Black Araewness Weekend Organizers Searcy, AR 2005

It was a first for White County and it was a huge success, organizers for the first White County Black History Awareness Program said of last weekend's event.

The event included special presentations and culminated in a parade through downtown Searcy.

Many people are talking about the event and its possible future effects on the community, William Gant, pastor of St. Mary's Church said.

Gant has already received calls from people asking the date of next year's parade, he said.

Next year's program will be held during the third week of February.

"It may not be limited to a weekend," Marva Holiday of the White County Black History Awareness Committee said. "We are trying to expand it into a week-long event."

Last weekend's program, which included a parade on Saturday through downtown Searcy, was more than a celebration, Joseph Washington, chairman of the committee, said.

The events of the weekend were the start of the process of recording all the other milestones of White County's black community, he said.

"Before this program there was no consolidated place of information about accomplishments of the black community in White County," Washington said.

At Friday night's event at the Carmichael Center, a written program distributed to the audience honored over 100 White County black pioneers who had integrated their professions in the region.

It is a matter of preserving a history that has rarely been set to paper.

Francis Tollever, a literature professor at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, who has published a study of the history of the black community in White County says it is a topic about which not enough has been written.

"We're getting ready to pass on stories from generations," Washington said.

That history is told through the life stories of black White Countians who have lived through the changing times of race relations.

Growing up black in Searcy presented Margarete Sipes, 83, with a different perspective of the city.

Sipes graduated high school not once, for example, but enough times that she no longer remembers the dates of each graduation. She graduated the 10th grade in 1937. But there was an 8th grade graduation some years earlier, and another graduation sometime after 1937. All because the school she attended kept adding grades as she went along.

The White County Training School where she attended, the only school for black students in the region, slowly grew until it offered a full high school education, she said.

"Every now and then another year would be added," she said. And she would return to school.

Students attended the White County Training School from Beebe, McRae, Judsonia, Kensett and Mt. Vernon. For some students it was a 32-mile trip each morning and afternoon.

"They would pass right by different white schools when the students were bussed down here. It was because we were consolidated. White schools weren't consolidated," said Sipes.

James Adair Washington recalled a history of segregation that did not prevent white and black children from playing ball in yards together. But when he grew older he met economic discrimination.

"We worked real hard, but we didn't get the pay whites got," recalled Washington who left Searcy in 1952 for service in the Korean War. That was shortly after his 12th grade graduation from the White County Training School in 1951, the second year that the school offered a 12th grade high school diploma.

Sipes was conscious of prejudice. Each morning before school she walked in through the back door to work in a white family's home.

"They let you come on in, and you cook and take care of their babies, but you had to come in through the back door," said Sipes.

Only to sweep the porch, would Sipes would cross the threshold of the front door.

Before moving to Searcy, Carrie Ann Washington knew Searcy from passing through on a bus from Little Rock to Batesville. A stop in Searcy meant a few minutes off the bus and a chance to order a bite to eat at Robinson Rendezvous restaurant. For black passengers, food could be ordered at a side window.

Segregation, Washington recalls, began at birth. When her son was born 51 years ago, the delivery happened in a room in the back of Porter Rodgers Hospital. There were two rooms in the back reserved for black patients, said Washington.

"This was sure enough Jim Crow. We didn't have freedom to do as we chose. We had to do what the white man said. You couldn't come as you wanted to do. You were restricted," Washington said.