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Harvey Crowley Couch was the astute Arkansas businessman who founded the precursor to Entergy and helped to bring electricity and telephone services to Arkansas, Mississippi and other nearby Southern states.
Othello Caleb Cross spent over 40 years serving the Pine Bluff community and its legal needs, even representing many Arkansas farmers in a landmark racial discrimination case against the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
On March 25, 1910, Judge O. Jones, a 26-year-old Black man, was killed after accusations he harassed a white woman. According to the 1908 and 1910 Pine Bluff directory, Jones lived at 603 E. 15th Ave. and was a driver for the Marx-Baer Co.
The Forest Park Fair and amusement park operated in Pine Bluff from 1904 to 1912. Exclusively owned and operated by Citizen's Light and Transit Co., the Forest Park Fair was immensely popular during the summer months as it attracted more than 400,000 patrons. This was quite a remarkable feat since during that time only 30,000 people lived in Pine Bluff, and there were only an additional 12,000 people in the surrounding territories.
John Thach was born April 19, 1905, in Pine Bluff to school teachers, James H. Thach and Jo Bocage Thach. In 1927, Thach followed his older brother James' example by graduating from the United States Naval Academy. For the next two years, he was assigned to two battleships, the Mississippi and California. In 1929, he was transferred to aviation.
The U.S. Navy was one of the last military branches to integrate Blacks into its service. By the beginning of World War II, the Army already had a Black general and had seen its first Black Army officer graduate from West Point Academy in 1877.
John Daniel Rust was born on Sept. 6, 1892, near Necessity, Texas. His father, Benjamin Daniel Rust, was a Civil War veteran, a farmer and a school teacher, while his mother, Susan Minerva Burnett, was a homemaker.
Winston Joseph Deane was born on Aug. 2, 1924, in Pine Bluff. Nicknamed "Buddy" as a child, Deane developed an early love for radio. At just 10 years old, he and a friend set up their own radio station in a chicken coop that belonged to Deane's mother.
William LeVan Sherrill, a human-rights activist from Altheimer, is credited with leading and linking the Black nationalist movement of the 1920s, 1950s and 1960s.