By Ray King
With no dissent, the Pine Bluff City Council on Monday adopted a resolution allowing the Economic and Community Development Department to buy and place temporary signage in the Delta Rhythm and Bayou’s Cultural District.
According to the resolution, the signage will be in the form of decals that highlight the history of the area with regard to music, cinema and civil rights.
Michael McCray, who has been working on the project, explained it to Deltaplex News.
Three separate lists were included with the resolution, each one with the names of 25 people who inspired music, cinema or civil rights in Jefferson County.
For example, the Delta Music Walk list includes names like Queen Sylvia Embry who was born in Wabbaseka and had her own Chicago blues band; Miles Davis, who spent summers at the family farm in Moscow and produced the most successful jazz album in history, and the Browns, which included Pine Bluff born Jim Ed Brown and his sisters and who are in the Country Music Hall of Fame.
The Civil Rights list includes nationally recognized syndicated columnist and longtime editor of the Pine Bluff Commercial’s Editorial Page Paul Greenburg and William Harold Flowers who mentored Daisy Bates and his grassroots organization laid the foundation for the civil rights movement in Arkansas.
The Cinema list includes Freeman Harrison Owens who invented cinematic technology; Gould native John Donley who was an award winning television writer whose first recognition as a writer came when he sold the script “Black Jesus” to CBS for the sitcom “Good Times.”
Also on Monday, for the third straight meeting, a resolution dealing with naming rights for the property where the Sixth Avenue Plaza is being constructed being awarded to Simmons Bank in return for $2 million from the bank to complete the project was pulled before it could be read.
Also pulled were resolutions appointing Joshica Moore and Zadralyn Elizabeth Butler to the Civic Auditorium Commission.
Mayor Shirley Washington said those will be taken up at a later date.
