- University News Archive - ��Vlog��ý Little Rock

Environmental engineering professor and program coordinator to compete in Mrs. Arkansas America pageant

Jenny Lambert — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 16:15:45 +0000

Dr. Lashun Thomas, program coordinator of the environmental engineering program at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, has switched out her engineering cap for a crown. Thomas was recently titled the 2019 Mrs. Little Rock, and will compete for the Mrs. Arkansas America title in November. “This is the first time that I’ve ever done anything like this,” Thomas said. “Although it takes me totally outside of the engineering world, it gives me an opportunity to raise awareness about engineering careers to a wider audience of students and women in Arkansas and around the world. It also gives me a chance to promote the importance of family and marriage.” While browsing online one evening, Thomas came across an advertisement for Mrs. Little Rock. Surprisingly, what caught her attention wasn’t the glitz and glamour of the competition, but the contestants’ platforms. A pageant platform is a cause that a contestant chooses to volunteer for by either bringing awareness to, raising money for, or implementing a program that addresses a specific issue. Thomas, who is a huge proponent of education, believed that stepping into the pageant world would provide her with an opportunity to inform a broader audience of students and women about careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. She also saw it as a chance to motivate these groups and show them that they have the power to make anything possible. With nothing but success in mind, Thomas moved forward with completing the pageant application, which was followed by several conversations and an in-person meeting with the pageant director. After a much anticipated wait, she was titled the 2019 Mrs. Little Rock. On November 10, she will compete in the Mrs. Arkansas America pageant in Hot Springs, Arkansas, ripping the runway in the interview, swim, and evening wear categories and representing her platform, “Empowering through Education-The Power of Knowledge.” If Thomas wins, she will go on to represent Arkansas in the Mrs. America pageant. In addition to her traveling expenses being covered, she will enjoy television interviews and personal appearances that will help to amplify her role as a married woman. From the field to the classroom Growing up in Phillips County near Elaine, Arkansas, Thomas was always taught to value education. At a very young age, she witnessed the toll and strain of hard work on her entire family. Before she was old enough to attend grade school, Thomas spent time working on her grandfather’s farm alongside her grandparents, mother, aunts, uncles, and cousins, who all lived under the same roof, to assist in the up-keep of the land. “I would help with potatoes when it was time to dig them up,” Thomas recalled. “I also helped with chopping cotton. My grandfather didn’t grow cotton, but during the summers when we needed extra money, because we were very poor, my mom would get us all together, and she would haul cotton choppers.” Thomas spent her last summer on the farm when she was 10 years old. The following year, she was enrolled in pre-college and summer engagement programs at her school. Because she had experience with agriculture and mathematics from working on her grandfather’s farm, she naturally gravitated toward the math- and science-based programs. ‘I didn’t know that there was a world out there’ While attending the summer courses, Thomas received continuous support from her family. �� “That’s one of the reasons I was really motivated,” she said. “My grandparents and my mom told me, ‘I want you to be able to use your education. I want you to be able to use knowledge and make strides forward in life to leave some type of legacy or mark.’” Thomas also received a tremendous amount of support and encouragement from her instructors, but it was the Upward Bound program that opened the doors to new possibilities and gave her a new lease on life. “Upward Bound was instrumental to me because growing up in Elaine, I didn’t know,” she explained. “I didn’t know that there was a world out there, that you could go to college, and that there were different opportunities out there for you.” Once Thomas had been exposed to life beyond the farm, she was determined to reach those places in the new world, to experience the parts of life that had long been hidden from her. Thomas knew that she wanted to be an engineer, but she also knew that the only way to make it possible was through education. The year before she graduated from high school, Thomas had manila folders filled with applications, their statuses, and the scholarship applications she had submitted. Using this filing system, she compared colleges, selected her top choice, and began her journey through higher education. Life’s a marathon, not a sprint

Photo by BENJAMIN KRAIN –03/27/18–.Lashun Thomas, program coordinator for the Environmental Engineering (ENVE) program at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (��Vlog��ý Little Rock)

Thomas was sold on attending Tennessee State University, one of the locations she visited while in Upward Bound. She graduated from the university with both her Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering and Master’s of Science in Engineering. Although she’d accomplished a huge feat, Thomas didn’t plan on stopping. After obtaining her second degree, Thomas packed up her clothes in huge garbage bags and made her way to Virginia. “I pulled up MapQuest, got in my car, and hoped for the best,” she said. Thomas was determined to build an inspiring legacy. She knew that she wanted to do research at Virginia Tech, so she created opportunities that led to her to the university and eventually obtained her doctoral degree in civil engineering from there. While completing her degree, she worked as a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey. After 11 years of higher education, Thomas accepted a position as an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Syracuse University. While there, Thomas was so focused on success and balancing her personal and career life, she neglected her health. Thomas had reached her largest weight at 385 pounds. “It was so difficult to move, to walk,” she recounted. “Daily activities, daily tasks that I had to do were very difficult because of the amount of weight I had. I was very unhappy.” Thomas knew that she was prone to heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes based on her family’s medical history. If she wanted to be an inspiration to others, she would have to start with being an inspiration to herself. “[Losing weight] is one of those processes where you ask yourself, ‘How do you even get there?’” she said. “Having this internal sense of ‘I can do it, I’m not going to quit,’ I looked at [the challenge] as a marathon instead of a sprint.” Through exercise and dieting, she lost 20 pounds, then 40, remaining consistent until she eventually lost more than 230 pounds. On to ‘Mrs. Arkansas America’ This moment in Thomas’ life showed her that she could do anything with the right mindset, and she wanted to share this experience with women and students from all walks of life, informing them of why investing in their education is so important. “Everything stems from knowledge,” Thomas said. “Knowledge teaches you about health, academics, and even things in your personal life.” Thomas is the only female program coordinator of an undergraduate environmental engineering program in the state of Arkansas, which is why she is so passionate about encouraging other women to take on roles in STEM. In preparation for Mrs. Arkansas America, Thomas is visiting schools and universities across the state to speak about her platform, “Empowering through Education-The Power of Knowledge,” share the role education played in determining her future, and voice the importance of family. �� “I’m very humbled and I’m grateful,” Thomas said. “It feels like a dream.” ��

