1950s
Elvis Presley warms up for a performance at the Swifton High School gymnasium in 1955. A 13-year-old Tara Chapman snapped this photograph with her Brownie camera; later, her father took her to Elvis’s pre-Graceland house in Memphis, and the King came out and...
1950s
As the newly elected governor of Arkansas Girls State, Newport’s Lindley Williams is escorted into her inauguration by Arkansas Governor Orval E. Faubus in 1955. Outfitted in her prom dress, Williams was following the tradition of her day, which clearly did not...
1930s
Born a slave in Alabama about 1861, Pickens Black Sr. moved to Arkansas as a teenager, worked on the railroad, and started buying land, eventually amassing more than 8,000 acres. Black and his sons ran a plantation that included a cotton gin, sawmill, and grain...
