To mark the launch of UALR’s Institute on Race and Ethnicity, the University History Institute’s “Evenings with History” Lecture Series will present three themed talks this fall focused on the history of the African American freedom struggle in Arkansas. Lecturers will include faculty from the UALR Department of History.

The theme honors UALR’s new Institute on Race and Ethnicity, announced earlier this year by Chancellor Joel E. Anderson. The institute’s goal is to create a fresh agenda on the subject of race aimed at dismantling the historical, cultural, and institutional structures that prevent racial and ethnic justice.

“We are delighted that we can build on our links to and support from our local community partnership with the University History Institute to educate and inform the public on such an important topic,” said Dr. John A. Kirk, chair of the UALR Department of History and one of the fall lecturers.

The Evenings with History lectures on Oct. 4, Nov. 1, and Dec. 6 will begin with refreshments at 7 p.m. with the talk beginning at 7:30 at the Ottenheimer Auditorium in the Historic Arkansas Museum at 200 E. Third St. in Little Rock. Parking is available at the museum’s adjacent parking lot at Third and Cumberland streets.

All members of the Chancellor’s Race and Ethnicity Committee are invited to attend the Fall semester talks free of charge.

Beginning on Oct. 4, Dr. Carl Moneyhon, professor of history at UALR, will talk on “Freedom: Black Arkansans and the End of Slavery.” His talk will examine the post-Emancipation struggle for whites and blacks, looking at how black freedom came to be defined in this tumultuous period and the legacy that solution left the future to face.

Dr. Story Matkin-Rawn, an assistant professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas, will discuss on Nov. 1 the age of segregation with a focus on World War I in her lecture, “From Land Ownership to Legal Defense: The World War I Watershed in Black Arkansan Organizing.”

Soaring farm prices at the end of the war should have helped lift thousands of black Arkansan families from indebted sharecropping to independent farming. But labor exploitation and fraud cut many black families off from the benefits of wartime prosperity. Hundreds of African American farmers organized in the Progressive Farmers and Householders Union to confront these obstacles, but the Elaine Massacre destroyed their movement.

On Dec. 6, John Kirk, will present his lecture, “A Movement is More than a Moment: Arkansas and the African American Civil Rights Struggle since 1940.” The Little Rock Crisis has come to stand for the civil rights movement in Arkansas, but the iconic integration of Central High School was one of many flashpoints in the the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s and was a glimpse of a much longer and more complex struggle for freedom and equality that unfolded over many decades.

The University History Institute, a nonprofit Arkansas corporation, is an organization of private citizens interested in history and in community support for UALR.

Annual subscriptions for the Evenings with History series are $50 per person, a joint subscription for two is $90. A Fellow of the Institute subscription at $250 offers admission to all six lectures and fellows-only special presentations. The series also offers lifetime memberships for $1,000.