On September 10, 1970, the Rev. Ezra Greer and his wife, Jackie, who was a candidate for mayor of Earle, Arkansas, led a march from an Earle church toward Earle city hall when local white residents opened fire on the marchers, which led to a violent night in which Earle’s white and Black residents fired shots at each other. The dispute had started over the integration of Earle schools, in which the local school district tried to have classes segregated by race within supposedly-integrated public schools. In an odd reversal of the usual pattern in the South, the Rev. Greer formed a Black private school, the Soul Institute, which existed for at least one school year, 1970 and 1971. Jackie Greer did not get to be mayor of Earle in 1971, but Earle has had Black mayors, and made national news last year with the election of Jaylen Smith, at eighteen years old, the youngest mayor in the United States.
Unfortunately, Smith inherited a city with nothing to work with. Earle, once the largest incorporated town in Crittenden County, Arkansas, was a railroad town and commercial center for nearby cotton plantations. It depended on agriculture and cotton ginning, and had one large industry, known as Earl of Arkansas. But Earle’s fortunes began to decline during the 1960s. Many of the town’s Black residents began to move to the North in search of something other than the farms and cotton fields which surrounded the town. And when it became apparent that schools were going to be integrated, whites began to move as well, to West Memphis, Marion and even Memphis. With the town nearly evenly divided between whites and Blacks, racial tension was perhaps inevitable, but it exploded in 1970 when Dunbar High School was closed and Blacks sent to Earle High School. Earle’s superintendent, Sam Bratton, decided that the best way to avoid problems was to assign Blacks to Black homerooms with Black teachers, and whites to white homerooms with white teachers. There were no Black cheerleaders, no Blacks on the student council, and Black students felt they were being discriminated against in athletics and extracurricular activities. They took their concerns to the Rev. W. Exra Greer, who had moved to Earle, Arkansas from Selma, Alabama, where he had marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Greer had started something he called the Crittenden County Improvement Association, which had made headlines in the summer of 1969 for demanding that the Earle town dump be moved away from the Black community south of the railroad tracks. At Greer’s prompting, Black students walked out of Earle schools on Labor Day. By some accounts, some of them threw rocks at cars, businesses and white residents. When these students were convicted and sentenced by the mayor, the resulting protest march led to the shootings.
In the wake of the upheavals of 1970 and 1971, whites and Blacks fled the town, and the decline of family farms and agricultural also hit the town hard. Earl of Arkansas was the target of union organizers many times over the years, and one campaign notably brought Jesse Jackson to Earle in the 1980s. Eventually, it closed as well, and as it was Earle’s only industry, it led to more people moving away.
Today, like many Delta towns, Earle’s downtown is largely abandoned. There are grassy vacant lots where buildings once stood, and many abandoned buildings. The historic old high school has been replaced by a new one north of town along the bypass. There is an abandoned football field west of the former school, with its “Earle Bulldogs” scoreboard still intact, and beyond that, an abandoned swimming pool and water park full of stagnant water, presumably because the town does not have the money to repair it or make it operational. Young’s Grocery remains open, blasting 1990s rhythm and blues music out into the street, and the former railroad depot is the Crittenden County Museum. But nearly every building on Main Street is vacant, and most of the buildings on Second and Commercial streets are also vacant.
As bad as things seem on the north side of the tracks, on the south side, things look even worse. There are a couple of cafes, some churches, some small houses, an abandoned motel, and a lot of vacant lots where houses once stood. Dominating the neighborhood to the west is the abandoned site of the former Earl of Arkansas company. Aside from a park with basketball goals and a convenience store or two, there is not much going on in the Southside neighborhood of Earle.
Mayor Jaylen Smith has done the best he could, but he has had to deal with a wintertime collapse of water pipes, and a fiscal crisis that led to the interruption of garbage pickup because the town’s only truck was broken down and no city funds available for its repair. The future for Earle does not seem particularly bright. However, unlike its neighbors on either side, Parkin and Crawfordsville, Earle so far has managed to hold on to its school system. That may be in part that neither Marion nor Wynne particularly wants to absorb its predominantly-Black student body, and the transportation distance for the young people to either district would be prohibitive. It seems likely that, unless things change, they will probably eventually be annexed to the West Memphis School District. If that happens, Earle will likely die the same death as Hughes.