Interviewed by Guy Lancaster

GS: Fortunately, there has been that kind of trend. Because there’s this view that that’s where you’ve got to read that kind of history, and you’re not going to know what a state or a region has done until you’ve read those very local histories. In Arkansas, the book Who Killed John Clayton? is a perfect example of local history that makes that point by looking at what happened in places like Conway County—that explains why we have the 1899 election law and what motivated it.

GL: And so… this is kind of a ticky question somewhat, but you’re working on a history of race relations, you’ve written two books already on that, and you’re a white guy.

GS: Yeah.

GL: Has it been somewhat difficult to get an African-American perspective either in talking with people—

GS: Okay, I haven’t gotten to the talking to stage; I’m still reading all the history I can. It’s absolutely essential that we get the African-American perspective. But I’m about to go off on a couple of books now that we’ve elevated to iconic status in Arkansas. We’ve got Orville Taylor’s Negro Slavery in Arkansas—that book was reprinted by University of Arkansas Press a few years ago, and quite frankly, in my opinion, it’s part of our legacy of white supremacy, because that book does not look at slavery from the African-American point of view despite the fact that, at the time it was written, in 1957 or 58, the [WPA] slave narratives were available to Orville Taylor. He takes five or six quotes from Bodkin’s Lay My Burden Down, which quotes the slave narratives, but you cannot write a history if you don’t have the perspective of half of the people you’re talking about. That book could not be published today. Imagine a book about professional baseball where you don’t interview the players. A publisher would laugh you out of his office, and yet now we’ve taken that book and had it reprinted by University of Arkansas, and the main reason they’ve done it was we don’t have another history. But without the perspective of African Americans, any kind of history about slavery is just fatally flawed, misleading, and makes all kinds of misconceptions about what slavery was like. If they want to reprint some books, I’ve got some suggestions already that Arkansans have written, but that wouldn’t be one of them. So the fact that I’m white makes it doubly important to try to get the perspective. The latest book—what’s the guy who was just here?

GL: George Lankford? [Author of Bearing Witness: Memories of the Arkansas Slavery Narratives from the 1930s WPA Collections]

GS: George Lankford. I think he’s done a wonderful service in collecting the Arkansas-based [WPA] interviews on slavery, and that’s where I’m going to start my book, on the slavery section. There are some incredible stories in the slave narratives, and they need to be heard. You touched a sore spot there—sorry. Taylor himself could have gone to the slave narratives and ferreted the Arkansas stuff. As a historian, I think he was obligated to go that, and I don’t care about the historiography of the day and that people weren’t doing that—it’s inexcusable. I’m not an academic historian, but I’m good enough to know that I couldn’t get a book published on baseball if I didn’t include the perspective of the players.

GL: You probably couldn’t get a passing grade on a freshman paper with that.