Arkansas Identity, Between South and Somewhere Else

Arkansas has had a complicated relationship with its own reputation. For much of the twentieth century, the state was the butt of a specific set of American jokes, poor, backward, barefoot, a place where nothing important happened and ambition went to die. The jokes were not entirely without foundation.

Arkansas ranked near the bottom of most economic and educational measures for decades, and its political culture had long rewarded insularity and punished deviation from orthodoxy. But the jokes were also a projection: they told you more about the anxieties of the rest of America than about the actual complexity of a state that produced William Fulbright and Johnny Cash and Scott Joplin and Maya Angelou and Sam Walton in the same century. William Fulbright represented Arkansas in the United States Senate for nearly thirty years, from nineteen forty-five to nineteen seventy-four, and chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

He was the longest-serving chair in that committee's history, a man of considerable intellectual ambition and deeply provincial racial politics, he signed the Southern Manifesto opposing desegregation and never quite reconciled those two parts of himself. Johnny Cash grew up in Kingsland and in the Depression-era Delta community of Dyess, where his family farmed government land under the New Deal. Scott Joplin was born in northeast Texas and grew up in Texarkana, on the Arkansas-Texas border, and the region shaped his earliest musical formation.

Maya Angelou grew up partly in Stamps, in Lafayette County, and wrote about it in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings with a precision that made that small Arkansas town part of American literature. What these figures share is not Arkansas exactly, but the place that formed them: a state that asked its people to be more than their circumstances and often received an answer. Arkansas is still answering.