Dream Land: Little Rock's West 9th Street

[Music] major funding provided by the Arkansas Humanities Council and the Moving Image trust fund [Music] ladies and gentlemen including the people like myself we want to thank you for coming to the dreamland ballroom we want you to come back tonight tomorrow night and from now on we want to have fun here at the dreamland ballroom in the lowlands thank you people would come from miles around to come to nice tree just to see what it was like I'm saying this was the letter of entertainment in the south we thought we was on top of the world and could tell us his home it was everything you would wish for I mean all the top bands came to him it would come here this is the place to come this Main Street this is something that belongs to us this is our case it was a lot of the community some said to while they be it what they wanted to do to destroy a black community 9th Street became nothing no buildings on it all the businesses were gone I can't see that there isn't some intent when it happened everywhere when I first bought this building I just fell in love with the building I just found them in the architecture it just looked like a grand old building there'd be a wonderful place to put a flag business in flags are very very emotional products when 9/11 happened everybody want to play and they want it that day who goes and gets in the flag business I got in the flag business from a series of bad luck how I ended up here is beyond me and how I'm so successful at it when most flag dealers are not and how I ended up saving this building without even knowing the history of this building when I first started looking at it I've never even dreamed that I would ever have a reason to buy it or away to buy it but it just called to me and I just ended up coming into this broken-down old building that was abandoned and then when the old-timers would come by to visit me to see who that lady was that had restored the Taborn Hall I would spend time with them and write down their notes and talk to him and that's when I began to find the history of the building and I began to really realize that I had been entrusted with something more than just saving an old building but also with you know carrying the story the oral histories on to understand the whole story you have to understand the birth of the street this was an african-american community with Snite Street was for 100 years this was the heart of not only Little Rock's african-american community this was the capital city I guess you could say of the african-american communities in in Arkansas [Music] this was a community that was born out of emancipation this area was originally a federal encampment where emancipated slaves came they flocked here the Union Army occupied Little Rock on September 10th 1863 and when that happened thousands of blacks started to pour into Little Rock in fact a lot of southern plantation owners were so mad they loaded up their slaves and they just drove them to Little Rock and their wagons and dump them off and they might have a little Punda love maybe some food and maybe a few belongings but that's it they're liberating themselves they're liberating themselves with their feet they know Union troops are nearby they know slavery never worked for them so they're going to these places where they can begin to make sense out of life and to begin to live life as Free People the US military commanders were several overwhelmed they didn't really know what to do suddenly they had to provide housing and terror for all these at the time they were referred to as refugees they created a temporary little shanty town and it consisted of tents and shacks and this is where they put the former slaves [Music] blissful basically became the core for the the early black commercial district it was established really just west of what's where Mount Holly Cemetery is right in close proximity to ninth Street something new was happening in Arkansas in terms of just societal change the Republicans gained control passed a new constitution which meant that African Americans now for the first time african-american males of course would be able to vote it comes as a surprise to a lot of people but there were 20 african-americans in the Arkansas legislature 16 of them were in the house and there were four senators of course we've never had that many african-americans in the Arkansas legislature since then for the first time in history of Arkansas we had a new kind of type of african-american living here a black urban middle class you know you're talking about people who understand very well that they have to be self-sufficient that they have to be self-contained we're also talking about people who are very intelligent they understand well the times in which they live and the things that they need to do in order to survive and also when we're talking about people who may have been formerly enslaved that doesn't mean everybody was in the field picking cotton some of these people had skills [Music] the 1870s 1880s businesses were being established especially from Broadway which was kind of anchored the East End of the West Knight Street business district all the way down to Ringo Street and that comes six block area majority were operated by African Americans [Music] by 1890 actually 1/6 of the white population polarock was foreign-born over half of the people living in a city of Little Rock had been born in northern states and I think this in itself