The UALR Center for Arkansas History and Culture, UALR Department of History, and The Butler Center for Arkansas Studies of the Central Arkansas Library System will host a panel discussion about the 1927 lynching of African American John Carter at 5:30 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 15 at the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center. The event is free and open to the public.
The panel will include John A. Kirk, UALR Donaghey Professor, chair of the history department, and civil-rights scholar, Cherisse Jones-Branch, associate professor of history at Arkansas State University, and Stephanie Harp, the great-granddaughter of one of the deputy sheriffs involved in the lynching, and George Fulton, Jr., the great-grandson of Carter.
Limited scholarly and popular articles about the circumstances surrounding this incident have been published to date.
Little Rock was mired in social instability that resulted in the incident in 1927. “The lynching of John Carter was one of the worst episodes of racial violence in Little Rock in the twentieth century, and it continues to shape the collective memory of the African American community in the city today,” said Kirk, who has authored such books as Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1940-1970 and Beyond Little Rock: The Origins and Legacies of the Central High Crisis.
Carter’s murder is often called the “last lynching in Little Rock.”
For more information about this event, contact the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center at (501) 683-6457.
