Pat Johnson’s long-lasting dream has been to make a difference. A small, white building in Pocahontas, Arkansas, stands as proof of her success: About 25 years ago, Pat led the charge to save the former one-room school in her hometown and transform it into a community hub.
That mission has meaning on many levels. Because this wasn’t simply a small school. It was the Pocahontas Colored School, where Black students were educated for decades in the segregated Arkansas town.
Pat was one of them. Born in 1948, she completed her first eight years of school within its walls.
Today, the Eddie Mae Herron Center – named for the school’s longtime teacher – still has a mission of education. And even though she wasn’t trained as a teacher, Pat has been leading the charge of education even longer than the beloved Miss Eddie Mae, who taught there for 17 years.
There is a museum-like space where visitors can see what the building was like as a school, as well as displays showcasing topics related to national and local Black history. Annual events – like a hog butchering – bring community members together. Local events and gatherings are also held within its walls.
It’s for this work that the National Endowment for the Arts chose Pat as the Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Fellow for 2024 . The Hawes Fellowship, named after the NEA folk arts director who created the awards in 1982, goes to an individual who has made “a significant contribution to the preservation and awareness of cultural heritage,” according to the NEA. Nine other traditional artists were honored for National Heritage Fellowships for their status as “national living treasures” for the practice of traditional music, dance, quilting, painting, and other art forms.
The award surprised Pat, who didn’t do any of these things for recognition.
“I thought, ‘Oh my goodness – how in the world? What did I do to win such a prestigious award?’” Pat said from the Eddie Mae Herron Center in May recalling hearing she was selected for the honor.
“When I was younger, there were just so many things that you couldn’t do. Because of the times. The law was different. I always wanted to be part of the community and try to make a difference,” she said. “I always wanted to help people. And so the things that I’ve been doing weren’t anything to get an award – it was just me.”
A Legacy Around Pocahontas, Arkansas
Pocahontas, a town of about 7,300 people, is located in rural Arkansas about 100 miles northwest of Memphis. It was founded in 1856 and, on the southern side of the Mason-Dixon line, played several roles in Confederate operations during the Civil War, its official website notes.
Pat’s family history is intertwined with this story. Her great-grandparents were enslaved around Imboden, Arkansas, a town about 15 miles away.
Three generations later, she was born in the late 1940s and lived her very early years on a farm near Pocahontas. When that land was sold, her parents moved their home into town – literally, as in they moved the house itself – after they purchased land. It still stands next door to the school.
Pat had a close connection with the school, which was built about 1919 as St. Mary’s AME Church. In the 1930s, it also began being used to educate Black students.
“This was the hub for the African American people,” Pat said. “Everything that went on basically went on here because this is where we could all congregate. You could come here, you had dinners, you had Easter programs and things like that. Everything happened here.”
A key figure in this effort was Eddie Mae Herron, who began teaching at the school in 1948 after another nearby Black school closed.
“She was good for us,” Pat said, who noted that the former teacher gave instruction during the day and held classes in the evening to help teach local parents.
“She had classes right here in this building at night to help them learn to read. “She was just what we needed at the time. She looked like us, and she loved us. She didn’t have children but we felt like we were her kids.”
Miss Eddie Mae taught at the school until it closed in 1965.
Yes, that’s right – 1965. Because even though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled “separate but equal” was not in 1954, integration didn’t happen for years in Pocahontas. Pat felt the effects of this. After finishing eighth grade in the building where she now sits, she was bused to Newport, Arkansas, to attend high school.
“The people said, ‘No, we’re not ready. We’re not going to do it,’” Pat said of local attitudes about integration in Pocahontas and other nearby communities. “It was 10 years before it (integration) came here.”
Continued school segregation was unjust, but there were silver linings, Pat said. High school allowed for new opportunities such as extracurricular activities – if you had a family member you could stay with nearby – and the chance to date and socialize with a wider group of kids.
In Pat’s case, it was through these bus rides that she met her future husband, Sherley Johnson. They married in 1966 and ultimately had two children.
Motivated to Action
Despite the town’s declining Black population – according to 2020 U.S. Census data, the town’s population includes just about 1.5% Black residents – the Johnsons didn’t leave Pocahontas.
Her husband worked for the railroad, while Pat began at the local hospital as a nurse’s aide. Later, she worked for the Arkansas Health Department and the Arkansas Department of Human Services before retirement in 2008.
Pat saw the changes in the former school, which went through a variety of uses after integration finally occurred. It was used as a daycare, and later, as a senior center. Locals did use it for a few things, and tried to keep it up, but it was difficult to maintain the aging structure. Ultimately, those efforts didn’t allow for recognition of its legacy, let alone enough resources for preservation.
“The building was just sitting here … and every day I would think, ‘Oh, my goodness – I wish we could do something with that building, because we’re going to lose it,’” Pat said“That’s all we’ve got left of our history. That we were even here.”
Those sentiments changed from anxiety to action in the late ‘90s, when one morning she heard on the radio that the local chamber of commerce had secured a grant to help the airport.
“I knew the person who was the director of the chamber at that time and I thought, ‘Oh, I wonder if he could help us get a grant to keep that building open,’” said Pat.
She went in to speak with him, and the conversation got the ball rolling. The chamber director agreed to approach the school board with Pat about their plans for the building, as it was still owned by the district.
“That night everybody was just in agreement,” Pat said of the meeting. “They said, ‘We’re not using the building, we’re not going to use it, and we’ll just donate it back to the community.’”
Aided by $35,000 from the Pocahontas City Council, work began to transform the center for the future but retain its original identity as a place of community.
