Nonprofit Offers New Book on Josephine Pankey

If you’re as intrigued as your Whispers writers are by the small, historically black Pankey neighborhood in west Little Rock that now sits not far from a New Balance store and Starbucks, you might want to pick up the new book “Josephine.”

The Little Rock nonprofit Friends of Josephine Pankey is offering the book at FoJPankey.org to people who donate toward completing the unfinished Josephine Pankey Education Center in the Pankey community.

Friends of Josephine Pankey leaders Nancy Robinson Lott and Regina Norwood self-published the book this year.

The book tells the life story of Josephine Pankey — the pioneering woman who developed a safe suburb outside Little Rock in which black families could buy their own land and avoid the city violence that led to a lynching in 1927.

Construction on the education center began in 1999, but its state funding didn’t all come through and the Friends of Josephine Pankey has been raising funds just to maintain the incomplete facility.

“The center has a lot of potential for west Little Rock,” Norwood told Arkansas Business in 2010, “meeting space, after-school things, education.”