I AM INDEBTED TO THE PROFOUND work of historians who investigate African American life in the rural South. This list is not exhaustive, but I hope it recognizes sources that influenced me and points curious readers to the right places. Leon Litwack’s Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (Knopf, 1998) and Robin D. G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1990) were among my first introductions to Southern history and formed a lasting impact. I found indispensable Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South (Harvard University Press, 2003), which powerfully chronicles the organizing of black rural poor in the South and brings to light the vibrant black social movements in Phillips County, Arkansas. Jeannie Whayne’s Delta Empire (Louisiana State University Press, 2011) and A New Plantation South (University of Virginia, 1996) were essential to understanding broader socioeconomic transformations in the Delta from the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, as were Nan Woodruff’s American Congo (Harvard University Press, 2003) and James Cobb’s The Most Southern Place on Earth (Oxford University Press, 1992). I thank Jeannie Whayne and Paddy Riley for their generosity in pointing me to incisive and helpful sources.
On Frederick Douglass’s opposition to the Black Exodus and to Back-to-Africa movements, I found helpful Waldo Martin’s The Mind of Frederick Douglass (University of North Carolina Press, 1986) and Nell Irvin Painter’s Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction (Norton, 1976). On the Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas, I consulted the work of Steven Hahn, Adell Patton, Jr., and Kenneth Barnes, which suggests that the rural black poor formed the early and most devoted constituency of Back-to-Africa Movements. I’m grateful to the work of Donald Holley on migration to Arkansas in the early twentieth century, and to S. Charles Bolton, Willard Gatewood, and Carl Moneyhon on inequality in Arkansas. On the Great Migration, Stewart Tolnay and E. M. Beck’s studies comparing the economic status of those who migrated and those who stayed were eye-opening. Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House, 2010) and Nicholas Lemann’s The Promised Land (Vintage, 2010) offered panoramic views of the Great Migration that helped me contextualize and contrast the experiences of those who left with those who stayed.
On the first black institution of higher education west of the Mississippi, Thomas Kennedy’s A History of Southland College (University of Arkansas Press, 2009) illuminated a fascinating local history of Quakers who came to teach and live in Phillips County and more broadly of black education in Arkansas. Randy Finley’s From Slavery to Uncertain Freedom (University of Arkansas Press, 1996) offered a moving portrait of the Delta immediately after emancipation. I am grateful for Finley’s research on the role of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas.
On the massacre in Elaine, Arkansas, and racial violence in the Delta, I turned to Grif Stockley’s Blood In Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacre of 1919 (University of Arkansas Press, 2001); Woodruff’s American Congo; the research of Karlos Hill; J. W. Butts and Dorothy James, “The Underlying Causes of the Elaine Race Riot of 1919,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 20 (Spring 1961); and Jeannie Whayne, “Low Villains and Wickedness in High Places: Race and Class in the Elaine Riots,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 58 (Autumn 1999).
On Japanese internment in the Arkansas Delta, I am indebted to Calvin Smith, William Anderson, Russell Bearden, and Jason Morgan Ward, and the oral histories at Densho (densho.org). On the experiences of Asians in the Delta, I consulted James Loewen’s The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Waveland Press, 1971) and Leslie Bow’s Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (New York University Press, 2010).
On the history of criminal justice in the Delta and more generally the South, I turned to David Oshinsky’s Worse Than Slavery (Free Press, 1996), Michael Klarman’s From Jim Crow to Civil Rights (Oxford University Press, 2004), and Hortense Powdermaker’s After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South (Viking, 1939).
On incarceration and justice in urban areas, I turned to William Stuntz’s The Collapse of American Criminal Justice (Belknap Press, 2011), Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (The New Press, 2010), Randall Kennedy’s Race, Crime, and the Law (Vintage, 1996), Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness (Harvard University Press, 2011), and Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (Harvard University Press, 2016). On moral luck and criminal justice, I turned to Nir Eisikovits’s work, published in Law and Social Justice (MIT Press, 2005). I deeply appreciated Lisa Pruitt’s work on the dire shortage of lawyers in rural Arkansas.
I am grateful for the work of the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families. Its February 2013 report on school discipline found that black students receive in-school suspension almost three times as often as white students, out-of-school suspension more than five times as often as white students, and corporal punishment almost twice as often as white students. On the battle for desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement, Richard Kluger’s Simple Justice (Knopf, 1976) and Derrick Bell’s work were formative. Robert Carter’s essay was published in Shades of Brown: New Perspectives on School Desegregation, edited by Derrick Bell (Teachers College Press, 1980). On education policy and law more broadly, I find James Ryan’s work penetrating. Richard Hofstadter’s Age of Reform (Vintage, 1959) helped me think through the rural-urban divide. To understand challenges facing present-day rural America more broadly, I relied on Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas’s Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America (Beacon, 1999). We urgently need more research on criminal justice and education in the rural South today.