A Little Rock Boyhood: Growing Up in the Great Depression

A Little Rock Boyhood:Growing Up in the Great Depression
A. Cleveland Harrison

After more than fifty years, American newspapers, journals, and books are still repeating the tragic story of school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas. But long before that crisis, blacks and whites in Arkansas suffered together in the Great Depression, facing the toughest economic times in American history, side by side. Cleveland Harrison tells his family's part of that story in his memoir A LITTLE ROCK BOYHOOD: Growing Up in the Great Depression.

As the naive but observant younger son of a middle-class Arkansas family, he traces the story of his family and their relations and neighbors, from the mid-1920s to the early 1940s, describing good and bad times in old Little Rock and Warren, as his father and older brother struggle to find jobs to keep the family afloat, their living and working arrangements changing abruptly and often.

Cleveland easily makes friends across lines of race, age, gender, and class at public school and church, acting in plays, singing on the radio, camping out in the Boy Scouts, exploring town on streetcars, skates and bikes. Visiting his grandparents and relatives in small towns, he enjoys himself but confirms his preference for the bustling city of Little Rock.

When his parents are reduced to financially desperate straits, they open a rooming house downtown, within walking distance of radio stations and movie houses, where Cleveland confirms he is a "born player," meant for the theater. At Little Rock Senior High School, he is elected president of the student body and meets the girl who will become his partner for life. On the cusp of World War II, he proves his theater talents at Junior College before being drafted into the Army.

This richly detailed, elegantly expressed memoir of a boy's life provides an insightful look at a certain time and place in Arkansas history.