Arkansas
The Chinese arrived in Arkansas primarily after 1840 as the need for foreign labor grew to develop land west of the Mississippi River. The needs were primarily to fill roles of "... railroad workers, cooks, launderers, grain farmers, fruit growers, tide-land drainers, miners and other " Many Chinese settled between the 1870s and 1880s as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation to work the fields that were previously worked by the slaves of the south. By 1900, many of these people became small businessmen and owned grocery stores, laundries and restaurants and still reside in the area in the present day.
Read more about this topic: Chinatowns In The United States
Famous quotes containing the word arkansas:
“The man who would change the name of Arkansas is the original, iron-jawed, brass-mouthed, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of the Ozarks! He is the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the smallpox on his mother’s side!”
—Administration in the State of Arka, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“...I am who I am because I’m a black female.... When I was health director in Arkansas ... I could talk about teen-age pregnancy, about poverty, ignorance and enslavement and how the white power structure had imposed it—only because I was a black female. I mean, black people would have eaten up a white male who said what I did.”
—Joycelyn Elders (b. 1933)