calsfoundation@cals.org
July 13, 1888
Amid racial tensions following more than a decade of post-Reconstruction “fusion” politics in Crittenden County—whereby white and black residents agreed in advance upon a division of county offices and representation in the legislature—according to historian Margaret Woolfolk, “a group of about 80 whites assembled at Marion about 10 a.m….and marched to the courthouse where David Ferguson [the county clerk] was forced to resign at the muzzle of a Winchester rifle….Other blacks were taken by wagon to the Mississippi River, then by boat to Memphis, and released.” Despite the fact that Crittenden County was overwhelmingly black in 1888, no African Americans were afterward elected to a county office for the next 100 years.