Dr. Charles Feild remembers the paratroopers with jump boots, helmets and bayonets on rifles, standing shoulder to shoulder. At around 4 1/2 years old, Feild was experiencing some of the chaos and violence of the 1957 Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis. He remembers being taught that what segregationists were doing outside the school was wrong.
“I do remember my dad saying, ‘I’m showing you this. Remember it, this is wrong,’” Feild said. “So I grew up — I didn’t know what a [Gov. Orval] Faubus was — but I knew that was a terrible, terrible thing. I don’t think they [his grandfather and father] were necessarily liberal or progressive, I think they just didn’t like the white trash that lined up in front of Central High waving their Confederate flags. And why were these guys out in the streets in front of a high school during working hours on a working day?”
Feild’s remarks came during a lecture he gave at the Little Rock Main Library Wednesday about his book released last April, “Feild Notes on Little Rock.” And no, the first word in the book’s title is not misspelled — it is a pun on the Feild family’s last name, which is an Early Modern English (sometimes known as “Shakespeare’s English”) spelling of “field.”
Feild is a retired pediatrician and sixth-generation Arkansan who enjoys history and storytelling, interests he said he inherited from his father.
He was able to trace his genealogy back to the 17th century thanks to the help of a 1901 book that recorded Feild family genealogy dating to before the year 1700. He started to scan different family records and photos and came up with a digital family scrapbook. Upon realizing the value of the information, he decided to write this history down.
As Feild began to annotate family photos, letters, maps, school records and more, he was able to weave together a family history that places the Feilds amid some of Arkansas’s and the United States’ most significant historical events, such as chattel slavery, the Civil War, the Little Rock Central High crisis and more.
At his lecture Wednesday, one of the first things Feild discussed was his family’s relationship to chattel slavery, which was booming during the time his great-great-great grandfather William Hume Feild Sr. moved to Little Rock from colonial Virginia via Tennessee in the 19th century.
William Sr. moved to Little Rock around 1845, bought a house at 811 Scott Street and became a judge.
“…they always had, it looks like at least two or three people living on the property to take care of things. Initially, they were enslaved people, and after that, they were hired, but [William and his family] never had to do things for themselves,” Feild said.
Feild found records that showed William Sr. owned enslaved people aged 48 down to 1 year old.
“That was just how it was in the South,” Feild said. “It was ubiquitous. It was not something that Miss Scarlet and Mr. O’Hara owned over on the big plantation. It was in the neighborhood down the street, your next door neighbor, your relative.”
Feild’s great-great grandfather, known as Grandpa Hunter, was a beloved Methodist minister who voted along with two other Arkansans to split the Methodist Church in the South from the one in the North over the issue of slavery. In opposing abolition, southern Methodists became the Methodist Episcopal Church, South.
Feild said that his grandfather and father were open about slavery’s connection to the Civil War.
“It was not about Southern honor,” Feild said he was taught growing up. “It was not about state’s rights. It was about slavery, and slavery was wrong.”
He talked about Feild Brothers Farm, a 1,600-acre plantation along the Arkansas River where Rebsamen Golf Course and Murray Park are today.
The farm was going well until after World War I, when England stopped buying cotton from the American South because a higher-quality and cheaper product could be sourced from Egypt and India.
On the side of the farm towards downtown Little Rock in what is now Riverdale was the West Rock community, a Black neighborhood that was destroyed in the 1950s due to urban renewal, or what Feild called “urban removal.”
“They [the Little Rock Housing Authority] came in with a bulldozer and wiped out all of these families,” Feild said. “One person that was there said they knocked on the door and told my daddy we were living in a slum, and we didn’t know we were living in a slum. We were living with our aunts and uncles and cousins and friends by our school.”
Feild grew up in Kingwood and went to Jefferson Elementary School. He remembers having a disproportionate number of Jewish schoolmates.
“We were so envious of those kids,” Feild said. “Hanukkah was eight days. We only got one. The boys got out for half a day for Hebrew lessons, we had to stay in class. And then on Jewish holidays, they didn’t have to come to school, but we did. So you had all these little Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian kids going on saying, ‘Daddy, why can’t we be Jewish?’”
He also remembers visiting West Ninth Street as a kid, which was an important Black corridor that was also torn down in the name of progress in the mid-20th century.
Feild’s mother, who he said was very cheap, would go to a bakery where she befriended two Black women who ran it to buy day-old, marked-down goods. He remembers thinking that he was in a very “exotic” part of town.
“I realize now, looking back on it, on Ninth Street, we were the exotic people,” Feild said. “But I didn’t know that everybody didn’t go to Ninth Street.”
Feild emphasized the importance of teaching accurate history that doesn’t whitewash slavery or racism in the U.S. and in Arkansas. He decried the state’s crackdown on how issues of race are taught in schools, and said that despite some progress, Arkansas still has a long way to go to become an equitable state.
In 2023, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed the Arkansas LEARNS Act, banning the teaching of critical race theory and so-called “indoctrination” in public K-12 classes. Critical race theory is rarely a component of K-12 education, and is usually found only at the college/university level. The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld this piece of the LEARNS Act last summer after a group of Little Rock Central High teachers, parents and students sued on First Amendment grounds.
Feild encouraged people to vote for new leadership in upcoming elections.
“What I said today would be illegal in an Arkansas public school,” Feild said.
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