Opening Address by Joel E. Anderson, Chancellor
University of Arkansas at Little Rock
Conversation on Race and Release of the Third Annual Survey on Racial Attitudes in Pulaski County by the UALR Institute of Government March 14, 2006
The full report, tables and papers are found online at:
http://www.ualr.edu/log/racialattitudes.htm
The third annual survey by the UALR Institute of Government reveals bright spots in regard to the subject of race in our community. It also shows that we have a long way to go.
This is our third annual mini-conference, and a number of you have attended all three, some of you have attended two out of three, and for others this is your first. Let me say to all of you that I am deeply grateful for your interest and support. Thank you for being here.
At the outset let me say thank you to Dr. Roby Robertson and his colleagues in the Institute of Government who conducted the survey and organized this meeting. They do good work. I appreciate them and am proud of them.
Each year we give you numbers. Numbers are essential in public policy decision making. We need numbers in order to address issues of race effectively. We are going to give you survey numbers related to race again today.
Next year we are going to add a layer of a different kind of numbers—more about that toward the end in my remarks.
But numbers are faceless. Racial stereotyping is not faceless, nor is its impact. Racial prejudice hurts real people, and in our state and our community it has done so on an enormous scale.
I have a hunch that two recent developments, if not noted at this mini-conference, would be conspicuous by their absence. So let me take note of a movie and of a new television program.
Ten days ago "Crash" won the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture of the Year, which assures it an audience of millions. Upon learning that its subject matter was relevant to this meeting today, I secured and watched a copy of it.
Now I should tell you that I would not be comfortable watching this movie with my mother! And I am not qualified to say that it did or did not deserve the Academy Award. But it seems to me that any movie that wins the big Oscar is to some degree a commentary on its times as seen by those who produced it. And given the size of its audience, I think its worth paying attention to.
(A clip from “Crash” is shown in which two young black men walk along a sidewalk in a white Los Angeles neighborhood and discuss whether or not they should be afraid..)
Out of respect for those of you who have not seen it, I will not tell you the plot, the very complicated plot, let alone how it ends. Nor will I presume to say whether it is an accurate portrayal of the people of Los Angeles represented in it.
In "Crash" I saw a great city riddled with racism and ethnic prejudice directed toward multiple groups. The racial and ethnic prejudice was sometimes mild, sometimes lethal; sometimes polite, sometimes rude and crude; always hurtful.
Here are people I saw in it.
The movie was filled with persons who were full of prejudice and showed blatant racism. Their interactions were intense, and I was exhausted empathizing with this one and sharing the anger of that one.
Then to complicate things for the viewer, some of these same people, these offenders, would show tender caring towards family—and remarkable courage in coming to the aid of those toward whom they were horribly prejudiced.
One thing that struck me was that although there were a couple of characters who, despite being the object of prejudice and being unfairly treated, were not angry at the world.
But those gentle hearts were the exception. True to reality I am afraid most of these characters who experienced racial and ethnic prejudice were angry people. And to some degree all of the characters who showed or experienced racial prejudice were fearful.
"Crash" was not a movie about a pretty world. The world in "Crash" was ugly. It puts a face—multiple, compelling faces—on racial and ethnic prejudice.
As a nation, the movie said to me, we have much work to do.
As a university, the movie said to me, we are right to do our annual survey, hold this annual meeting, and endeavor to keep our community focused on unresolved issues of race
I should say to my university colleagues that the movie illustrates that when those of us at an engaged university like UALR address major problems in our own urban backyard, we address issues of national significance.
I will be briefer on the television program—a new reality TV program named "Black/White." The show immediately brought to mind a book I read in my college days, Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin. This TV program also puts a face on racial prejudice, particularly toward blacks.
The first show in the series aired on March 8. In it there are two families, one black and one white, who move into the same house to live together for a period of months. The white man, woman, and daughter are professionally made up each day to appear to be African Americans. The black man, woman, and son are made up to appear white. (Those make-up artists do incredible work!) These six people, passing as members of the other race, are filmed in various situations during the day. At night they discuss their respective experiences. I plan to keep watching it, but at this early point I offer no evaluation of "Black/White."
