In 1900 Harrison, the seat of Boone County, had 1,501 residents, and 115 of them were Black. The St. Louis and North Arkansas Railroad had come through in 1901 and went bankrupt on July 1, 1905, and the Encyclopedia of Arkansas gives the unemployment that followed as the background to what happened next.
October 1905
On October 2, 1905, a white mob of about thirty broke into the jail, took two Black prisoners and several others outside the city limits, whipped them and ordered them to leave. Then the mob burned homes, shot out windows and told every Black resident to be gone that night. Many went to Fayetteville, Eureka Springs or Missouri. Five days later a posse member shot and killed George Richards, a Black railroad worker, at a camp in Omaha. Judge John Henry Rogers and the prosecutor, James Kent Barnes, tried to bring the mob before a grand jury, but witnesses were missing and the jurors would not indict. Froelich and Zimmerman, who later researched the episode, found no record of local officials protecting the Black community.
The second blow came in January 1909. Charles Stinnett, twenty-four, was arrested on January 18 and accused of assaulting a white woman. He testified that he had meant to rob her, not hurt her. A jury convicted him in four hours and he was sentenced to hang. When word spread that the woman was gravely ill, a lynch mob formed, and Stinnett was moved to Marshall.
The woman who stayed
Most of the town's remaining Black residents left on the night of January 28, 1909. One woman stayed, Alecta Caledonia Melvina Smith, whom the town called Aunt Vine. The families who left lost their property, which was declared forfeit. Stinnett's mother collected about 800 names on petitions, nine jurors among them, and Governor George Donaghey stayed the execution for thirty days. He then declined to intervene. Stinnett was hanged on March 24, and public subscription paid to send his body to his mother in Okmulgee.
The census shows the Black populations of neighboring Carroll and Madison counties falling sharply between 1900 and 1910, though the Encyclopedia says the cause is unknown. The Encyclopedia calls Harrison an all-white sundown town afterward. In 2010 the census counted 34 Black residents among 12,943.
What was dug up
The story was almost lost. The Harrison Daily Times has gaps for the riot dates and most 1905 grand jury records are missing. Jacqueline Froelich and David Zimmerman pieced it together in an Arkansas Historical Quarterly article, "Total Eclipse," in 1999, and it won the Arkansas Historical Association's Gingles Award. In 2003, after a series in the Daily Times, Mayor Bob Reynolds convened a Community Task Force on Race Relations, which was still working in 2017.
Harrison considers itself the gateway to the Buffalo National River, fourteen miles south, which the Associated Press says draws more than 1.5 million visitors a year. The Park Service's Tyler Bend visitor center is on the middle stretch of the river, and a public radio documentary on the Ozarks' Black communities describes Harrison's history as buried for almost a century.