To avoid violent political and economic protests, some African American families sought an exit from the increasingly oppressive conditions in Arkansas.  Some saw the Indian and Oklahoma territories as a nearby western homeland that had yet to shape into a racist society.  Several members of Arkansas’s black elite migrated to modern-day Oklahoma in the 1890s, but the majority of Arkansas black migrants to Oklahoma were rural and poor.  One Arkansas migrant to the all-black town of Boley, Oklahoma stated,

I was born in Arkansas.  Me and my brother were pretty rough on the white folks around where we lived, so my father decided to bring us out here before we messed up somebody or somebody messed us up.  That’s how my father happened to come out here  It is a good thing, too, ‘cause I don’t have much good blood for people who try to misuse me right now, and that is what these white people try to do.  I just don’t ‘low nobody to misuse me.

Another Arkansas migrant to Boley also referred to racial tension:

I came here when the place was still a territory.  I wanted to go to a place where a man could be a man, I came from Arkansas, and I didn’t like a white man’s civilization where if two people got to fighting, a whole mob would jump on one.  I read of Boley, and I came out here. My first big disappointment was when the territory went into statehood. I know then that we would be bothered with the white man again.

You hear this expression all the time but in a museum history exhibit, it is the truth.

This photograph is a perfect example. At first glance, it is a photograph of a man giving a speech.



This one photograph can tell you more than hundreds of words of text.

Other black Arkansans sought a more distant homeland overseas in Africa. In the 1880s and 1890s more Arkansans migrated to Liberia than from any other state. In 1891, the year of the Separate Coach Act and the Election Law, the American Colonization Society’s Arkansas applications for immigration to the African nation of Liberia peaked at more than 3,000 (out of a total African American population of 309,117 in 1890). According to historian Kenneth C. Barnes, of the 3,000 applications, approximately 600 black Arkansans emigrated—representing over one-third of black American immigrants to Africa between 1879 and 1899. Due to the high illiteracy rate of African Americans (55 per cent of Arkansas’s African American males in 1890 were illiterate), schoolteachers and preachers wrote many of the 3,000 applications for large groups. The 3,000 letters, therefore, represent a greater percentage of Arkansas’s 300,000+ African Americans. These migrations and desires to leave Arkansas are telling evidence of rural and urban unrest in the state’s black communities.

H.L. McGill Named Director of Mosaic Templars Cultural Center


Little Rock, Ark. (Dec. 6, 2010) – The Department of Arkansas Heritage (DAH) announced today that H. L. McGill will be director of the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center (MTCC), the department’s museum for African American culture. The museum offers exhibits and programming about African Americans in Arkansas from 1870 to the present, especially concerning their contributions to business, politics and the arts. His position will be effective Dec. 13.

“H. L. will be a top-notch addition to the great staff we already have at MTCC,” said Trey Berry, Ph. D., deputy director of museums for DAH. “The work he has done in the areas of non-profit organization, grant-writing and assisting city, county, state and federal government programs will help him lead MTCC to a new level of community leadership.”

McGill comes to MTCC from the Arkansas Arts Council, another agency of DAH, where he had been community development program manager since 2002. His duties included assisting non-profit groups that apply for state and federal arts grants and providing technical assistance to arts organizations around the state.

“I look forward to helping present the very important story of African American culture throughout Arkansas,” said McGill. “The Center stands on 9th Street in Little Rock, a neighborhood that was very important to African Americans as they established their influence in Arkansas business and culture. My hope is that the museum and cultural center will continue to be an important place to all Arkansans and a place for the state and community to come together.”

The other agencies of the Department of Arkansas Heritage are the Delta Cultural Center, Historic Arkansas Museum, Old State House Museum, the Arkansas Arts Council, Arkansas Historic Preservation Program and the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission.