The 60 years since Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington have delivered progress, but not nearly enough.
On Monday, the Arkansas NAACP and the W. Harold Flowers Law Society for Black attorneys hosted a program in Little Rock called “History, Education and Divine Order” to commemorate King’s 1963 march and regroup for the next steps.
“Their sacrifices and activism have not been in vain, and we honor them today,” attorney Evelyn Moorehead told the more than 100 people filling the pews at Allison Presbyterian Church. “At the same time, we honor them by acknowledging that a just, free America is still an incomplete project.”
Arkansas state government’s ongoing culture-war-fueled attack on an Advanced Placement African American Studies class hammers home that there’s plenty of progress still to be made, she said. Moorehead equated the state’s ambush on AP African American Studies to antebellum prohibitions on Black people learning how to read and write.
“If anything, now is a time of increased vigilance. Now is a time of increased action because policymakers are working very hard. You know as well as I do, they’re working across this nation to erase crucial improvements,” she said.
A handful of speakers bookended Moorehead’s turn at the podium during the hour-long event, which kicked off with a church full of people singing all three verses of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
Attendees were a who’s who of legislators, mayors, judges and other prominent Black Arkansans, and the crowd was big enough to fill the extra chairs set up in the back.
Speakers shared worries about losing ground and resolved to push for more education about Black and brown history.
“You cannot have liberty until you understand your history,” Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott said.
Amari Brantley, president of the NAACP Youth Council at Philander Smith College, adapted King’s famous words for present-day concerns. “I have a dream that Black men stop dying. I have a dream that our legislators recognize enough is enough,” he said, a nod to the racially motivated weekend shooting in Jacksonville, Fla. by a white man who killed three Black people.
Philander Smith Professor Jesse Hargrove talked about his great-grandparents, Celia and Soloman Hargrove. Celia Hargrove was a midwife, and Soloman Hargrove was a teacher. Soloman Hargrove was killed in 1893, he said, 30 years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. “He was lynched for teaching little Black boys and little Black girls how to read and write,” Jesse Hargrove said.
American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas Director Holly Dickson agreed that Arkansas is on shaky ground and in danger of sliding backward on civil rights issues.
“There are way too many in our midst who would love to make gatherings like this illegal again,” she said.
But Monday’s speakers all committed to meeting, talking and teaching about Black history more going forward, not less.
Many of the children in the Arkansas Delta town of Elaine play under trees where lynching victims once hung, and on ground covering mass graves, but they don’t have any idea, Moorehead said.
“Now we’re being told we can’t talk about what you did to us? What’s wrong with that picture? I think we want to say, ‘Not on our watch.’”
Moorehead and others are forming a task force to craft curriculum and support teachers to make sure Black history doesn’t get erased in Arkansas.
“We should never have trusted the one who didn’t want us to learn, who was afraid of our reading, with the care, the sacred duty of teaching our children. We will teach our own,” she said.
You can watch the full program here.
