I never did lose consciousness, till they put me in the hospital and had to do surgery. “I was shot bad, but never did fall down. Her friend, Jessie Mae Maples, was shot in the back and despite serious damage to her vital organs kept on walking. So concludes Jackie Greer in recounting the history of a 1970 civil rights march in the delta town of Earle, Arkansas. And in Memphis, unless there’s a murder, they hardly holler, didn’t bother about coming. We never really did get much news coverage. Earle is nothing but a little out-of-the-way place that most people haven’t heard anything about. Dannin collaborated with Richards when they both worked at Magnum Photos, was a student of Howard Zinn’s at Boston University, and contributes to the Zinn Education Project. To learn about the stories in the book, read the following essay by Robert Dannin, an independent scholar in linguistics and anthropology. Now, it can be purchased from the author’s website. history, and/or on approaches to oral history collection. Thanks to a generous donor, hundreds of copies of the $60 book were made available free to teachers for their lessons on Arkansas history, U.S. Recognizing the power of these deeply personal stories, Richards recorded and collected them in the 160-pages of the day I was born, published by Many Voices Press in 2020, with full color photographs. Among these conversations, were stories about the history of protest and social change in the region, systemic racism, poverty, Black history, abuse of women, and the struggle to be what you want to be. People he met were eager to talk about their lives. While there, he went to Earle “with the single purpose of revisiting a place I’d reported on when a young journalist 50 years earlier.” In early 2019, Richards returned to the region to examine change. Then he helped found a social service organization and newspaper, for which he was a reporter and photographer. Richards had been in the Arkansas Delta as a VISTA volunteer. (These events are described in detail in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas in two entries: Earle Race Riot and William Ezra Greer.) Five African Americans were wounded, including two women who were shot.” The protestors were also demanding that the polluted town dump be moved from the Black neighborhood. The resistance in Earle turned into a riot on September 10 and 11, 1970, when “a group of whites armed with guns and clubs attacked a group of unarmed African Americans who were marching to the city hall in Earle to protest segregated conditions in the town’s school system. The day I was born is a collection of oral history interviews and photographs from the Arkansas Delta (primarily in Earle), by photographer, writer, and filmmaker Eugene Richards.Įarle, Arkansas, is one of countless towns with a history of Civil Rights Movement activism and violent white resistance that do not make the history textbooks.
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