Lee County, Arkansas was named for Robert E. Lee at its founding, and by its folklore, at the suggestion of a Black resident, which highlights some of the contradictions that still haunt this part of the Arkansas Delta. Lee County was once one of the Blackest counties in America, yet the town of Marianna was, briefly in 1971 and 1972 the scene of significant racial conflict.
The catalyst for difficulty in Marianna began with the coming of VISTA workers from the Federal government, who helped local Black residents set up a medical clinic called the Lee County Cooperative Clinic in 1969. One of the Black community leaders who was involved with the founding of the clinic was Olly Neal, who was at odds with the city and county officials in Marianna. The latter denied the clinic doctor the right to admit patients to the Lee County Hospital, and when that failed, they wrote letters to the federal government trying to get the funding cut. That did not work either. At one point, when Federal funds were briefly delayed after Arkansas Democrats complained, folk singer Joan Baez came to Marianna and performed a free concert to help call attention to the clinic and raise funds for it. That the county officials objected to a health clinic in a county as unhealthy as Lee was one of the ironies. However, it was not the medical aspect that concerned them. As one of the county officials, Lon Mann, was quoted as saying at the time, “They (the VISTA workers) are telling the Blacks to raise up.”
And the Black community did indeed “raise up,” When, in 1971, a Black schoolteacher was arrested for refusing to pay for a pizza she ordered because it was not ready before she had to return to work, the Black community decided to boycott the town of Marianna. That many of the boycott leaders were also involved in the clinic only increased the white community’s opposition to it. Businesses began to close, and mysterious arson fires broke out. Whites joined the Citizens Council, a segregationist organization that had spread across the South after the Supreme Court issued its school desegregation decision in 1954. The governor at the time, Dale Bumpers, tried and failed to negotiate an end to the difficulties in Lee County.
With the establishment of Lee Academy, the white community basically abandoned the public schools, and when the school board refused to allow Black students a holiday on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday in 1972, they walked out as a group and were sprayed with firehoses despite the January weather.
Marianna has never truly recovered from the boycott of 1971-1972, even if the town looks somewhat better than its once-bigger neighbor Helena to the south. There have been several more school walkouts and boycotts over the years, and the usual problem of lack of school funding that is common to any county where the white residents have chosen private schooling. Worse, Marianna seems stuck in a time warp. The public schools are all-Black, and the academy all-white. The town square is still dominated by a statue of Robert E. Lee, for whom the county is named. Blacks live on one side of town and whites on the other, although whites are continuing to move away.
After 1972, Blacks began moving away too, mainly to the North, But one peculiarity of Marianna brings them back, a tradition of Black gathering in large numbers to party and celebrate in town on Memorial Day. How that tradition developed is unclear, and it is unique, at least in the Mid-South. This year, by some estimates, as many as 20,000 people may have visited Marianna. Otherwise, the town seems rather quiet and moribund. There is no industry to speak of, and nothing to lure new residents or businesses.