Race and Ethnicity: African American

Richard Nathaniel Wright was a writer of fiction and nonfiction. His many works, influenced by the injustices he faced as an African American, protested racial divides in America. His most famous work, the autobiographical Black Boy, was a controversial bestseller that opened the eyes of the nation to the evils of racism. Richard Wright was born on September 4, 1908, on a farm in Roxie, Mississippi, the son of Nathan Wright, a sharecropper, and Ella Wright, a teacher. He had one younger brother, Leon. The family’s poverty forced them to move around the South during Wright’s childhood. In Memphis, Tennessee, his father left the family, and in 1915, his mother put Wright and his brother in a Memphis orphanage after …

On June 29, 1892, an unidentified African-American man was apparently lynched in Wynne (Cross County) for allegedly assaulting a young girl. Although the New York Sun reported that the girl was black and that the mob was made up of African Americans, the Forrest City Times told a slightly different story. According to the Times, passengers traveling south on the Iron Mountain Railroad reported the “loss” of an African-American man in Wynne on the night of the June 29. The unidentified black man had allegedly tried to assault a six-year-old white girl that morning. The two were found in a closet, and the girl reported what had happened to her. The man was jailed, but the next morning the doors …

The Wynne Normal and Industrial Institute was a private primary and secondary school for African Americans founded in Wynne (Cross County) in 1901 by the Reverend W. F. Lovelace, DD, who served as the school’s principal. The school operated until 1924. Born in Lauderdale County, Tennessee, in 1862, Lovelace was a Baptist minister and educator who moved to Wynne in 1887 to pastor First Baptist Church. When he arrived in Wynne, the Cross County schools had 1,424 white students and 860 black students. In 1888, Lovelace became principal of Wynne’s public school for black students and remained in the position until 1894. In 1896, Lovelace was named principal of black schools in Stuttgart (Arkansas County). He was later asked to …

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 …

On May 25, 1883, a young African American man named Joseph Young was executed in Little River County for an alleged assault on a white woman named Chism. No information is available on the Chism family, but in the 1880 federal census for Little River County, Joseph Young was living with his parents, farmer Alfred Young and his wife, Caroline, and his father was working as a ferryman. This census lists him as being fourteen, which would make his age seventeen at the time of his execution. The crime itself was described in a May 26, 1883, article in the Arkansas Gazette. In November 1882, a “comparatively poor” family named Chism arrived in Little River County with all their possessions. …

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 …