was important in so far as race relations were concerned but because it did mean you had a more cosmopolitan racial mix a lot of people left other areas of the south to come to Arkansas into places like Little Rock because they did think it was more progressive and more moderate I think they understand that they have to deal with racism but not to the extent maybe they'd have to in Mississippi or Alabama Little Rock was considered for a time to be more tolerant of the races over time that will change when former Confederates were pardoned they quickly swept all of the different elections almost all of the positions of authority in the south and so they gained control of the south again they couldn't take away their freedom that was given with a 13th amendment but they could circumvent Jim Crow laws made that pretty apparent hey I have an idea yes you'll be around here about a half hour before the show you mean you won't even watch up close Jim Crow you'll practically be right on the stage whoa Jim Crow was a minstrel character that was performed by a guy named Thomas daddy rice and this caricature came around I think in about 1830 somewhere in there wiill about and and minstrel characters these are people who would perform in blackface and they would perform in ways that stereotypes and stigmatized African Americans later on the term was co-opted to mean racial segregation it meant that increasingly the black community found itself isolated found itself being increasingly controlled and once the state had establishes official cachet of authority to this practice of separating the races then the practice started to spread much more in the private sector as well it was very costly there had to be black Hospital in a white hospital there had to be a black Cemetery in a white cemetery a lot of things that are necessary to grow an economy and grow a community were not really available to black people at that time just post-reconstruction and the way that it was provided by was the formation of fraternal organizations they existed because black people couldn't expect to be admitted into predominantly white fraternal organizations and so what's happening on 9th Street is happening in black communities all over the country they're forming mutual aid kinds of societies to to help each other out in difficult times [Music] the Knights and daughters of Taber that is one of many fraternal organizations that we had in Arkansas it is a national and eventually an international organization just like the Mosaic Templars [Music] the official name of the tube ourian's was the order of the 12 the nights and daughters of Tabor they were founded in 1872 by the Reverend Moses Dixon he was minister of African Methodist Episcopal Church he died in 1901 his successor was Scipio Jordon Scipio africanus Jordan was mail carrier here in Little Rock he was an exemplary leader of the Knights and daughters of Tabor very progressive man he's the one that spearheaded organizing and getting this building built this was the grand temple and tabernacle of the Knights and daughters of Taber it was black built and paid for with contributions from Arkansas from chapters all over Arkansas and it wasn't cheap it was $65,000 when that was a lot of money the late teens and early 20s this was a golden era for african-american development you know they even had the label in Little Rock the prosperous race they were doing really well there were every kind of business imaginable is operating you had confectioner's you would have barber shops you would have stable yards you name it almost any kind of business you can imagine would be operating here along West 9th Street and all the local people called it the line because the line was the boundary between black and white societies in Little Rock [Music] we have been ruled by race in Arkansas White's sought to dominate in control african-americans through really a retelling of our history in a way that justified and rationalized white supremacy then increasingly as we get up to the world war 1 years there are african-americans who are questioning what is democracy what does all of this mean should African Americans stand behind the war effort we should African Americans go fight overseas you know how are you going to ask people to go abroad and fight for that cause when it's not happening here in the United States but a lot of African Americans do go serve after the first world war African Americans came back to Arkansas expecting there to be some changes in the way they were treated we see the rise of the KKK in Arkansas that had reinvented itself as being moral Protestants that are upheld in Family Values racial tensions are at an all-time high at this point because people are emboldened they're saying I have fought for this nation now will this nation be all that it says it is and again some people are saying well I don't care what you fought for and I don't care what this nation is supposed to be your black here at the bottom of the racial hierarchy one of the ways they reinforce that is by killing people in 1927 in May there was this child named floella McDonald her body was found in the bell tower of the first presbyterian church eventually Lonnie Dixon was charged with the murder he was able to be gotten out of Little Rock in the rumble seat of a Studebaker and sent thousands of people into just a frenzy the people in Little Rock needed to find somebody to take revenge on what happened to John Carter was