I am pleased to see black-white issues explored because that has been the central race issue in American history, still is, and unless we work hard, prejudice toward Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans will have faded into insignificance and there will still be black-white issues.
Racism has a face. Let me tell you an Arkansas story, from 86 years ago. In telling the story I am relying primarily on the work of Mr. Grif Stockley (who is with us here today) in his book, Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919.
Elaine is a small town in southeast Arkansas.
In that part of the state a group of African-American sharecroppers had formed the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America in an effort to get fair treatment for sharecroppers. On September 30, 1919, they were meeting in the tiny Hoop Spur church late at night to pay dues to the union and sign oaths. Outside a car pulled up with two law enforcement officials. What happened next has been a long-standing matter of dispute. According to some claims, the law enforcement people were there to break up the meeting. Others say the members of the union began firing on the car. Whatever the case, one man was killed and one seriously wounded.
The event set off widespread fighting that lasted for two days, ending with an official toll of 25 blacks and five whites dead. Several hundred blacks were arrested, accused of plotting to kill white farmers.
But the real death toll of blacks was much higher.
In Blood In Their Eyes, Grif Stockley notes that one indicator that the black death toll was much higher than the official count was the number of burial insurance claims filed. The Pythian Lodge, which was a black fraternal order and insurance company, wrote that they had paid benefits for 103 individuals. There were also stories of mass graves, both in Elaine and at Snow Lake.
An Arkansas Gazette reporter named Louis Sharpe Dunaway said in his 1925 book, What a Preacher Saw Through the Keyhole, that the number was 856.
Whatever the precise number, the carnage against blacks in that area of the state was incredible.
H. S. Smiddy, who was a member of the white posse, would later testify by affidavit about the events. He said:
“Between nine and ten o’clock on the morning of October 1 a great many people from Helena and other portions of Phillips County and from other surrounding counties began coming in, quite a large number of them, several hundred of them, and began to hunt negroes and shooting them as they came to them. I shot Milliken Giles myself. He was in the edge of the thicket trying to hide. When I shot him he was not trying to shoot anybody and didn’t have a gun. As we marched down the thicket in the southwest I saw about five or six negroes come out unarmed, holding up their hands and some of them running and trying to get away. They were shot and killed by members of the posse. I didn’t see a single negro during all the man hunt that was armed and I didn’t see a single negro fire a shot.”
A band of men from Mississippi arrived that afternoon and took the horrors even further. Smiddy stated that:
“They shot and killed men, women and children without regard to whether they were guilty or innocent of any connection with the killing of anybody, or whether they were members of the union or not. Negroes were killed time and time again out in the fields picking cotton, harming nobody.”
The homes of African Americans were destroyed and their property stolen. Schools and churches were destroyed. Families were torn asunder. It was estimated that the planters pocketed over one million dollars from crops that rightly belonged to the black sharecroppers.
Besides those killed, hundreds of blacks were arrested. Of those arrested, 67 were sent to prison and 12 were accused and convicted of murder.
The 12 men who were accused of murder were convicted and sentenced to die. Their fate became the subject of a years-long fierce legal battle. Six of the cases went to the United States Supreme Court which vacated the convictions on the grounds that the trial was dominated by a mob atmosphere and the use of coerced testimony. The other six men were retried, and were given sentences of 12 years but were freed by action of the governor.
I recently heard Grif Stockley, who is with us today, present a lunch-time lecture here on campus in which he told the story of Scipio Jones, the black Arkansas attorney who led the successful effort to save the 12 black men convicted of murder in the Elaine riots of 1919.
Now there is an able Arkansan—Scipio Jones—who rose to the occasion. He did great deeds in our state in the midst of evil and danger. He is an Arkansan our children and grandchildren deserve to hear about.
At this conference two years ago I recounted the story of the lynching of John Carter in Little Rock in 1927. Why tell such cruel stories from our state's past?
Unfortunately, we cannot understand our present challenges in regard to race without recalling the brutalities inflicted upon African Americans in the past.
For the other racial and ethnic groups who today experience stereotyping and discrimination—as in the movie "Crash"—it is a present-day insult. For blacks who today experience stereotyping and discrimination, it is a present-day insult and also a painful reminder of an enormous insult to them and their family forebears over three centuries—because of their race.
