Watson State Park

In 1937, Dr. John Brown Watson, the first president of Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College (now known as the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff ), donated 100 acres of land southwest of Pine Bluff for the first public African American state park in the South. Image Credit : www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net In 1937, Dr. John Brown Watson, the first president of Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical, and Normal College (now known as the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff), donated 100 acres of land southwest of Pine Bluff for the first public African American state park in the South. This was a remarkable turn of events since segregation laws had thus far ensured that state parks, schools, recreational facilities, and other institutions were off-limits to African Americans.  Unfortunately, Watson State Park, named after its benefactor, never became a beacon of racial inclusion, as the state put little money or effort into developing it. In 1942, two years after Watson’s untimely death, the park closed. Watson’s widow, Hattie Rutherford Watson, successfully sued to have the donated land returned to his heirs. Consequently, over the next two decades, Arkansas became the only state in the former Confederacy that provided no public park for its African American residents.  From 1904 to 1908, Watson taught at Morehouse College while earning a master’s and a doctorate. For a decade, he was secretary of the Colored Men’s Department of the International Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). During his earliest efforts to get a park for Black residents of Arkansas, Watson wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Resettlement Administration stating that there hadn’t been “but one lynching in this state in nearly nine years” so race relations were better than they had been in the past.  From 1933 to 1938, President Roosevelt enacted New Deal reforms, which included the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), to reverse the economic decline of the Great Depression. Among the New Deal reform agencies was the National Youth Administration (NYA), which was dedicated to providing education and work for young people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, especially in the Depression-ravished South. The NYA focused on using young men and women to develop segregated recreational parks in the South. As a result, in 1921, Arkansas began creating its first public park. Lyndon B. Johnson, the head of the Texas division, became the future president who would push the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. Watson saw the NYA program as an opportunity to provide recreational facilities for African Americans, so he lobbied to develop land and facilities in the mostly Black community of Pine Bluff. During that time, the approximately eight state parks were mostly scenic, predominantly White, and located in the mountainous regions of Arkansas. The Roosevelt administration listed a potential project as “Arkansas R-4, Pine Bluff Regional Negro Park.” Though Governor Carl Bailey, the president of the University of Arkansas, which supervised Arkansas AM&N, and the State Parks Commission greenlit the project, it struggled because of a lack of funds.  Finally, in 1937, Watson offered to give the state 100 wooded acres he owned south and west of the AM&N campus and the city, near Bayou Bartholomew. The NYA, the CCC, and the State Parks Commission pledged resources. African American children and schoolteachers raised $5,000 to match a $15,000 federal grant. By 1939, young Pine Bluff citizens had labored to build a caretaker’s residence, a barracks, and a dining hall, but no further improvements were forthcoming. Watson had envisioned ball fields, a tennis court, and a small golf course, but when he died suddenly of a heart attack on December 6, 1942, his park was still undeveloped and unused. In 1964, African Americans officially received the same facility and institution rights as their Caucasian counterparts with the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Sources:  https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net - Watson State Park Written by: Ninfa O. Barnard