that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time he was alleged to have attacked two white women the white Posse chased down Carter they found him in the woods so they beat him and they beat him and they beat him strung him up and forced him to jump off a car they hung his body from a telephone pole use his body as target practice tied him behind a truck and drug him down from Broadway to Chester and back the very center of black life in a Little Rock [Music] there used to sit a big beautiful church the church was called Bethel they broke into Bell toll and got some pews and they built this big bonfire in the middle of Main Street then they took John Carter's body placed it in the fire at one point somebody dragged his arm off and directed traffic with it that night the amount of intimidation that this caused in the african-american community was enormous and we still don't know how many african-americans left little rod as a result of what happened that night in 1927 you know our label of being tolerant I kind of went away by that period of time yeah see right here chansu right here shiny shoes right here see that's the building right there see it right in that front door that tore down sad truth this long stick it's a true home right here Miller's see that sign right there Miller few home right here then we get to the twin city club down there it seems Jeff down there at pleased and go around out to see ya go downtown go twisting the club down there the baseball I run twin city bitters club night cold drink be untains pong shot rang up like pawn shop got it duck pond shot right here okay then crease your tiller shot right here yeah uh-huh all black we're working that yeah walking and talking shooting pool looking so he's drinking even gambling do everything don't look like nice to me tonight glad bills all that side come get down to a seder people's like this in keep it like ain't stayin when that cab comes over there right there West nightcap yeah just right there Church yeah that's right seem to you right there yeah Oh Jim to Eva right there red pool hall right here Yeah right yeah bears pool hall yeah we chase women all means did women come down there well a good time yeah and I won't Bend is everything I don't know okay we'd know it to hang down down here children drove to it right there yeah uh-huh right yeah cheering drugstore right here okay come and talk all the time because I was calling talked drank a little Coco Lopez girl shoot pool well it would be nice to talk of the town used to be only that's only black folks we go with that time go back I wish I wish some days come back to me and a good time got long down here a good time had someone to go wink I wanna go now only a few years ago we were a discouraged people because we were the first to lose our jobs when old man Depression came along and the last to get them back we struggled vainly to regain our bearings while depression fear and failure stopped the nation in the 1930s things were not looking that good for West night Street the Great Depression really impacted african-americans on the line as a matter of fact it impacted every single fraternal organization and we're going to see them close the doors of a lot of their businesses the nights and daughters of Tabor are going to lose this building because of the Great Depression so what we see is a reorganization of Westminster when that happened the kind of center of life though move down the street to the dreamland ballroom when dream land became dreamland is unclear but we do know in 1933 it already had a name they were already making a little heart-shaped invitation with modernistic Club the dreamland ballroom and then in 1936 the Chicago Defender newspaper starts writing about the dreamland ballroom and how is going to be this music epicenter for all of these musical acts that are coming through Little Rock [Music] in the United States of America it appear that music will the true freedom for the Negro race of people we're so people yes so what's in our soul you'd hear the music plant just light your soul right up the dreamland ballroom was one of the most beautiful venues for these dances and for these performances in the South everybody talked about it you can dress real nice you could just go ahead and relax enjoy life it was beautiful down here on a hot summer night they was out there cutting looks people would have on that fighters threads in the world looking good from head to toe and they would come out and they would party all night long we weren't doing Charleston that Johnson was out there was old one of the best promoters was SW Tucker and he's gonna hold a lease on this place for a long long period of time and he kind of set the stage to bring those big acts to the dreamland ballroom after they finished playing at the Robinson auditorium they were coming down to the line cuz this is the only place they could come it would do that gig and then after that they come to the ballroom what a real party and musicians are notorious for playing until the Sun came up every week that was some name and staying up at the dream home you name that I'd see lil green tiny Bradshaw Duke Ellington Count Basie Count Basie Lord Hama BB King band BB King Cab Calloway Cab Calloway Milton and a solid sentence that each spots Mills Brothers Roy brown and men's alhelou lucky millander Ella Fitzgerald Addison DC Louie George died in the Washington Ray Charles Billy Eckstine Little Richard Eddie James oh