New South
As track networks expanded across the state in the late 19th century, this mode of transportation became the primary way passengers traveled across Arkansas.
What is a train/railroad?
During the 1919 "Red Summer," white mobs and federal troops killed dozens of Black sharecroppers in Phillips County, Arkansas.
What is the Elaine Massacre?
This environmental event happens when a region experiences long periods without water.
What is a drought?
Describes the status of a person who does not have a job but is actively searching for employment.
What is unemployment?
They fueled late 19th-century growth in Arkansas by connecting isolated rural communities directly to national markets for cotton, timber, and mining.
What are railroads?
Co-founded in 1909 by leaders including W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells, this prominent civil rights organization fought racial injustice through investigative reporting, anti-lynching campaigns, and legal challenges against segregation.
What is the NAACP?
Destroying millions of acres across Arkansas and neighboring states, this event became the most destructive river flood in U.S. history.
What was the Great Flood of 1927?
This severe global economic downturn caused widespread bank failures, soaring unemployment, and severe poverty throughout the 1930s.
What was the Great Depression?
This system of agriculture involved tenant farmers working someone else's land in exchange for a portion of the harvested crops.
What is sharecropping?
Enacted across the American South following Reconstruction, these state and local statutes mandated racial segregation in public facilities and stripped political rights from Black citizens until the mid-20th century.
What were Jim Crow Laws?
The devastating drought of 1930–1931 made these agricultural necessities nearly impossible for Arkansas farmers.
What were growing crops?
Before serving as the 31st U.S. president during the onset of the Great Depression, this leader earned national acclaim as Commerce Secretary for directing relief efforts during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.
Who was President Herbert Hoover?
This term describes a person who rents land from a property owner to cultivate and grow crops.
What is a tenant farmer?
Formed by Confederate veterans in Tennessee following the Civil War, this white supremacist terrorist organization used violence and intimidation to suppress the political and civil rights of newly freed African Americans.
What is the Ku Klux Klan
Arkansas was hit harder than almost any other state in 1927 because flooding overwhelmed its flat Delta farmland through these major internal waterways.
What were overflowing river tributaries?
First appointed and then winning election during the Great Depression in 1932, this Arkansan became the first woman ever elected to a full term in the U.S. Senate.
Who was Hattie Caraway?
This major economic sector drove growth across the region by harvesting trees to produce lumber for building and manufacturing.
What is the timber industry?
To suppress Black political power after Reconstruction, state and local leaders enacted voter suppression measures like poll taxes, literacy tests, and white primaries, alongside physical intimidation.
What were disenfranchisement tactics?
Floods pose an existential threat to agricultural communities primarily because rising waters can destroy all four of these vital rural assets.
What are crops, livestock, homes, and farmland?
Launched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during his first 100 days in office, this series of federal programs, public works projects, and financial reforms aimed to deliver "Relief, Recovery, and Reform" during the Great Depression.
What was the New Deal?