Winthrop Rockefeller and African Americans

After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1968, Winthrop Rockefeller was the only southern governor to hold a memorial service for the slain civil rights leader. You can find out more about Rockefeller and the larger history of race relations in Arkansas at a conference being held in the Darragh Center at the Main Public Library in Little Rock on May 11 and 12, 2012. The evening of May 11 will feature a plenary talk by Douglas Blackmon, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Slavery by Another Name. May 12 will feature talks by fourteen experts on a variety of historical and contemporary topics relating to the conference theme of “Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas: Perspectives on the African American and Latina/o Experience.” The conference is free and open to the public. I’m John Kirk of the UALR History Department and this has been an Arkansas moment.