Entry Category: Civil Rights and Social Change - Starting with Y

Yellowhammer was a women’s communal-living farm in Madison County in the 1970s, representative of women’s land groups that existed in northwest Arkansas at that time. The back-to-the-land movement and the women’s movement came together in the early to mid-1970s to create the women’s land movement, self- or nearly self-sufficient land communities organized by and for women. The women’s land movement had many roots, including the hippie and anti-war movements, environmentalism, and feminism, many of which were interwoven. In 1970, founders Trella Laughlin and Patricia Jackson were in Austin, Texas, playing in an “all-girls band,” learning about solar energy, sharing resources and living spaces, and protesting the Vietnam War. Soon afterward, they moved with friends to land in rural Pope County, …

Charles Young, an African American man, was burned alive by a mob near Forrest City (St. Francis County) on October 20, 1902, accused of raping and killing a white woman. Ed Lewis, “a respected farmer,” was working at a fishing camp on the St. Francis River when his wife left their home on horseback about seven miles from Forrest City on October 13, 1902, to visit him. While on the way, according to newspaper accounts, someone attacked her, and she was “carried some thirty yards into the thicket…along the side of the road and there ravished and murdered.” When her riderless horse arrived at the camp, Lewis sent a messenger to go toward his house and investigate. When her horse …

Rufus King Young was an influential church and civil rights leader in Arkansas in the second half of the twentieth century. As the leader of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Little Rock (Pulaski County), he was actively involved in the local civil rights movement and the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Rufus King Young was born on May 13, 1911, to Robert Young and Laura Scott Young in Bayou Bartholomew (Drew County). He received his early education at Young’s Chapel AME Church, an institution built on land originally owned by his grandfather, before graduating in 1933 from Chicot County Training School in Dermott (Chicot County). He continued his education at Shorter College in North …