The not-so-long-ago alliance of African-American women and the Arkansas Republican Party

Caroline Jett

It has generally been accepted that African-Americans wholly embraced the Democratic Party by the 1970s. This was not, however, entirely the case in Arkansas.

African-Americans were members of the Arkansas Republican Party in the 1960s and 1970s. In particular, black Arkansas women embraced and often became prominent members of the Republican Party.

Harvard University scholar Leah Wright Rigueur has argued in her 2014 monograph, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power, that it was not until the 1960s that black women, “despite being the least likely of any racial demographic to vote for the Republican Party, increasingly played an important public role in party affairs.” This was certainly the case among African-American women in Arkansas.

Black Arkansas women turned to the Republican Party because African-Americans could not access opportunities within the state Democratic Party. When New Yorker and Republican Winthrop Rockefeller ran for governor in 1966, he relied upon the canvassing and organizing skills of black women like Annie Zachary Pike, a native of Marvell, in his quest to make Arkansas a two-party state. Mrs. Pike, who clearly identified herself as a “Rockefeller Republican,” campaigned on his behalf in Phillips County and served as the local Republican Party coordinator.

When Mr. Rockefeller became the first Arkansas Republican elected governor after Reconstruction in 1967, he appointed Mrs. Pike to the state welfare board, a position she held until 1985. Mrs. Pike and Willa Howard from Marianna in Lee County were the only two black women members of the Arkansas Delegation at the Republican National Convention in Miami in August 1972. And later in that same year, Mrs. Pike ran for the Arkansas state senate; she did not win. In 1973, she was elected vice president of the Arkansas Minority Republican Organization (AMRO), the goal of which was to bring more African-Americans into the state Republican Party; in 1974, she served on the Arkansas GOP’s executive committee.

Other black women assumed positions in local Republican Women’s clubs and committees and ran for elected office around the state in the late 1960s and 1970s.

In 1968, North Little Rock’s Minnie Pearl Ross became the first African-American elected to the Republican State Committee. She was also a member of the Pulaski County Republican Committee.

In 1970, Carrie L. Dilworth, a native of Benoit, Mississippi, and a resident of Gould, was chair of the Lincoln County Voters Education Project when she ran for state representative against the Democratic incumbent, Star City’s Jimmie McKissack. An activist since the 1930s, Mrs. Dilworth had also been a member of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, a representative on its executive council, and was well known as one of its best organizers. She was a civil rights activist in the 1960s who had worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to organize the Gould Citizens for Progress Committee (GCPC). Mrs. Dilworth later ran unsuccessfully to become the mayor of Gould.

In southeastern Arkansas, Chicot County café owner Caroline Jett ran for state representative in 1970. During this same year, (Mrs.) Henry Graham managed Winthrop Rockefeller’s West Memphis Minority Headquarters, and in 1972, she directed the combined GOP and “Re-Elect the President” office. In 1974, Mrs. Graham was a Crittenden County Republican Committee member, she had been a delegate to the past four GOP State Conventions, and she was chair of the Crittenden County AMRO.

Younger black women were influenced by Arkansas Republican Party politics as well. In 1971, for instance, Marlyn Kelley, an Arkansas A.M. and N. graduate from Poplar Grove in Phillips County, competed as Miss Black Young Republican in the first Miss Black Arkansas Pageant. Her platform was “the importance of youth becoming more involved in politics.”

And in 1971, Geneive (sic) Smith was elected secretary of the Lonoke County chapter of the Young Republicans of Arkansas.

African-American women eagerly embraced the Arkansas GOP in the 1960s and 1970s because it provided them with political engagement and opportunities to effect change that the Democratic Party denied them.

It is likely that it was after Governor Winthrop Rockefeller’s death in 1973 that African-American women began to find the Republican Party’s increasingly conservative rhetoric distasteful and began to embrace the Arkansas Democratic Party’s inclusive and progressive politics. Yet, for a time, the Arkansas Republican Party’s progressive politics appealed to black women who understood them as the greatest hope for the state’s African-Americans.