron of advanced years.
Another source for interesting and colorful quotes is the collection of letters Hiram A. Whittington wrote his family back in New England after he moved to Arkansas Territory in 1827.
In the spring of 1830, Whittington described the “vice and immorality” found on the streets of the territorial capital: “… the Sabbath was not kept; peaceable individuals were prevented from enjoying any rest by the midnight revels of your free-thinkers; virtuous females were insulted with impunity; justice had fled from our courts; every man carried arms, either for murdering his enemy or for his own defense; and murders were [an] everyday occurrence.”
The Arkansas Legislature has always been generous in coining memorable quotations. Legislative debate ranged from the inspired to the insipid. In 1883, Rep. F. G. McGavock of Mississippi County introduced a resolution which proclaimed “… surgery and medicine are humbugs …”
A very different legislative debate took place in 1891 when a bill was introduced to require that all Arkansas railroad and streetcar passengers be seated in segregated areas.
State Rep. John Gray Lucas, a black lawyer from Pine Bluff, took the floor to oppose this Jim Crow bill: “We are proud of our people; proud of our wonderful progress from the degradation forced upon us … proud of our noble and aspiring ambition; proud of our ability we have shown to take care of ourselves in the great and unequal contests in our country, under the shadow of an arrogant and superior people, for life, liberty and property; but most proud are we of the high moral standard to which we aspire and have in great measure attained.”
The Separate Coach Act was ultimately adopted. Rep. Lucas left Arkansas a few years later, settling in Chicago, where he became a prominent lawyer. In 1934 he became assistant U.S. attorney in Cook County.
One of the most quotable politicians Arkansas ever produced was Jeff Davis, who served as a state legislator, state attorney general, and governor before moving up to the U.S. Senate where he died prematurely in 1913. Davis was quoted as bragging: “No man could be appointed to office under my administration unless he was a white man, a Democrat, and a Jeff Davis man.”
Jeff Davis’ racism was certainly blatant, but sadly it was not unusual in Arkansas and much of the South. Lynching was rampant in Arkansas. Black farmers in eastern Arkansas were held in peonage, noted Scipio A. Jones, the dean of black Arkansas lawyers.
It should not have surprised anyone when the Elaine Race Massacre occurred in the autumn of 1919. Nevertheless, the intensity of the violence coupled with 12 innocent black men being tortured into confessing and sentenced to death surprised many. Pioneering black journalist Ida B. Wells was aghast: “If this is democracy, what is Bolshevism?”
A very different journalist, H.L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun and American Mercury magazine, was biting in his description of Arkansas as “the most shiftless and backward state in the whole galaxy. Only Mississippi offers it serious rivalry for last place in all American tables of statistics.”
Historian Michael B. Dougan has referred to Mencken as “Arkansas’ bete noire,” and state legislators rushed to condemn the Baltimore iconoclast.Gov. Charles H. Brough, considered the state’s most progressive governor of his era, took to the airwaves to defend his state’s image.
Not all racism found in Arkansas was aimed at black citizens. World War II with its Japanese “relocation camps” introduced a new minority group to rural Arkansas, and the historical record holds many remarkable quotes.
Gov. Homer Adkins, who got his start as the Ku Klux Klan-endorsed candidate for Pulaski County sheriff in 1922, vehemently opposed having the relocation camps in Arkansas. He quickly signed legislation which prohibited Japanese Americans from owning land in the state.
Near the end of the war, U.S. Rep. William F. Norrell of Monticello, an ally of Gov. Adkins, told the Roosevelt administration’s interior secretary “we had three [Japanese Americans] during the last census, and I want to say to you, sir, that we are expecting you to leave only three Japs in Arkansas when the war is over.”
We should not forget that some individual Arkansans performed acts of kindness for the relocatees. The Methodist Church even urged its members to “extend the hand of Christian greeting” to the Japanese Americans, whom the church described as “victims of the folly and madness of war.”
Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living near Glen Rose in rural Hot Spring County. Email him at Arktopia.td@gmail.com .