Blackville, Arkansas - Fashioned by a Former Slave: Stories from Individuals Who Remember Blackville

Blackville, Arkansas, an all-Black self-sufficient thriving community was named after its founder Pickens Black Sr., a former slave. When a young man, he migrated to Jackson County in Northeast Arkansas. While working in Jackson County, Black saved his earnings, purchased acres of land, cut the timber, sold it, purchased more acres, repeating the process. By the 1940s he owned 8,000 acres of land, comparable to twelve square miles.

His land started about fourteen miles south of Newport, Arkansas, the county seat, and ran twenty miles south to Shortland. Houses in which families lived that sharecropped on the land of Mr. Black stretched the length of the twenty miles.

Workers grew cotton, rice, and soybeans in season.

There was a mercantile store in Blackville and everything from farming tools and seeds, to watches, shoes and clothes, gasoline, as well as foods were sold there. Black donated the land and paid for the construction of the two churches in Blackville, one Baptist and the other Methodist, and he donated the land and contributed handsomely for the school that was built.

At the height of his power Black owned forty (40) tractors, combines, flatbed trucks, pickup trucks and other agricultural equipment to develop the local economy. He owned several crop dusters which the aviator Pickens Black Jr. and other Black pilots flew. Black pilots resided seasonally in Blackville and flew for the Black enterprise crop dusting.

There was a mechanic shop in Blackville run by men whose sole employment was to maintain the farm machinery for the Black enterprise.

There was a team of builders employed by Black Sr., and their only job was the maintenance and repair of the numerous houses that sharecroppers lived in and the upkeep of structures in Blackville integral to the local economy.

There were men whose salaried occupation was to water and feed the horses and mules that worked the fields.

All the salaried workers lived in Blackville.

When Black died in 1955, he left a rural empire in the isolated hill country that valued in the millions of dollars that consisted of a cotton gin, mercantile store, agrarian machinery, vehicles, grain silos, and a small fleet of airplanes.

The successor of Pickens Black Sr. after his demise was Pickens Black Jr.

Black Jr. expanded the Black enterprise. The rice, cotton, and soybean crops yielded such profits that he had to hire an accountant to come live in Blackville and manage the financial books. A meat slaughtering house was erected and farm animals grown locally were slaughtered and sold. A Farm Manager was hired to come and live in Blackville and manage the huge Black farm economy. The Farm Manager was a recent graduate of AM&N College in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and had a solid academic background in agriculture.

Black Jr. brought a cultural dimension to Blackville. He had a recreation center built for teenagers. A gymnasium was erected to accommodate the junior high school girls' and boys' basketball teams at Blackville Junior High School. A 4-H Club was established.

The aviator would sometimes on a Sunday afternoon take some of the children up in his passenger airplane, circle Blackville, and land, providing them an experience of riding on an aircraft.

Last generation Blackville residents share timeless reflections with readers in this volume.