BUTLER CENTER FOR ARKANSAS STUDIES, CENTRAL ARKANSAS LIBRARY SYSTEM
HISTORY
RIGHT-TO-WORK SUPPORTERS: The Arkansas Free Enterprise Association was created by the State Chamber of Commerce and others to prosecute strikers. This page from an AFEA brochure shows some of its members.
The Racist Roots of Anti-Unionism MOTIVATED BY MONEY AND WHITE SUPREMACIST BELIEFS, THE STATE FARM BUREAU, CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE AND OTHERS LINED UP WITH SEGREGATIONISTS TO ENACT THE ‘RIGHT TO WORK’ LAW. BY MICHAEL C. PIERCE
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nti-unionism and white supremacy have been joined at the hip in Arkansas since World War II. As seen over the last five years, the forces that abolished the Little Rock School Board as soon as it had a black majority and have pursued policies that would resegregate the city’s public schools are the same ones who decertified the Little Rock Education Association. The current trouble in the city is deeply rooted in its past. Here’s the history of Arkansas’s racist underpinnings of its anti-union positions: Around 5:30 p.m. on Dec. 26, 1945, Otha Williams, an African-American strikebreaker, left the Southern Cotton Oil Co. mill on East Ninth Street in Little Rock through a side entrance, away from the Food, Tobacco and Allied Agricultural
Workers Union (FTA) Local 98’s picket line. As he and four other strikebreakers crossed the street, they encountered two strikers, Walter Campbell and Robert Brooks, both African-American. Although accounts differ as to what happened next, there was agreement on these essential details: Strikebreaker Williams pulled a knife, stabbed striker Campbell multiple times and left him to die on the street. A Pulaski County grand jury refused to indict Williams for killing Campbell, concluding that he had acted in self-defense, but it did charge six black FTA Local 98 members with violating an anti-labor violence law enacted by the Arkansas General Assembly in 1943 that made picketers criminally liable for any strike-related violence. Charges against four of these men were later dropped, but Pulaski Country Prosecutor Sam Robinson sought to make an
example of the local’s leaders at the mill, Louis Jones and Roy Cole. The pair had not participated in the violence, but, nonetheless, Robinson put them on trial, secured convictions and convinced the judge to sentence each man to hard labor in the state penitentiary. The court proceedings so outraged civil rights activists Daisy and L.C. Bates that they published a blistering condemnation in their newspaper, the Arkansas State Press. The judge responded by jailing them for impugning the integrity of his court. The killing of Walter Campbell, the convictions of Louis Jones and Roy Cole and the jailing of the Bateses were all part of a broader anti-union movement that was designed to keep black and white workers apart and competing against each other. The planters, bankers and utility magnates who had long controlled ArARKANSASTIMES.COM
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