Kenneth Barnes has won the 2022 J.G. Ragsdale Book Award, given each year by the Arkansas Historical Association to the best book published on Arkansas history, for The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas: How Protestant White Nationalism Came to Rule a State.
Barnes also won the Ragsdale Award in 2017 for his book Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–1960.
About The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas:
The Ku Klux Klan established a significant foothold in Arkansas in the 1920s, boasting more than 150 state chapters and tens of thousands of members at its zenith. Propelled by the prominence of state leaders such as Grand Dragon James Comer and head of Women of the KKK Robbie Gill Comer, the Klan established Little Rock as a seat of power second only to Atlanta. In The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas, Kenneth C. Barnes traces this explosion of white nationalism and its impact on the state’s development.
Barnes shows that the Klan seemed to wield power everywhere in 1920s Arkansas. Klansmen led businesses and held elected offices and prominent roles in legal, medical, and religious institutions, while the women of the Klan supported rallies and charitable activities and planned social gatherings where cross burnings were regular occurrences. Inside their organization, Klan members bonded during picnic barbeques and parades and over shared religious traditions. Outside of it, they united to direct armed threats, merciless physical brutality, and torrents of hateful rhetoric against individuals who did not conform to their exclusionary vision.
By the mid-1920s, internal divisions, scandals, and an overzealous attempt to dominate local and state elections caused Arkansas’s Klan to fall apart nearly as quickly as it had risen. Yet as the organization dissolved and the formal trappings of its flamboyant presence receded, the attitudes the Klan embraced never fully disappeared. In documenting this history, Barnes shows how the Klan’s early success still casts a long shadow on the state to this day.
Kenneth C. Barnes is professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of Who Killed John Clayton?: Political Violence and the Emergence of the New South and Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–1960, winner of the J. G. Ragsdale Book Award in Arkansas History.
The award will be presented at the Arkansas Historical Association’s annual meeting, on April 22, 2022, in Little Rock. The mission of the Arkansas Historical Association is to promote the preservation, writing, publishing, teaching and understanding of Arkansas state history through the publication of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly as well as other activities.
Past winners of the J.G. Ragsdale Book Award from the University of Arkansas Press include:
Arkansas Travelers: Geographies of Exploration and Perception, 1804–1834 by Andrew Milson
Dardanelle and the Bottoms: Environment, Agriculture, and Economy in an Arkansas River Community, 1819-1970 by Mildred Diane Gleason
Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy, 1910–1960 by Kenneth C. Barnes
Arkansas / Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol’ Boys Defined a State by Brooks Blevins
Ruled by Race: Black/White Relations in Arkansas From Slavery to the Present by Grif Stockley
A Stranger and a Sojourner: Peter Caulder, Free Black Frontiersman in Antebellum Arkansas by Billy D. Higgins
Promises Kept: A Memoir by Sidney S. McMath
The Rumble of a Distant Drum: The Quapaws and Old World Newcomers, 1673–1804 by Morris S. Arnold