PRESIDENT’S REPORT
Arkansas Bar Presidents Past and Future “Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.” – Marian Wright Edelman
On the second floor of the Arkansas Bar Center are two walls with pictures of the past presidents of the Arkansas Bar Association. As President Bob Estes and President-Elect Joe Kolb take office it is appropriate to remember some of our predecessors—if only for a bit of context or simply out of curiosity. I am the 123rd President of the Arkansas Bar Association and, like many of my predecessors, I want to believe that the past year has been one like none other. But that is axiomatic. So, in no particular order and at the risk of leaving out a lot, we pause to remember some milestones and a few millstones in our history. U.M. Rose was the first President of the Arkansas Bar Association and many others from his eponymously named Rose Law Firm (which celebrated its 200th birthday in 2020) have served as association president, most recently Brian Rosenthal, whose creativity and enthusiasm as president are unsurpassed. U.M. Rose’s grandson, George Rose Smith, was elected to the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1948 and served until 1987. On a personal note, when Justice George Rose Smith retired, he sold his personal copy of The Arkansas Law Review to my law partner, Cliff Gibson of Monticello. Justice Smith and Bar President 6
The Arkansas Lawyer
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Paul W. Keith is the President of the Arkansas Bar Association. He is a member of Gibson & Keith, Monticello
“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” – Native American Proverb
J. Gaston Williamson (1968-1969) delivered the books to Monticello while on a hunting trip to Drew County. A bit more about Justice Smith later on. There was at least one milestone and one millstone in 1919. On July 28, 1919, less than a month into the term of William H. Martin of Hot Springs, Arkansas, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in Arkansas, recognizing the right of women to vote. Just two months later, September 30-October 1, 1919, an estimated 100-237 black people and five white people died in Phillips County, in what has come to be known as the Elaine Massacre. One hundred years later, President Rosenthal and I represented the Arkansas Bar Association in downtown Helena-West Helena at the dedication of a memorial to those who died in the massacre. Past President John Gill (19921993) was also in attendance. Later in 2019, the Elaine Twelve were memorialized on the Arkansas Civil Rights Heritage Trail in Little Rock. The Elaine Twelve owed their lives to Arkansas Bar President Thomas McRae (1917-1918). The Elaine Twelve were 12 black men who were convicted of murder in connection with the Elaine Massacre and were sentenced to death. Scipio Africanus Jones convinced the U.S. Supreme Court in 1923 to require that the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas examine the fairness of their trials.1 Thomas McRae was elected governor in 1920 and served from 1921 to 1925. After the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Scipio Africanus
Jones’ client, Governor McRae commuted the Elaine Twelve’s sentences and they were released. More about Governor McRae later. Lest we believe we are unique for having lived through the COVID-19 pandemic, one need only look to the 1918 flu epidemic, which took the lives of about 7,000 Arkansas residents; the mortality rate at Camp Pike (now Camp Robinson) was so high that the undertakers who had the government contract for the camp were overwhelmed and the Army assigned government embalmers to keep up with the deaths, and a statewide quarantine was put in place.2 Such was the water in which Thomas McRae’s successor as Bar President, J.H. Carmichael of Little Rock, swam. By way of comparison, as of May 16, 2021, there had been 5,793 deaths from COVID-19 in Arkansas.3 In 1927, W.T. Wooldridge of Pine Bluff took office in the midst of a great flood that inundated about 6,600 square miles in Arkansas with 36 of the 75 counties being flooded to some degree and water up to 30 feet deep in places. The September 1927 National Geographic said that the streets of Arkansas City were dry and dusty at noon, but by 2:00 p.m., “mules were drowning on Main Street faster than people could unhitch them from wagons.”4 More about a mule skinner Arkansas Bar President later. As late as the 1960s one could see in my home town of Lake Village the “high water mark” about six feet high on the old county jail. And the railroad bridge between flooded North Little Rock and Little Rock was washed away by the flood.
