Local Historic Knowledge Production and ‘The Public’ in Jonesboro, Arkansas: An Academic’s Encounter with Contemporary Community Theatre and a Historic Community Lynching

My presentation partly revolves around two professional and personal confessions which, in turn, elicit slight feelings of discontentment and pride. First, I am an academic recluse—cloistered within the confines of my office and my classroom.  And until recently I have seldom attempted to construct a bridge between the “academic” community where I work and the “real” community where I live.  I have made a few feeble attempts via private emails with misinformed newspaper columnists after they have published erroneous essays based on neo-confederate myths. This was unsatisfactory and left me thinking I am not effective at explaining the value of my discipline to “regular” people. Overall, my voluntary seclusion has sometimes left me feeling discontented.  Second, over the last seven years I have become a passionate advocate of and participant in local community theatre. And for this I feel a modest level of pride.  Not an overwrought pride but rather the kind that emerges when one subsumes the self to the higher good of group creativity.  Participation in community theatre has taught me a lot about self and selflessness at the same time. So in one world I have always lived the solitary existence of a scholar but in a different world I have begun to live the gregarious existence of a performer.  And it has been the great surprise of my professional life that I have found a way to combine these worlds with the creation of local historical knowledge.

My paper presents an exemplary practice on the informative reciprocity between public art and the public humanities in a college town in the American South. It is based on the fusing of one of my areas of academic interest (Southern Social History and Memory) into the extemporaneous context of my participation in the local artistic community.  First, I will present the tragic history of Wade “Boll Weevil” Thomas who was arrested on December 25, 1920 for the murder of a Jonesboro, Arkansas policeman.  The following day a mob of 400 whites lynched the young black man at the corner of Main and Monroe (Jonesboro’s principal intersection at the time).  No charges were ever filed against Thomas’s murderers although his death provided some context for the failed 1921 Federal Anti-lynching Bill.  Eventually the modern inhabitants of Jonesboro lost all public memory of this singular event.  Secondly, I will briefly explore my participation in local community theatre at the Jonesboro Foundation of Arts (FOA) which happens to be located at the corner of Main and Monroe.  Fortuitously, in September of 2017, the FOA presented its first ever production from the genre of African American theatre with a majority black cast and black director (A Raisin in the Sun).  Due to my professional and personal knowledge I was able to fuse together these seemingly disparate events and advocate that the play could be a “redemptive” public moment.  And indeed that is essentially what happened.  During the run of the show modern black citizen-actors reclaimed and redeemed a space that had signified their exclusion a century before while white citizen-patrons became more aware of their city’s difficult history via the theatrical production and through local professional/social media.

Ultimately, I argue that scholars’ participation in their local communities, particularly in events that overlap into the public arts and humanities such as community theatre, is integral to their ability to employ their expertise in a way that engenders public trust.   It can be an effective antidote to the bias which poisons many Americans’ perceptions toward academe in general.  But it can also be an efficacious prescription for stodgy academics, such as myself, who need to climb down from their ivory towers more often.

Read more about the Wade Thomas lynching (NOTE: contains graphic material)

Gary Edwards is Associate Professor of History and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Arkansas State University. His most important research interests are Antebellum America, the American Civil War and its attendant cultures of memory as well as Slavery and Secession. He’s the author of the forthcoming monograph “Yeomen Families on Tennessee’s Cotton Frontier”. In 2012, he conducted the project Making Sense of the Civil War with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Closer to home, he was a Fulbright Senior Fellow in American Studies, John F. Kennedy Institute (2009-10).