Ruled by Race: Black/White Relations in Arkansas from Slavery to the Present by GrifStockleyReview by: Mark NewmanThe Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Autumn, 2009), pp. 337-339Published by: Arkansas Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40543244 .

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Book Reviews Ruled by Race: Black/White Relations in Arkansas from Slavery to the

Present. By Grif Stockley. (Fay ette ville: University of Arkansas Press, 2008. Pp. xxiii, 530. Illustrations, acknowledgments, notes, bibliogra- phy, index. $34.95.)

The twin themes of Grif Stockley's carefully researched and clearly written study are that Arkansans have been and continue to be "ruled by race" and that, even before the civil rights movement, African Americans were not passive in the face of discrimination. A civil liberties attorney, Stockley is manifestly committed to equality and justice, but as an histo- rian he carefully weighs conflicting evidence and interpretations to pro- duce an informed, nuanced account. Largely a synthesis, the book incorporates generous quotations from other historians but also includes primary material and makes use of the author's own research on the civil rights era. Although slavery existed in the territory and state of Arkansas for only forty-six years, Stockley argues it established a pattern of white supremacy based on economic exploitation that also produced "a racial pecking order based on white ancestry, skin color, and class . . . that would profoundly affect not only race relations between whites and blacks but those among blacks themselves," including "black racism and black self- hatred" (p. xviii).

The book begins by discussing slaves' perspectives on their lives. While cognizant of their limitations, Stockley uses extensive quotations from interviews with former slaves conducted by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s that give them a voice. These accounts are often har- rowing, revealing the brutality and inhumanity of slavery, but Stockley also notes diversity, including former slaves who expressed affection for their one-time owners. After briefly assessing historiographical treat- ments, he judiciously concludes, "As much as slaves tried and sometimes were successful in influencing their treatment through their own behavior, slavery was ultimately in the hands of whites" (p. 23).

Delta slaveholders, Stockley observes, treated slavery as an eco- nomic enterprise. Slavery and the pursuit of wealth through cotton culti- vation lay at the heart of white Arkansan support for secession in 1861. Slaves ran away to Union lines, but emancipation left the freedmen largely at the mercy of planters who continued to exploit and punish them despite Reconstruction reforms that accorded blacks voting rights and some political officeholding. Little Rock saw residential integration, and interracial mixing in business continued until the 1890s, by which time

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338 ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans took hold in the state. As conditions worsened, some rural blacks migrated to Liberia, and in the early twentieth century African Americans mounted short- lived boycotts against new segregation laws in Hot Springs, Little Rock, and Pine Bluff. In 1919, whites crushed a black sharecropping union in Phillips County, massacring scores of black men, women, and children around Elaine.

Many impoverished delta blacks, especially in Phillips County, were attracted in the 1920s to Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and its emphasis on racial pride, separation, self-help, and self-defense. Established in Arkansas in 1 9 1 8, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) struggled, its integrationist agenda having little appeal to African Americans in the delta. The short- lived Southern Tenant Farmers' Union brought some interracial coopera- tion in the 1930s, but a combination of its members' poverty and violent repression led to its early demise.

Change began in the late 1940s and early 1950s when state graduate and professional schools and some Little Rock public facilities voluntarily desegregated, and NAACP pressure opened up Democratic primary elec- tions to blacks. Yet at the same time, Little Rock planners cleared African- American slums, relocated blacks to public housing away from whites, and brought an end to mixed housing in the city.

Stockley finds Gov. Orval Faubus's motives during the Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis of 1957 largely indiscernible but argues that, thereafter, Faubus cynically used race for electoral gain, be- came a hard-line segregationist, and countenanced state persecution of the NAACP that, along with its own internal difficulties and failings, ren- dered it moribund by 1960. Indigenous African- American students under- took direct action protests in several cities during the early 1960s, with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee focusing mainly on the delta.

Arkansas elected a series of moderate governors beginning with Re- publican Winthrop Rockefeller in 1966, but black antidiscrimination pro- tests, sometimes violent and riotous by the late 1960s, continued into the early 1970s. Many whites responded to enforced public school desegrega- tion by retreating to the suburbs or private schools. Although overt racism disappeared, Stockley contends, racial tensions remain and a "physical and emotional separation between most blacks and whites," notwithstanding significant numbers of interracial friendships (p. xviii).

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BOOK REVIEWS 339

Minor criticisms are that Stockley's primary interest in the twentieth century produces uneven chronological coverage, and almost a page of text is repeated in an endnote.

Mark Newman University of Edinburgh

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Sam Dellinger: Raiders of the Lost Arkansas. By Robert C. Mainfort, Jr. (Fay ette ville: University of Arkansas Press, 2008. Pp. xvii, 144. Pref- ace, acknowledgments, catalog list, illustrations, map, bibliography of Samuel Dellinger, index. $39.95.)

In September 2006, members of the Arkansas Archeological Society, in Little Rock for their annual meeting, attended a reception at the Old State House Museum. The occasion was a new exhibit, and it produced wide-eyed awe on most faces in the small display room.

The attraction was 248 artifacts from Arkansas prehistory. Although the viewers had spent a great deal of their time serving the state of Arkan- sas by doing professional-level archaeological digging and preservation, few had ever seen the examples of pottery, stone, and shell drawn together in that room. Many were from the Arkansas collection of the University of Arkansas Museum, which has been curated at a research facility since the university closed the public space in 2003. A significant number of the ar- tifacts, though, were on loan from major museums throughout the country and from private collectors. The exhibit was thus the first time all of this rare material had been brought together in one place.

The visitors were looking at a unique gathering of Arkansas treasures, and they knew it. On leaving the gallery, being aware that within months this spectacular collection would again be dispersed, most viewers wanted a permanent set of photographs of the artifacts. This book represents the fulfillment ofthat desire.

The exhibit was conceived by Bill Gatewood, director of the Old State House, who is trained in history and anthropology. He enlisted Robert C. Mainfort, Jr., anthropology professor at the University of Arkansas and ar- cheologist with the Arkansas Archeological Survey, as guest curator for the exhibit, which ran in 2006-2007. The major focus was not the artifacts themselves, but the person primarily responsible for the creation of the University of Arkansas Museum, Samuel C. Dellinger (1892-1973).

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