Blood
in Their Eyes: An Interview With Grif Stockley |
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Interviewed by Guy Lancaster Grif Stockley has received wide acclaim for his two books on Arkansas racial history— Blood in their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacre of 1919 (University of Arkansas Press, 2001) and Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas (University of Mississippi Press, 2005)—but he first came to the attention of the state and the nation for his six legal mysteries, five of which star the intrepid lawyer Gideon Page, which won him the Porter Prize, Arkansas’s foremost literary award. A longtime advocate for the legally dispossessed, Stockley was a legal services attorney in Little Rock for twenty-nine years and the staff attorney for the Arkansas ACLU before he signed on as the first Dee Brown Fellow of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, where he is currently researching his next book. GL: I was wondering if, first off, you could talk a little bit about what you’re working on right now. GS: Okay. I’m working on a history of race relations in Arkansas, slavery to the present, and actually, the first book I ever tried to write was a book called, Race Relations in Arkansas: Thank God for Mississippi. It was back in the 70s, and it was pretty bad in retrospect. I mean, I’ve learned an awful lot since then. But here I am, thirty years later, and I’m finally writing it again, and I think it’s going to be a little bit better. GL: Is that because there’s a lot more scholarship— GS: Oh, there’s so much more scholarship! It’s astonishing how much more scholarship there is, and how much more honest scholarship. Arkansas history has been shameful in its treatment of race. There’s been so much of it that’s been, in my opinion, an apology for white supremacy and racism. And I don’t think that’s all that unique a view. There’s a book by a history professor at North Carolina about public history, and he cites Arkansas—the guy who was the head of the Arkansas History Commission— GL: Was it Dallas Herndon? GS: Yeah, Dallas Herndon. And people who did these in the South, who became heads of history commissions, basically omitted black history, and we just lost so much history as a result of those early historians—and this is in the words of the North Carolina professor who wrote this book. So much of what is preserved was a kind of monument to the Anglo-Saxon legacy and history and a glorification of that. And you can see that the speeches of Governor [Charles] Brough. Ironically, he had applied for a job in Mississippi to be the head of their archives and didn’t get the job, and that’s why he came to Arkansas, to be a professor at the University of Arkansas. GL: So is this going to be black, white, Native American…. GS: No, it’s just going to be black and white. That’s about all I’m capable of at this point. I think there’s a place for a book like this because, as far as I know, nobody’s ever written a history of race relations, certainly not in Arkansas history. No one’s concentrated on the history from slavery to the present. GL: Maybe that’s somewhat indicative of trends in academia, to write about smaller subjects. GS: Well, I’m not an academic and I’m not competent to comment on what trends are. GL: A lot of the books now, they’re about race relations in a particular county, 1914 to 1928, for example.
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