Kit Karson and Band: Race, Class, and New South Nightriding in Northeast Arkansas

• Published in: The Arkansas historical quarterly 2022-10, Vol.81 (3), p.252-281
• Main Author: PERKINS, J. BLAKE
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: African Americans; Capitalism; Civil rights; Cotton; Decades; Employment; Governors; Men; Nightriding in Arkansas; Occupations; Politics; Population; Railroads; Timber; Towns; Turn of the century; White people; Working class
• ISSN: 0004-1823; 2327-1213

Jones immediately sent a letter to Arkansas governor George Donaghey urging him to commit state law enforcement to full "protection of the negroes of Lawrence County. After ten days of patrolling in Walnut Ridge by the State Guard and then subsequent policing by more than a hundred local posse men deputized by the mayor and sheriff, thirteen suspected whitecaps were arrested, all of them white working-class men.2 This night of terror in 1912 was the culmination of at least two decades of festering animosities that many white working-class men in northeastern Arkansas felt toward African American workers and their elite white employers. Though we know nothing of their views on labor unions, the role of government, business, or markets, their backgrounds and acts of vigilantism suggest they bear at least some resemblance to the "white men who identified their interests with the acquisitive market functions of capitalism and the social and political privileges of their race, nativity, and gender" that historian Járod Roll described in his study of white metal miners in the Tri-State District of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri. Upon its incorporation in 1884, Black Rock was home to 277 people, but jobs at the lumber mills and furniture factories that quickly opened there swelled the population to about 1000 by the end of the decade and 1400 by 1900, making it the largest town in the county at the turn of the century.