Entries - Entry Category: Print Journalism - Starting with L

Bob Lancaster worked at several publications as a writer and editor for nearly fifty years. His iconoclastic journalism and imaginative, idiomatic style produced an avid readership wherever he went, and his deep research and waggish writing popularized Arkansas history for a generation of readers. Lancaster wrote for the Pine Bluff Commercial, the Arkansas Gazette, the Arkansas Democrat, the Arkansan, the original Arkansas Times magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the weekly Arkansas Times newspaper. At the end of his four-year sojourn as a daily columnist in Philadelphia, he declined job offers from the New York Times and the St. Petersburg Times of Florida to return to Arkansas. Lancaster published a book of collected writings on Arkansas history, a novel based upon the …

Walter John Lemke established the department of journalism at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) in 1928 and served as the head of the department until his retirement in 1959. The university named the department the Walter J. Lemke Department of Journalism in his honor in 1988. In addition, he founded several historical and journalistic organizations. Walter Lemke was born on January 6, 1891, in Wausau, Wisconsin, to Carl Lemke and Ulrika Block Lemke. Lemke attended the University of Wisconsin and the University of Indiana. He received his AB degree from Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, which is near Cleveland, in 1911. The college later awarded him an honorary doctor of letters degree in 1962. He earned …

Henry Jackson Lewis, who was born into slavery, has been called the first black political cartoonist. His drawings appeared in publications across the nation. H. J. Lewis was born in Water Valley, Mississippi, in 1837 or 1838. As a child, he fell into a fire, maiming his left hand and blinding his left eye. Nothing further is known about his youth, but by 1872, he was living in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County), where he worked as a laborer in the mid- to late 1870s. By 1879, he was selling drawings of city and Arkansas River scenes to the national publication Harper’s Weekly, and he later sold similar drawings to Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. On October 25, 1882, a Pine Bluff …

The Liberator was an anti-Catholic weekly newspaper published in Magnolia (Columbia County) from 1912 to 1915. It is representative of a type of journalism that railed against Catholicism in the early 1900s and was particularly strong in the South and the Midwest. Populist politician Tom Watson of Georgia had launched a new wave of anti-Catholic journalism in 1910 with his Watson’s Jeffersonian Magazine, but the largest anti-Catholic paper was The Menace, published in Aurora, in the Missouri Ozarks, approximately forty miles north of the Arkansas line. Founded in 1911, The Menace had 1.5 million subscriptions by 1915, making it one of the most widely circulated publications in the country. The Liberator was a smaller regional paper, similar to other anti-Catholic …

The Little Rock Free Press was an alternative newspaper based in Little Rock (Pulaski County). It began publication on April 20, 1993, and twelve years later, the Freep, as it was commonly called, became the Arkansas Free Press. The Little Rock Free Press covered everything from daily news to controversial topics such as prostitution, homosexuality, night life, drug culture, and Little Rock’s independent music scene. Often incurring the wrath of religious groups and politicians, the Freep was said by its editor to be “provocative Arkansas history with a twist.” In 1993, Little Rock’s previous alternative newspaper, Spectrum Weekly, ceased publication. It had been printed in Russellville (Pope County) but faced opposition from the printer and others after it began running …

The city of Conway (Faulkner County) was incorporated in 1875 and became the county seat and a well-known center of education in central Arkansas. It is home to Hendrix College and surrounding historic district, the University of Central Arkansas (UCA), and Central Baptist College. Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Conway’s population skyrocketed, making it the eighth most populous city in Arkansas at the time of the 2020 federal census. One of its most enduring institutions is its newspaper, the Log Cabin Democrat. The newspaper has existed throughout the history of the city and continues to be printed in the twenty-first century, making it the longest-running publication in Conway. After the Arkansas General Assembly created Faulkner County in 1873, Abel …

Mary Loughborough was a bestselling author and the publisher of the Southern Ladies’ Journal in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Mary Ann Webster was born in Phelps, New York, on August 28, 1837, to Ashburn W. Webster and Julia Strong Webster. In 1842, when she was five years old, she was temporarily in the care of a New York City almshouse, possibly because of the death of her mother. By 1850, her father had moved his family to Carondelet, Missouri (now part of St. Louis). She attended Monticello Seminary in Godfrey, Illinois, graduating in 1853. On October 11, 1857, in Carondelet, she married prominent St. Louis attorney James Moore Loughborough, a native of Shelbyville, Kentucky. The couple would have six children. …

Joseph Patrick (Pat) Lynch of Little Rock (Pulaski County) was a longtime Arkansas radio personality, newspaper columnist, and advocate of civil liberties. His popular talk show in the 1980s and 1990s on Little Rock radio station KARN attracted guests including major politicians and other public figures who discussed both local and national issues. Lynch was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), representing Arkansas on the ACLU’s national board of directors from 1989 to 1995. Pat Lynch was born in Mobile, Alabama, on August 5, 1950. His parents were homemaker Dorothy Rodwell Lynch and Joseph Richard Lynch, who worked for the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Railroad. He grew up in Mobile, where he attended McGill High School, a …

While the details of Arkansas’s many lynchings (mostly of African Americans) differ widely, some common themes or tropes were used in the newspaper reports related to them. The most common of these were: 1) language employed to dehumanize the victims of lynching; 2) descriptions of the mob as quiet and orderly; 3) statements to the effect that the local African-American community approved of these acts of vigilantism; 4) reports of victims confessing to their crimes prior to being lynched; and 5) statements that perhaps exaggerate the efforts of law enforcement to prevent such violence. The propensity to demonize or dehumanize lynching victims was especially prominent if these people were accused of attacking a white woman or girl. In 1892, the …

Gene Lyons is an award-winning author, columnist, and political commentator who lives in Arkansas and wrote a nationally syndicated column for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, among other publications. He is author of several books and co-author of The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (2000), which was made into a documentary film in 2004. Eugene Aloysius (Gene) Lyons  was born on September 20, 1943, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to Eugene Aloysius Lyons Jr., an insurance clerk, and Helen Sheedy Lyons, a typist. For a time, Lyons’s father also ran a Dairy Queen. Lyons attended Chatham High School in New Jersey and graduated from Rutgers University, also in New Jersey, in 1965 with a degree …