“Across the Bayou: The African American Community of Grady, Arkansas”
The Arkansas History Commission will display a photographic exhibit entitled “Across the Bayou: The African American Community of Grady, Arkansas.” The black-and- white photographs taken during the Depression capture rare scenes of African Americans engaged in everyday activities such as agriculture, education, domestic life, business and religion. The southeast Arkansas town in Lincoln County is comprised of a relatively large African American population. Nestled along the Choctaw Bayou, Grady is about twenty-five miles south of Pine Bluff with the neighboring towns of Gould and Varner, Arkansas. Its 1930 population of 496 people remains about the same as its population today.
The exhibit’s forty images are from the collection of Cornelia Kirkley Foster who moved to Grady with her parents in 1910. Cornelia later moved to Camden, Arkansas in 1940 where she owned Foster’s Business School. She died in Camden in 1971. Cornelia’s photographs and original manuscript, yellowed with age, were tucked away in a cedar chest for over sixty-five years. The manuscript was recently donated to the Arkansas History Commission by her son, W.F. Foster of Pine Bluff. Foster, age 79, does not know how his mother became interested in the project of photographing and collecting biographical information of Grady’s black residents, except everyone seemed like family. African Americans lived in tenement houses close to the family owned stave and boat mill. Mr. Foster described his mother as a very talented artist and a musician. He published her unedited manuscript entitled “Across the Horizon” in 2006.
The style in which Cornelia Foster gathered her material closely resembles the work of the Federal Writers’ Project, where she collected information on folkways and recorded biographies and narratives of local residents. The Federal Writers’ Project was part of the Works Progress Administration, created in 1935 as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation. The name was changed in 1939 to the Work Projects Administration. W. F. Foster acknowledges in the book’s foreword that the script was “written in a different time and world than we now know.” Cornelia’s work also appears to have documented several former slaves living in the community not identified or interviewed for the Arkansas slave narratives project. One ex-slave, Amy Lewis, was born in South Carolina in 1850 and died in 1944. Amy’s living descendants in Grady recount her stories of being sold away from her family in South Carolina at the age of eight years old, with her name changed to keep her family from tracing her. After she was freed at age fifteen, she was sent to Arkansas Post to work as a farm laborer. It was at Arkansas Post that she met her husband and started her family.
By the 1930s African Americans in Grady owned a variety of businesses such as stores, cafes, dance halls, molasses mills, and auto repair stations. Church and religion played a major role in the community where ministers preached from the pulpit and gifted musicians and choirs played and song old hymns. In 1942, the WPA documented eight Baptist churches, four Methodist churches and one Church of God in Christ in the community. A few photographs of some of these original sanctuaries were captured on film. Other scenes of schools, teachers, farm life, and community events weave a wonderful story of African American life in a small, rural community. Images come to life with artifacts from the History Commission’s museum collection.
The exhibit will display from the exhibit area located at the Arkansas History Commission, 1 Capitol Mall, Little Rock, Arkansas 72201 (2nd Floor) from February 6, 2007 through June 2007.
For more information, feel free to contact: Julienne Crawford, Curator or Linda McDowell, African American History Coordinator at 501.682.6900.