The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2002. The citation stated:
“In the five decades between the end of World War I and the passage of Civil Rights legislation in the 1960s, this miniscule African American community in a small, poor rural southern state existed as much as possible in a state of anonymity; the church/school building on Archer Street served that anonymity while simultaneously providing this ‘hidden people’ opportunity to forge an identity as a thriving community striving for spiritual and educational growth and fulfillment.”
Even in recent years, that “hidden” sense has remained.
“One day, I was visiting with a friend of mine. We were having lunch and something came up about school, when we graduated and everything,” Pat said. “She said, ‘Pat, I don’t remember you being in my class. Whose class were you in?’”
Pat realized that her friend didn’t even know the Black students were segregated from the white.
“It was kind of like this town had a wall,” Pat says. “I’m not saying people were mean to us, but we were over on this side, and everybody else was over on the other side. It was not known that we had a separate school.
“That is when I thought, ‘We’ve got to do something. We’ve got to put some history in this building. Now that we’re going to be able to use it, we’re going to have to put history in it and let people see our faces. The kids who attended school here. Just history about it.”
A Quarter-Century of Making An Impact
Pat has been part of that mission work since it began and today is still at the center nearly every day – without being paid a penny. Her efforts and those of a board of other volunteers have resulted in a mashup of past and future that reflects the overarching Black experience in Randolph County.
Part of that building is set up like a museum, with artifacts and items to represent parts of its history. Some are original, while others are symbolic. A church donated the piano; the pulpit – representing the building’s history as a church – was from the chamber.
“That abacus that’s there in front of the desk – that was donated to us by an ex-school teacher,” Pat said of the item with brightly colored movable beads that students once used to learn math. “I had been looking and looking for one; I thought, ‘We’ve got to have one of those because we used one. That’s how we learned to count.’ Things like that – just as we go and hunt, we found a lot of the things to add in here.”
Another display features the shoe-shining equipment once used by Mabel Johnson, a Black man who lived in Pocahontas for years and worked at a local barbershop.
“This barbershop is still in use to this day,” Pat says. “But when he retired, the owners took that and they put it in storage. Once we got this up and going, they called me and said, ‘We’ve got something we think you would like, and we’d love to put it in your museum.’
“I try to let people know how much we appreciate them saving things like that.”
In some ways, those gestures show the presence of change in relatively uncharted waters. Out front, bricks engraved with donors’ names have been placed around a flagpole. One of them was given by a group of former students who were on the white side of segregation.
More community-building has been seen through an annual hog butchering, which not only preserves a legacy Ozarks tradition by teaching the process to younger generations, but also brings members of the community together. For years, the county judge – who was white – led the butchering process. Eventually, the job was passed down to his son.
There have been countless field trips, which tie to helping younger generations learn about the past – but also remind that while history is permanent, the chance to understand it is fragile.
An example of the latter is seen through those field trips.
Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Pat said, groups of students frequently visited the center. In recent years, that number has dwindled.
There could be various explanations; one reason schools have given, Pat said, is a lack of bus drivers for field trips.
But another factor could be tension in the U.S. surrounding education about race and history.
According to an April 2024 article in the Washington Post, “dozens of states have enacted more than 110 laws and policies reshaping the teaching of race, racism, sexual orientation and gender identity” since 2017.
An example in Arkansas is the L.E.A.R.N.S. Plan, which was signed by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders in January 2023. In addition to priorities including early childhood education, a commitment to equitable internet access for children, and fast-tracking teacher certifications was something else: A review of how well school districts communicate to the public and parents about transparency around classroom curriculum.
Additional language came in March, when a new order was issued proscribing any public-school activities that might be considered related to the teaching of “critical race theory.”
Pat doesn’t know for sure why students aren’t coming to visit like they once did. “I’m not pointing fingers and saying ‘That’s why you’re not coming,’ but I’m just saying that they’re not,” she said.
Regardless of why, when history isn’t taught, it’s troubling.
“I have to remember that even though it (segregation) was not a good thing, it was the law,” she said. “It was a terrible law, and I think about it a lot now because I feel like things are trying to go backwards. I’ve been there, and I don’t want to go back.”
Recognition as a Community Advocate
Pat didn’t know when she was a student with Miss Eddie Mae that she would ultimately take her education and use it to be the school’s biggest cheerleader.
Her work has taken her to Washington, D.C., where she was a participant in the 2023 Smithsonian Folklife Festival’s program on the Ozarks. It also took the Smithsonian to Pocahontas to feature the center’s annual hog butchering in a video that highlighted local culture and history.
She’s also helped inspire others in their own preservation efforts across the region. In West Plains, Missouri, a distant cousin of Pat’s recently led the restoration of the Lincoln School, another Black school in days of segregation.
When the National Endowment for the Arts announced her selection in February, her biography – written by Lauren Adams Willette, the folk arts fieldwork coordinator of Arkansas Folk and Traditional Arts – stated that she “is a pillar to the community of Pocahontas, Arkansas, where she supports community fellowship, traditional knowledge, and Black culture and heritage.”
“Through the Eddie Mae Herron Center, Johnson has created a dynamic space for local community traditions, community fellowship and activism, a place where the performance of daily heritage is enacted regularly and safely,” it continued. “Johnson’s work diversifies the history of the Ozarks region and honors the evolving nature of folklife while also upholding important community traditions, folk arts, and customary knowledge.”
The award carries $25,000 and another trip to Washington D.C. later this year. But for Pat, it’s not about the awards or the recognition. It’s about that long-held goal of making life better.
“Those are the kinds of things I say whenever someone comes here,” she said, referring to local history, segregation and realities for Black residents. “We have an open dialogue, and we sit down and we talk. We have visitors who come, and this is the way I talk to them. Just like this. And every time they’ll say, ‘I have really enjoyed this visit. We’ve talked about things I never thought about or didn’t know.’ To me, communication is the key. It’s the key.
“You do better when you learn better.”
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