Pine Bluff, June 1959

A Sebastopol resident looks back at the small, segregated college town in Arkansas where he grew up

AM&N, a historically black college, is now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.

By Bill Phillips

I really don’t think many people know where Pine Bluff is or what it means. For me it is a place of occasional warm and pleasant memories, particularly the lazy, lush early summer days, lying on the velvety grass covering the football field of the Golden Lions. Decades later, I remember the vivid azure and puffy white clouds drifting very, very slowly across the sky.

That playing field was soothing peaceful and enticing as the innocence of our youth transfixed by the natural beauty of things. Although four or five 9- and 10-year-olds don’t articulate such thoughts, we experienced them, and those feelings and enjoyment remain part of what Pine Bluff means to me today.

Having said that, there’s bitter with the sweet. The small and insular community of black Americans affiliated with the Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal (AM&N) College there were too often enveloped in fear and uncertainty.

In those days, Pine Bluff was an agricultural community of about 40,000 white and black souls. It was a segregated community, and I never remember seeing us doing anything together. Everything was segregated: restaurants, water fountains, bathrooms, movie theaters, and schools were segregated. Little black boys and girls did not associate or play with little white boys and girls. White folks had the country club, we had AM&N, a small historically black college, serving an isolated black community

There was a foul-smelling paper mill in town. Sometimes the smell of the mill made you gag. Black folks were used to it, as the smell blew over AM&N. When the smell was particularly disgusting, we looked at one another and said, “The Mill”— a phrase sheltering a host of physical and psychological insults. Nothing deterred us from what we wanted to do. There was order in our lives, and the stink was part of it.

There was a segregated swimming pool at Johnson’s Park that was great fun. I almost drowned there one day horsing around with my friends. I was proud I could dive to the bottom of the the deep end and hold my breath longer than everybody else. This day, my air ran out bolting towards the surface and the tangle of too many kids above me, blocked my way to the air. I experienced the shock of real fear and isolation on that day. Perhaps this was my first inkling of what I understood much later in life as “impermanence”—the shock of knowing I could die.

Then out of the warbled sunlight overhead, a sudden arm grabbed me by the shoulder and dragged me to the surface. The arm belonged to my friend’s older brother, Buddy. I cried then. When I finally stopped, somehow, I knew that everything was different.

Of course, in 1959 all the black kids played ball on the campus of AM&N. We all knew Jackie Robinson had broken the color line in professional baseball but knew too through our fathers’ conversations that there were great black players in the game before Robinson. We’d heard of Larry Dobey or Bumpsey Green, and the legendary black players like Moses Fleetwood Walker and Bud Fowler from the 1880s were still discussed— players so good white folks banned them from the game.

There was plenty of joy, but behind it, behind the ambitions, excitements, and mysteries of our normal childhoods, there was always a faint stench of fear in that segregated community. It was usually unclear or pieced together from snatches of conversation we accidentally overheard in the hushed, rapid whispers of our parents and their friends. New words like “segregation” or “the whites” bubbled up from the ordinary chatter kids ignored. We knew about white people. You had to know, but “the whites” was something different, something fearful that made the grownups nervous. That made us nervous. There were other ‘nervous’ words like “integration,” and “The Governor.” We sensed the fear most clearly when our parents took us to the local Five and Dime Kresge’s store in Pine Bluff.

Whenever we had errands in town, Momma was adamant about our using the bathroom before going into town. We could beg all we wanted, but she would not stop for an ice cream or hot dog or even a glass of water. There was something about her alertness that agitated my own fear so, when she was like that, we just minded. When we entered the store, Momma’s grip tightened, and my brother and I checked each other, unsure of what that meant. I tried to wiggle a little, but she didn’t loosen her grip. “I don’t want you to get lost,” she said.

What was she talkin’ about? How could we get lost in a store? But you didn’t ever want to get sideways with Momma. We had no inkling about her fear and heightened alertness, but we knew it had something to do with sharing physical space with white folks.

Even in those situations, we were still kids, and our thoughts invariably migrated back to the innocence and safety of the clover-carpeted campus, or the solid double I had smacked the day before.

There were a few black businesses in “our” part of Pine Bluff where she relaxed, particularly the barber shop where many of the black folks and their children went for haircuts and, frankly, to be in a safe space and be ourselves. We could be loud and laugh and play checkers — aggressive and friendly games with a lot of hollerin’! There was a black woman’s “beauty parlor,” where my mom and other black women got their hair cut and trimmed and did something called a “perm,” which I still don’t understand. It was well into the 21st century before I learned that my dad, in addition to being a professor and department chairman at the black college, was an officer of the local NAACP Chapter and engaged with colleagues and black civil rights litigator Wiley Austin Branton, in challenging the City of Pine Bluff’s refusal to implement the new desegregation laws created after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education overruled the old “separate but equal” justification for segregation in 1954.

It required six decades before I grasped my dad’s objective understanding of the dangers of living in a racist city as a large black man. As a 6’2”, 180-pound former basketball player at Langston College and a WW II Pacific Theater Navy veteran with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he was an affront to white notions of “his place.” He was escorting his two male children in the town where he was aggressively challenging the racism of the white community — its lynchings, extra-judicial murders of black men, women and children — commonplace at that time. The archives of Tuskegee Institute recorded over 200 lynchings of black people in Arkansas between 1882 and 1968. Innocence...a fleeting sense indeed!

In spite of all that, it’s also true that the seed of a real American patriotism was planted in my heart in that segregated town.

As a second grader at J.C. Corbin Elementary School*, I remember the immaculately dressed Black children standing rigidly at attention as Ms. Dotson signaled us to begin reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Color me impressionable, but I still remember each word and how I felt reciting and believing those words. We recited from memory with energy and gusto! (A part of that gusto could be related to the common knowledge that Ms. Dotson enforced her discipline with an 18-inch wooden ruler.) We placed our hands over our hearts and said the words clearly, not comprehending everything they meant, but buoyed by some barely recognized feeling of aspiration. This jewel shone deeply buried in the cauldron of hostility, racism and barely concealed hatred bubbling over just beyond the protective shelter of AM&N College.

So when I describe the gentle warm summer breeze to you and the wafting sweetness of recently cut grass and when I recall the softness of the field of clover, the contradiction never has to be explained to a black person. There was fear in the town, certainly, but due to the courage of our parents and elders, due to the support of that small insular black community surrounding AM&N College, there was joy, fun, and for children at least, there was an irrepressible hopefulness — nourished by our parents’ determination to protect our innocence from the dark knowledge of white people they were forced to negotiate daily to survive.

Today, I’m deeply grateful to our black parents who managed to keep us innocent for as long as they did. What a wonder they could protect that sense of security in my memories—at a cost I can only imagine. My gratitude to them remains boundless!

Bill Phillips, a lifelong student of Ki Aikido, enjoys living in Sebastopol with his wife Linda, two adult sons and dog.

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* The school was named after Joseph Carter Corbin, abolitionist, educator, and the founder of AM&N, which is now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.

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