gee so many bands that I can't even remember our baby this nightlife here was the greatest life and at night I would crawl up to fire escapes and sit in that keep in the wonder why they were playing I was too young too good I did that for years place would be crowded people coming in we sneak in he's just mingling with the crowd after a while they'd forget all about you being able to go there and be exposed to all those musicians that was the heights of our growing up for a young person that kind of opened you up to things things you hear about that was happening in New York it was happening right here whatever you were saying about when you got here the music playing it's that all be put to rest come in and have a good time those are held but surely I could care less about anything else [Music] [Applause] and I remember they would come here to have what they call the battle of the bands this band was play like four or five song on this bed come up and play four or five seven eightt they rotate everybody [Music] this was a musician's hangout this hole straight because there were a lot of venues where they could play we were on what you call a chitlin circuit it's where most of the black performers travel here Nashville Beale Street in Memphis Birmingham they call it the chitlin circuit [Music] I have read about some of them Vince that took place here and they had 700 people crowded into the spice [Music] there was a vibrant kind of mentality down there that probably didn't exist anywhere in the white community but it was the black culture that really made it into a real happening place to be a lot of this music is you know very reflective of difficult times but then on the other hand one of this music is meant to celebrate theory or creativity its origins are in these predominantly african-american spaces ninth Street was the mecca of the economy for black people and dreamland ballroom was the vehicle that carried them world war two that bought about a dramatic revival in some sense rescued West night Street because you had all the black servicemen at Camp Robinson and they would come to us Knight Street for the cafes and the restaurants and the nightclubs and the USO was in the top Orion Hall from 1942 onward and the servicemen had money in their wallets suddenly the number of vacancies in the streets starts to diminish and that was when the good times really rose a young soldier in his twenties naturally he wants to come to ninth street lights were on people are having a good time everything is also bustle moving it was like a scene in a movie but it was real at night everything was hanging out on the street everything she was just a while swear your time you leave this place you go to that place leave that place we go to the next place my thing I mean you sleep all day it has so many characters it was unbelievable papa distel piece we call him chicken killer Pete the guy name was Payne everybody called him is Bobby little guy they called fat fat just run fool hole was a goddamn black man we called him boo and they called him red he called himself hard to beat because he thought he was a great pool shooter but he was really couldn't shoot pool I could beat him it wasn't called Main Street it was a nice Street but for african-americans it was Main Street it was our own town we couldn't go to the white restaurant we couldn't go to the white hospitals stay in the white hotels we had nowhere else to go we were segregated so it was two different cities in the one Little Rock had a rule 9th Street had a rule and everyone like 9th Street rule better than the Little Rock rule so when you're out there in the world outside of that space it can be a very cold place you have to constantly monitor what you say guard your actions guards your interactions with other people it can become incredibly stressful to have to do that but you came to night Street all those things you couldn't do you could do if it's just to go down and sit in a restaurant and have your favorite meal cook the way you like you can exhale you can exhale on Friday night or Saturday night you can find yourself again you can be who you truly are when you are in a safe space [Music] [Applause] [Music] the war tended to bring out the worst and the best of people the line West ninth Street was the only place that african-american soldiers could go and then we had white policemen and white MPs that were you know trying to keep the peace in this area as well a lot of times you have the attitude just because you're wearing a uniform doesn't mean you're equal to me and there was a lot of police brutality that took place and there was a african-american soldier who was killed by the white policeman sergeant Thomas Foster he got into it with a white police officer and the police officer shot him five times alcohol is almost a riot on West 9th Street and this brought blacks together in a way that they had never been together change is afoot all right things are happening people are challenging the system and any time anybody challenges the system that's when you see people really enforcing those Jim Crow laws the realization that we are going to have this change it is going to happen was hard for a lot of our Kansans to take because even if you were the poorest are canceled and I hope I'm not offensive to anyone they still thought of themselves as better than any african-american do you understand that just about all the machinery is original this kind of equipment last your