��Vlog��ý Little Rock class creates digital archive of long-lost Phillips County death certificates

Ajani Oyindamola — Wed, 14 Feb 2018 14:51:12 +0000

A history class at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock has created a new digital index of Phillips County death certificates from 1917 to 1922.�� Dr. Brian Mitchell’s American Urban History Class created the index during the fall 2017 semester and donated the archive to the Arkansas History Commission so it can be made available for public use. “This project is an important addition to the commission’s collections as it is currently the sole record of African American deaths in the county for that time period,” Mitchell said. “The index would be helpful for future research on public health issues in the region, identifying many of the Elaine Massacre’s victims, and of vital importance to African-American genealogy in the state.” Mitchell went on to note that “students don’t always understand the importance of history as an academic pursuit or understand what public historians do, but classes like this allow them to see how history is useful for the general public.” The class has already received a thank-you email from one amateur genealogist who used the archive to track down the never-before-found death certificate of her great-grandfather. He died in Phillips County in 1918 from an “epidemic.” Students who participated in the class include John Anderson, Tarrie Boggs, Grant Burress, Mark Ford, Laura Fuentes, Corrie Green, Kevin Hill, Benny Mutoni, Ellis Thompson, Christian Weaver, Nicholson Weaver, and Domorion Williams.

The death certificate of Leroy Johnston, who was one of the four Johnston brothers killed during the Elaine Massacre. Leroy had recently returned from fighting in World War I, where he served as part of the 369th Infantry more popularly known as the “Harlem Hellfighters.”

Mitchell’s current research involves creating a digital archive of records related to the 1919 Elaine Massacre. Through his research, he discovered that long-lost death records for Phillips County residents were kept at the Keeshan-Lambert Funeral Home. “The death certificates had been missing from the historic record for a long time,” Mitchell said. “The reason for their absence was the policy in the county at that time was for the coroner to take possession of their own records when they retired. When the coroner retired, the family kept them. Fortunately for the people of Arkansas, the family owned a pretty notable funeral home. Instead of the death certificates being disposed of, they remained in the records of this funeral home. The family donated the records to the Arkansas History Commission.” Since the county’s main newspaper in Helena, The Helena World, did not print many obituaries for African Americans at the time, these records may likely be the only record of death certificates for African Americans in the county during that time period. Mitchell is also hoping the archive will help identify members of the Elaine Massacre that occurred in the first week of October in 1919 in Elaine, Arkansas. Historians have been unable to discover how many people died during the Elaine Massacre. Estimates run from 17 to nearly 800.

The death certificate of Calvin Miller, who Mitchell believes is a previously unidentified victim of the Elaine Massacre, states that Miller died on Oct. 4, 1919, due to a hemorrhage.

“Despite being considered one of the largest race riots in American history, there has never a single identified grave for a black massacre victim.” Dr. Mitchell is hoping that the recovered “death certificates will assist in the identification and the locating of victims’ graves.” “I was fascinated by the fact that you can have that many people missing or disputed and have no records of who died. It’s one of these mysteries that you want to keep pursuing. It’s important to the families of these individuals that there is some accounting of their death. I’ve met a few family members of the individuals who went to prison. For many of those families, they think it is important that some commemoration of all these people be put into place.” The records themselves make it difficult to identify possibly victims of the Elaine Massacre, since many do not list a cause of death or burial site and could have been issued months after the actual death occurred. “The hypothesis we have come to is that many of these death certificates were made up when family members showed up to look for their dead loved one,” Mitchell said. “Many people don’t show up until the following year (1920), and these death certificates tell very little about how their loved ones died or how their bodies were disposed of.” The Phillips County death records span from 1917 to the early 1950s. Mitchell has plans for future classes to continue archiving the records and making them available for public use. In the upper right photo, members of Dr. Brian Mitchell’s class include: Back row (L to R): Ellis E. Thompson; Domorion Williams; Grant Burress; Kevin Hill; Benny Mutoni; and Nicholson Weaver. Front Row: John Anderson; Dr. Brian Mitchell; Corrie Green; and Tarrie Boggs.

- University News Archive - ����Vlog��ý Little Rock

Environmental engineering professor and program coordinator to compete in Mrs. Arkansas America pageant

����Vlog��ý Little Rock class creates digital archive of long-lost Phillips County death certificates

- University News Archive - ��Vlog��ý Little Rock

��Vlog��ý Little Rock class creates digital archive of long-lost Phillips County death certificates