During one afternoon, delegates will be offered their choice of four tours of Little Rock. One excursion is a civil rights tour and features a visit to one of the most important sites in the history of the civil rights movement. Little Rock High School National Historic Site is where nine courageous African-American students desegregated the city’s all-white high school in 1957 amid turmoil, violence and a national spotlight. The high school is still in operation.
This tour also includes a stop at the Testament Monument on the Arkansas State Capitol grounds. It presents life-size bronze statues of the Little Rock Nine walking into Central High School. A third stop on this tour is the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center, a museum that explores the history, life and culture of African-Americans in Arkansas and the challenges they have faced.
A second tour being offered is History and Helping Hands, a look at people doing good work around the world. It will include a visit to Heifer Village, part of the remarkable global outreach organization known as Heifer International. A village tour would likely include education aimed at inspiring, challenging and engaging people to help end hunger and poverty around the world and to care for the earth.
The History and Helping Hands tour will stop at several of Little Rock’s historically significant structures and neighborhoods, including the Old Statehouse Museum. Another part of the driving tour is a stop in the city’s Quapaw Quarter Historic District.
Shopping, History, Gardens
A third sightseeing tour option the conference will highlight is the area’s shopping. Participants will visit the Outlets of Little Rock, Arkansas’ first outlet center. The open-air center is crammed with nationally known stores and factory outlets that offer savings of up to 70 percent off retail prices.
Those delegates will then head back downtown to the remarkable Esse Purse Museum and Store. Some may pooh-pooh the mere idea of a purse museum, but delegates will be surprised to learn that the museum is lovingly dedicated to the evolution of the 20th-century American woman through the bags she carried and their contents.
“A purse is not just a utilitarian bag in which a woman carries her necessities,” said museum owner Anita Davis. “It is an extension of her personal space, her essence and the other things that make her her.”
The museum touches on history, art and the feminine mystique and is just one of three such museums in the world.
Another option is a summertime home and garden tour. Several garden and lifestyle personalities live in the Little Rock area, including TV gardening guru P. Allen Smith. Another prominent gardening professional is Chris Olsen; he has beautifully restored the Edgemont House, his residence in the historic Park Hill neighborhood in North Little Rock. This magnificent Spanish Colonial garden estate was built in 1927 and is listed on the National Historic Register.