lifetime it never wears out you might replace a part or two but it just keeps going this is back when they were really building machinery my dad I own his own shoe repair shop right behind our house and John Barrow you know nickname they called him read it read Rogers he was a quite a fella he was born and raised right here in the rock just like myself and shoe business was was his life right here my mother split up separated and he moved his location down on ninth Street where the bulk of that business was at the time on the typical Saturday it was real busy his door opened every 30 seconds it was a boom area boom time the money stated in there in the neighborhood and it flowed it just flowed from one business to the Nick's on ninth Street it's like ninth Street was all interconnected at the time kept the community together community would have stayed together with the exception of the urban renewal and that just kind of broke everything up and displaced them how eras of town [Music] we've separated like that then you you lost your power you lose quite a bit if not everything it really didn't expect that we're gonna do it and that's what I think it's kind of fun is that their expectation was that they were gonna put all these obstacles and that we weren't gonna do it the separate but equal was never equal integration was the way to go and now the law supported that as long as African Americans kind of kept to themselves and knew their place things were okay but when they started demanding their civil rights which they were entitled to that's when there was pushback from the larger white society Jim Crow Sabbath Wow heartbreaking heartbreaking demoralizing destructive and sometimes you have to have your heart broken to be mad enough to say you broke my heart but you're not you haven't broken me [Music] by 1957 is like uncle Richard say ain't gonna be like that we on all got Liza we had done the separation and we try to accommodate it burst both social Bowa they folks said I'm equal to anybody and I'm not gonna take second class nothing education jobs movement this is a government of the people by the people and father people and I'm a people Jim Crow is starting to come to an end and breakdown at the same time that more geographical segregations began to increase in Little Rock well into the 1950s in the central downtown neighborhoods you still had lights and plaques living together on the same residential blocks that started to change after school integration and when that happened sad the true there was a conscious effort made by the Little Rock housing authorities in urban renewal to basically carry out a program of Negro removal this has come to be called at the beginning of 1959 alarmed at the threat of a decaying downtown area the city board of directors authorized the housing authority to prepare and file an application with the urban renewal administration for federal participation in the renewal of the entire downtown well when the city of Little Rock started to putting into effect its slum clearance and urban renewal it was supposedly a colorblind thing but the big complaint very quickly came that slum clearance in urban renewal were not just about beautifying the city but they were explicitly racial in their nature the allegations are that you know whole areas were flattened because they were african-american rather than because they were blighted and that a few blighted homes were used as an excuse to just kind of raise complete areas of african-american residents areas whole areas of you know where you had have integrated housing who demolished new public housing projects were established like the one at Granite Mountain for example in southeast a lot but they were deliberately placed far away from white neighborhoods there was a conscious effort to basically kind of segregate housing in the city and you see that imperfect intersection with the schools in the Brantley Board of Education decision the first thing that the school district does is to create new schools in areas which are clearly demarcated African American and why it actually real Abel's Central High tellingly a Central High School at the same time they built Horace Mann high school in the East End of the city in a growing african-american neighborhood and they locate whole high school in the extreme west of the city right out in the white neighborhoods so they provide basically two new segregated schools as a response to desegregation why would you build a school [Music] far east of the city which was Horace Mann and then of white school for wealth what kind of thinking is that [Music] manipulation through public policy by given an advantage to write to get away from integration and desegregation you left a group of folks who were left to be back segregated by housing parents one of the things that urban renewal does is to build new public housing which are nicer which are more modern and all those kinds of things and new zoals you know incentives as instruments to move the black population away from traditional areas of residence into new areas of residence there's all kinds of ways of manipulating things once you kind of break up the natural housing plans not only the housing change the marketplace changed now only the marketplace change the schools changed not all of the schools change the ownership was changing and that was determined by what I call the engines of institutional racism people were worried about at the time people in