Annie Zachary Pike (1931–)

Annie Zachary Pike is a farmer and community activist from Phillips County who became the first African-American appointee to a state board and was later appointed to a variety of federal organizations by President Richard M. Nixon.

Annie Ruth Davidson was born on May 12, 1931, in Big Creek in Phillips County to Mississippi-born farmer Cedel Davidson and native Arkansan Carrie Washington Davidson. She was first educated at Trenton Elementary School in Trenton (Phillips County). Later, she attended the Consolidated White River Academy (CWRA), a co-educational boarding school founded in Monroe County by black Baptists in 1893. While at CWRA in the mid-to-late 1940s, Davidson was class secretary and president. She also played baseball and basketball and was a member of the Glee Club.

In 1949, after graduating from CWRA in 1948, Davidson moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to attend the segregated Homer G. Phillips Hospital School of Nursing. Davidson completed nursing school in 1952 and returned to Arkansas. Two years later, she married Grover Cleveland Zachary, a black Phillips County landowner more than forty years her elder. In 1959, the Zacharys, which included their son, Victor, were named “landowner sweepstakes” champions of a “Plant to Prosper” agricultural contest.

In 1962, Grover Zachary suffered a stroke that resulted in partial paralysis. Annie Zachary assumed control of their farming operation. She ensured the farm’s productivity by adopting new technologies, learning innovative farming techniques, and relying on black extension service agents employed by the Arkansas Agricultural Cooperative Extension Service (AACES). Reading extension circulars bolstered her knowledge, and the farm—which grew soybeans, oats, wheat, milo, and cotton—thrived.

As a community activist in Phillips County, she was a member of the Arkansas Negro State Home Demonstration Council, a network of rural black women’s clubs organized in 1936; in 1963, she was elected its vice president. In 1965, Zachary was named “home demonstration woman of the year” during a convention held at the segregated National Baptist Hotel and Bathhouse in Hot Springs (Garland County).

Annie Zachary was active in local and state politics during the 1960s. She helped organize a sociopolitical campaign to break the Democratic Party’s domination in the state by supporting Winthrop Rockefeller, a white Republican and millionaire who had relocated to Arkansas in 1953 and founded Winrock Farms in Conway County. Rockefeller ran for governor in 1964 but lost to incumbent Orval Faubus. When Rockefeller ran for governor again in 1966, Zachary became the Phillips County Republican Party coordinator. She traveled door to door to convince African Americans to vote for Rockefeller. She highlighted his plan to integrate black people into Arkansas politics in a way unachieved since the first Reconstruction and emphasized his commitment to reforming the state’s cruel penitentiary system.

Rockefeller won the 1966 gubernatorial election, garnering eighty percent of the black vote. He rewarded Zachary’s support by appointing her to the Arkansas Welfare Board. She was the first black statewide board appointee by an Arkansas governor in the twentieth century. Zachary quickly became known as the “black lady who challenged the system, who cared about the poor, the needy, and the indigent.”

Zachary’s prominence within the Arkansas Republican Party led to various political appointments from the late 1960s into the early 1970s. In 1969, President Richard M. Nixon appointed her to the White House Conference on Aging. She was further a member of the Technical Committee on Nutrition, which allowed her to address concerns about elderly malnutrition and food insecurity, particularly in rural Arkansas and elsewhere in the South. In 1970, Zachary was appointed to the Arkansas Economic Development Advisory Council, the Arkansas Farmers Home Administration (AFHA) Advisory Committee, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Citizens Advisory Committee on Civil Rights. Also in 1970, she and her husband used grant money to develop forty-seven acres of land they called the Zachary Subdivision. As a result, poor and working-class African Americans in Marvell (Phillips County) were able to their own homes. Winthrop Rockefeller was among those who attended the ground-breaking ceremony in 1975.

In 1972, Arkansas Republicans elected Zachary to represent them at the Republican National Convention (RNC) held in Miami, Florida. She was named co-chairperson of the platform subcommittee and sat on the RNC’s resolutions committee (a position that allowed her to introduce a formal statement demanding increased attention to sickle-cell anemia), and was also co-chair of an RNC subcommittee on human concerns. Two other black women from Arkansas, Marianna (Lee County) farm wife Willa Howard and Little Rock (Pulaski County) educator Mildred Tennyson, were alternates for the state delegation to the RNC, thus making it the most diverse in the state’s history. While in Miami, Zachary met with the National Federation of Republican Women. First lady Pat Nixon and her daughters Julie and Tricia also attended the meeting, as did Judy Agnew, wife of former vice president Spiro Agnew.

Not only was Zachary a state delegate to the RNC, in 1972, she became the first black person in Arkansas to vie for an elected office during the twentieth century when she competed for a seat in the Arkansas Senate. She did not win, but she demonstrated that black and white Arkansans would vote for a qualified candidate regardless of skin color. Zachary’s influence within the Arkansas Republican Party led to her being elected vice president of the Arkansas Minority Republican Organization, a group whose members sought to bring more African Americans into the state Republican Party. She additionally inspired black women to run for public offices throughout Arkansas.

After her husband’s death in 1973, Zachary assumed full responsibility of the family farm, but she remained politically and socially active. She joined the Arkansas Social Services Board; became a member of the National Conference of Christians and Jews Board of Directors, the countywide and local Marvell board of the Office of Equal Opportunity,  the Arkansas Wildlife Federation; and was vice president of the Marvell Rural Water Commission (MRWC).

In 1975, Zachary and other members of the MRWC met with the Delta Utilities Service Company, which operated under the auspices of the National Water Demonstration Project headquartered at Marianna. Delta Utilities provided grant money and loans to rural communities to help their leaders plan and design water and sewage systems. In 1977, she married Lester Pike of Postelle (Phillips County), and in 1979, employed her local and national connections to help establish National Teachers’ Day.

In 1985, the Arkansas Education Association recognized her many years of volunteer service. Additional public service included a stint on the Arkansas Tobacco Control Board from 1999 to 2001. Her husband died in 1997. In 2002, in recognition of her dedication to the community, Phillips County Road 125, which runs through Zachary farmland, was renamed Annie Zachary Pike Road.

As of 2019, Pike still resides on the family farm in Marvell. She remains active in community events and is a longtime member of Pleasant Grove Baptist Church.

For additional information:
Jones-Branch, Cherisse. “‘Been a Guinea Pig in This Race:’ Annie Ruth Zachary Pike, Arkansas Homemaker, Farmer and Politician.” International Journal of Africana Studies 17 (Spring–Summer 2018): 7–24.

———. Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women’s Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914–1965. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2021.

Cherisse Jones-Branch
Arkansas State University