African American Women Activists- Carrie Dilworth

This month at its commencement ceremony UALR will award an honorary doctorate to Marvell civil rights activist Gertrude Jackson. Black women like Jackson were often crucial in mobilizing local communities. Some, like Arkansas Delta sharecropper Carrie Dilworth, tied together successive generations of movements and organizing traditions within the span of one lifetime. In the 1930s, Dilworth organized and recruited for the interracial Southern Tenant Farmers Union. In the 1940s, she worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to register black voters. In the 1960s, she worked closely with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Gould, Arkansas, and was instrumental in forming the Gould Citizens for Progress organization and founding a Freedom School in that community. Dilworth also launched a landmark school desegregation lawsuit in 1965 on behalf of her two grandchildren. I’m John Kirk of the UALR History Department and this has been an Arkansas moment.