african-american neighborhoods and white neighborhoods were aware of what was going on but there's not much you can do about it and we rocked known throughout the United States as being at the forefront of ever renewal and been very successful in getting that federal money to come into the city because there's millions of dollars at stake here and millions of dollars of federal money on the table to bring to your city to help create better arms [Music] West ninth Street was based a lot on those neighborhoods that surrounded it particularly Dunbar connected at the end with Flanders Smith college one of the key benchmark institutions in that community if you get those neighborhoods around West 9th Street then basically you take that all of its clientele and all of the people who use it on a regular basis so slim Clinton urban renewal certainly doesn't help West 9th Street in any way that impacted the businesses that relied upon these dollars to flow down to ninth Street in a very negative way you have to make money the dreamland ballroom closed its doors in 59 and immediately another Club went in here but it didn't last they were gone by 65 these decisions have been made about these communities but the people who live there have not been sitting at the table along with the decision-makers and once things start rolling is also an incredible difficult to stop it so your entire community is gone in one sweep and all you're left with our memories then in addition example really horrendous public policy or lock Housing Authority in the state of Arkansas collaborated in building the east-west expressway what became eventually interstate 630 you know one of the things that the eye 630 does that it drives a big concrete wedge between West 9th Street and Philander Smith College and the Dunbar neighborhood that's behind it so it really hardens the lines of what's going on with every newer the urban renewal efforts and the building of the interstate system put people in cars gave them access to suburban land and suburban America began to grow and develop in a remarkable way late 50s and 60s and we now have the physical makeup of a city like Little Rock vastly different than 1950 we think I white flight out of central Little Rock moving to more of the suburban areas so the I 630 is really a kind of suburban expressway as it becomes to get people from particularly West Little Rock suburban neighborhoods to downtown where they work now you're moving into the downtown area but you have a problem there don't you yes the downtown area is a real problem Jim the problem there of course is right away the Housing Authority is acquiring much of the right-of-way through the high street project which is from Broadway to Bishop and of course it still has the construction cost and the scheduling of the construction by the highway department the plans have been pretty well completed and if we had to right away they could move right ahead on it depending of course on the matching money from the federal government and that freeway phenomenon called urban renewal or whatever is consistent across the country and I can't see that there isn't some intent when it happened everywhere they did exactly what they wanted to do was to destroy black community Cosi they lie to those black entrepreneurs that will own a street when they told them we for the build a freeway and it's gonna come directly down Main Street some of them said well I might well take my business elsewhere and those that did they threaten him with intimate domain well they was gonna tear all this out this was gonna be the Thruway it's gonna take over all of this wasn't gonna be any more nicer but as you can see your freeway is over there part a nice Street is still here and you had places it should kept insane on this street [Music] but it did not happen see 9th Street became a place of light glass boarded up Billings e it became a place that you would really be sick to see it and as fast as those people moved out of those buildings they've started at an and down one by one start an you know I don't think anybody I've even dreamed of nice Street ever going down we didn't even think about them thought it would always be there I'll never understand that why it was designed to destroy it had to be he's gone and all the people who were connected with it later rich that's history [Music] you know when they told how on these structures it just cleared it off surface clear they didn't dig down into it that might have been basements that is just covered in you never know so that would take an effort I think there needs to occur to really identify the sort of the hidden parts of the street these sidewalks are ritual wide sidewalks or as they were in 1950 1960 or even before this is more than likely added this was a saw cut and they placed this plaque and bedded in concrete at that location it means Arkansas Highway department right-of-way so this is how they determined the boundaries this is how they knew this is what they used probably to survey the new expressway that came to the town so this is just other symbols of the street that has historic value I think if there was not an eye 630 if there was not an urban renewal you would have had really historic buildings that would have created a situation that might be similar to Bill Street in Memphis there may have been more restaurants more places to attract people one from an entertainment standpoint it would have been a plus for the city of Little Rock