Hollywood / Valley Plantation Oral History Project

The Hollywood / Valley Plantation Project is a multidisciplinary effort conducted by the Arkansas Archeological Survey using the methods of archeology, cultural anthropology, and history to document the history and living culture of the African Americans who lived and labored on the Plantation for over a century. These interviews were collected as part of this effort.

The Valley Plantation was a historic farm operation that once spanned 12,000 acres of land where Desha, Drew, and Lincoln Counties meet in the delta lands of southeast Arkansas. Owned first in the 1820s by a slave trader named Peter Rives, it was sold in 1844 to his nephew and son-in-law John M. Taylor, who enslaved over a hundred people of color near Bayou Bartholomew in the two decades before Emancipation. Beginning in the 1870s, Taylor’s sons expanded the original tracts and converted the plantation into a sharecropping operation known as Hollywood. They successfully recruited entire communities of Black tenants from faraway states like Alabama and South Carolina to work the fields that had been abandoned by the enslaved during the war. In the twentieth century, the grandchildren of John M. Taylor split the plantation into smaller parts and used the Valley Planting Company to employ tenants to work the remaining lands they held in Drew County.

In 1918 croppers Robert Hill, Louis Lagrone, and Knox DeGraffenreed, who worked for the Valley Planting Company, and a Black physician named Dr. Virgil Powell formed the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America (PFHUA), the primary target of the Elaine Massacre of 1919. From the Valley these men recruited and helped Black croppers at plantations all over the Arkansas Delta to form chapters of the PFHUA in 1918 and 1919. Their purpose was to improve their living conditions and acquire the legal means to challenge their employers in court and receive their fair share of the crops that were being hidden and effectively stolen. The ensuing massacre in Elaine and the legal battle waged against its victims over the following years effectively smashed the organizing effort and allowed white landowners throughout the region to continue their exploitation of Black families for decades.

The Hollywood / Valley Plantation Project was funded in part by the Real Estate Transfer Tax. Matthew Rooney, Research Station Archeologist for the Arkansas Archeological Survey, University of Arkansas System was the Project's lead. The Arkansas Archeological Survey partnered with the Pryor Center to record the Project’s oral histories.

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Merle Bryant

Wallace Johnson

Morris Livingston

Azzie and Mary McGehee

Paul and Samuel Young