You have to face it to fix it.
I am very grateful to Mr. Stockley and to dozens of other scholars and journalists who are doing research and writing about the history of our state. (And let me hasten to say proudly that there are UALR faculty members in this valuable group I am speaking about.) As recently as a quarter century ago we did not have much well-researched and well-written treatises on people, events, and issues in Arkansas history, of either the proud or the embarrassing variety. That has changed.
The brutal events at Elaine in 1919 were quickly put behind a code of silence, as Mr. Stockley notes in the introduction to his book. We have to face our past in order to redeem our future.
Each of the first two years I have shared some thoughts about what we were planning for future years in connection with our annual survey and conference.
Our annual survey has been and will continue to be the anchor piece of this annual meeting. One thing I believe we have accomplished in three years (with today's survey report) is to document that there are significant differences in black and white perceptions regarding race in our community. In significant respects blacks and whites do not experience life alike in our community.
Our surveys have given us a picture of the racial-attitudes landscape of our community—and we see encouraging bright spots and disturbing shadows.
In the coming year we are going to develop an additional layer of information—the economic effects of race on our community. Let me elaborate.
I think we all have some sense that, economically, blacks are disadvantaged. I recently saw an informative report from Money, December 1, 1989, that addressed this subject. Let me give just one example from the article. Blacks accumulate wealth at a slower rate than whites in part because segregated housing patterns mean less demand for homes in black neighborhoods, thus the houses owned by black families often do not appreciate as fast as houses of white families.
I am reminded of Saul Alinsky's comment: “A racially integrated community is a chronological term from the entrance of the first black family to the exit of the last white family."
The Money article went further and concluded, on the basis of a great deal of data, that it was not just blacks who incurred the negative economic consequences of race. The article documented that "racial discrimination is...costing all of us billions."
I am going to ask some of my colleagues to see if we can develop a similar analysis, with local data, for our community. The availability of data will be an issue, but we will see how far we can take it.
My present conviction is that for our community to develop and embrace a fresh change agenda focused on issues of race, we need two rationales.
First, it is a moral issue. Abraham J. Heschel, theologian and philosopher, said that “Racism is man’s gravest threat to men–the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.” We have an education issue, a moral education issue. Some in our community need to be remediated in our houses of worship and go over that part again about God being no respecter of persons. We are all of the same race, the human race. We need to continue to define it as a moral issue. The moral appeal is powerful.
Second, it is also an economic issue. We live in a less wealthy society, we live in a less wealthy county because of race. We are all poorer because of it. Again we have an education issue, an economic education issue. We need to show that the white community—not just the black community—has an enlightened self-interest in black economic progress. We need to define it as an economic issue. The economic appeal is also powerful.
You might be interested in knowing about an internal step that is upcoming. Next fall the university will carry out an internal audit of campus attitudes, policies, and practices as they relate to race. We are obliged to pay critical attention to our own performance.
I also plan to visit one-on-one with two dozen front-line leaders in our community—governmental, business, religious, neighborhood organizations, etc.—to seek their candid views on the state of race relations in our community and what has hindered and what has helped on that front. I particularly want to ask what they think might be promising strategies for the community to try in the future.
My experience in a number of studies of communities problems is that the front-line people, the people in the trenches—at least some of them—will have nuggets of insight and wisdom which no one else can offer. Indeed, sometimes the people in the trenches do not appreciate the freshness and the value of their own insights and advice on seemingly intractable problems.
As a result of our ongoing series of surveys, we are learning things. I believe we are building an informed basis for shaping an updated community strategy to address issues of race in the greater Little Rock community.
In my opening remarks the last two years I have spoken to the question, why is the university involving itself in this controversial issue? Rather than repeat those comments, may I simply refer those of you who are here for the first time to those speeches.
I also in those two speeches spoke to the question, why a survey? Let me only repeat today that a survey of attitudes and perceptions is a mirror, an effective way for a community to look at itself.
Each year the mirror is being held at a different angle. Let's hear about this year's survey and let's see ourselves as a community in the numbers.