to have a district a distinctive district you had the mosaic temples on one end of nice Street you have two boring Hall on the other end so you had traffic yet circulation going between these two anchors the anchors of Main Street the land is still here the street is still here the opportunity to build back this this street in the manner that would be consistent with historic heritage it's still possible so I assume that the goal would be let's fill in the blank let's fill in the the space between the anchors in 1988 the city of Little Rock announced it was planning to demolish buildings all on West ninth Street the Arkansas Historic Preservation Office basically did get the city to agree not to demolish the Tabora and Hall later in the early 1990s it was sold to Carrie McCoy who really began a major renovation restoration of the building she bought this building which was supposed to be demolished because it became a desert of utility what used to be there I don't know just when I first saw it I was just in love with it I came in that front door which I have a picture of I came in the front door and there was debris from the front door all the way back the debris was literally a foot deep I tried to come in a couple of times and didn't get there and after about the second or third time I found a path to the third floor it was kind of a tunnel and when I came out I turned around I looked at the Bali [Music] first JIT beautiful I cannot tell you how beautiful I cannot believe I'm crying over it it was like was like a spiritual experience seriously it is a moment in time and it has seen so much and you can feel it you absolutely can feel it right here where we're sitting so many stars participated right here and there are enough people to keep this going she bought it and she had a vision of what it can be and as a result of that she brought back through the history of the past of a renaissance what used to be in that building I don't want to change it I don't want to take it back to being its original grandeur I want it to be exactly like it is with its chipping paint with its walls that can talk with its box seats that aren't perfect with its balcony that's not perfect with its floors that aren't perfect with its ceiling that's not perfect I want to save it I'm spending my energy on it and so the mission is let's save it oh this should have been a part of history just like she's revitalizing this bill is she being caring it took a lot of effort time and money to come in we do this to keep history alive this building is intrinsically important to to Arkansas history and to all of us this is a part of the American story I mean we need to know about these communities we need to understand that the communities were complex the people were educated that people had money that people owned businesses that they established from and maintained important institutions in these communities are stories that people aren't getting really if we don't understand to where we are today we can't really have any sense if the mistakes we made the things that we got right and trying to afford your policy for moving forward into the future the whole community did this to these people so the whole community has some responsibility seems to me through social policies to try to redress these ancient wrongs I think we many of us wish we could you know go back and play out this story a very different way yes but the story's been played out the way it is and now it's thinking about how do we how do we overcome the division that you know folks a couple of generations ago helped to create for us we are still three steps behind everybody the black community is and most of it is iPhone it's our phone we hold each other back I want to have community and family and I want to love on one another and we don't have that togetherness anymore and I'm not sure what we can do about coming back together as a community if they could do it then going through all of what they went through with so little and today we have so much and we can't even come together it's her is herb's on the end sir [Music] nice tree sticks in your map freedom again at that sense of freedom I go out there nine stand on that corner and think about how it was sixty years ago it was it's great the things you could do on nice Street should have never been seized it should be alive and well right today yeah what's what's God now is said it said what's God and and what it is now just one building sitting here and this one building brings back memories of [Music] thousands and thousands of people this one building this is the memory right here this is the hub of night Street [Music] you can have everything there not again that once was there if you learn to appreciate it and try to help people to bridge that gap of being and now and there'll be so that they'll get a little appreciation for once you taste it you may like it [Music] that's not Shalu so bye-bye and it still is [Music] I call me but God bless the child it's got me [Music] yes the strong get slide while the weak once baby empty pop gets toe ever make the brain [Music] but God [Music] you [Applause] [Music] major funding provided by the Arkansas Humanities Council and the Moving Image trust fund [Music] [Music]

Channel: Arkansas PBS

Views: 242,572

Rating: 4.8501735 out of 5

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Id: RjBeT7AyjRE

Length: 57min 33sec (3453 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 30 2018