Pulitzer Prize winner Douglas Blackmon (formerly a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and senior editor and correspondent for the Wall Street Journal), author of Slavery by Another Name, will lead a discussion at 6:30 p.m. Friday (May 11) at the Darragh Center, Main Library, 100 Rock St., Little Rock during a conference titled Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas: Perspectives on the African American and Latina/o Experience.

The conference is part of the Rockefeller Centennial Celebration to mark the 100th anniversary of former governor Winthrop Rockefeller's birth. Admission is free.

Along with Blackmon's talk, discussions by 14 local, state and national experts will examine aspects of race and ethnicity in Arkansas from 9:30 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday (May 12) at the Darragh Center. Participants include:

  • Adjoa Aiyetoro, director of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Institute on Race and Ethnicity and associate professor of law at the UALR William H. Bowen School of Law
  • Jay Barth, the Ima Graves Peace Distinguished Professor of Politics at Hendrix College in Conway and co-author (with the late Diane D. Blair) of the second edition of Arkansas Politics and Government: Do the People Rule? 
  • Melany Bowman of Arkansas State University, who spent the first 12 years of her life in Costa Rica, Chile, and Columbia learning English and Spanish
  • Jacqueline Froelich, senior news producer with KUAF National Public Radio in Fayetteville, who produced the public radio documentary Arkansas Ozarks African Americans
  • Perla Guerrero, assistant professor in the Department of American Studies and U.S. Latina/o Studies Program at the University of Maryland in College Park 
  • Kelly Jones, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville working on her dissertation, a state study of slavery in Arkansas
  • Cherisse Jones-Branch, associate professor of history at Arkansas State University-Jonesboro where she teaches courses in U.S., women’s, and African American history
  • John A. Kirk, George W. Donaghey professor and chair of the history department at UALR, who has written, edited and co-edited six books on Arkansas and U.S. race relations
  • Guy Lancaster of the Arkansas Studies Institute, editor of the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture
  • Story Matkin-Rawn, assistant professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas and coordinator of UCA’s Southern and Arkansas Studies program
  • Carl Moneyhon, professor of history at UALR and a specialist in the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras
  • Grif Stockley, an independent scholar who has twice won the J. G. Ragsdale Award presented by the Arkansas Historical Association for the “best book-length study in Arkansas History
  • David Stricklin, director of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies and the Central Arkansas Library System and associate director for Special Collections
  • Julie Weise, assistant professor of International Studies at California State University, Long Beach, whose current book project is Corazon de Dixie: Migration and the Struggle for Rights in the U.S. South and Mexico, 1910-2010
  • Calvin White of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, whose research focuses on the extent to which class, respectability, and the efforts of racial uplift intersected in the development of African Americans‘ religious traditions and racial identity after emancipation in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta.

For more information click here.