Through the years many citizens of the Upper Ouachita River Valley have enjoyed distinctive, prestigious, fascinating, and sometimes even dangerous careers in a wide variety of fields. While most served in very visible and/or public capacities, a lesser-known individual also found himself in a key position during a tough time in American history: An Amity school superintendent became an educator at a Japanese relocation camp in southeast Arkansas during World War II.

The town of Amity had its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century. By 1848 its post office opened and a Masonic Lodge was established in 1856. The little community grew to about 150 inhabitants by 1900, with the town sporting six general stores, three churches, and a school. According to local legend, Amity’s school pre-dated its post office. The town’s educational institutions gained a reputation for excellence, with teachers like Richard M. Burke and Samuel Samson offering students a strong academic background.

In the first part of the twentieth century changes came quickly in all phases of life as Arkansas moved toward modernization. Amity’s school made strides too—The school offered Home Economics courses by 1920. In 1927 students chose a mascot, the Golden Ram. In 1928 the senior class produced the first yearbook. Beginning in 1930-31, buses first rolled along roads to transport students. And, in the early 1930s, a man named Byron Spence Thompson served as the Superintendent of Amity School.

The Thompsons lived at Amity until Byron Thompson became Principal of Riverside Elementary School in North Little Rock in the fall of 1939. The family included wife Coy Curtis Hays Thompson, and children John C., Sibyl (later Mrs. Justus Edmondson), Retha (Mrs. J.D. McGee), and Kaye (Mrs. Ronald Bracken). But the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor resulted in major changes for the family. Young John Thompson left to serve in the military. And Byron Thompson got a new job—he became the Director of Elementary Education for the Jerome Relocation Center in southeast Arkansas.

Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s new War Relocation Authority, the federal government chose ten sites across the nation in which to house more than 110,000 Japanese- Americans. Two of the locations selected were in the Arkansas Delta—one at Rohwer and the other at Jerome. Japanese were forcibly moved to the new camps, which opened in the fall of 1942. Jerome’s peak population came in January 1943 with almost 8,000 individuals present. More than 30 percent of those were school-age children. And Byron Thompson served as head of the elementary school education there.

It was a trying time for the family. Kaye Thompson Bracken later recalled that while her father worked at the relocation center at Jerome, the rest of the family remained in North Little Rock. He came home every other weekend. The Thompson girls were admonished to not tell others where their father was employed due to the hostility toward the Japanese prevalent at the time.

Thompson and others in charge at Jerome attempted to create a normal environment for those held at the facility. They planned activities for the children and people of all ages living there. Kaye remembered that she, her mother, and sisters were able to visit Jerome, and enjoyed their time there. The internees were “very sweet and kind.”

When things began to wind down at Jerome, the school children took up a collection and commissioned a painting by well-known Japanese artist Henry Sugimoto, who was in the camp at nearby Rohwer. They gave the painting to Byron Thompson and the beautiful art occupied a prime location in the family’s home, then later in daughter Kaye’s living room. In more recent years Sugimoto and his wife visited Kaye Thompson Bracken and her husband in Hot Springs.

In June of 1944 the Jerome facility became the first of the relocation camps to close. The complex then served as a German POW camp until the end of the war in Europe. The site is mostly farmland today, with a monument marking the former camp’s location.

After Jerome’s closure, the Thompsons moved to Fayetteville, where Byron Thompson continued his interesting career. He became one of the very first Vocational Rehabilitation counselors for the State of Arkansas.  His daughter Kaye, a talented singer and performer, married Ronald Bracken (Hot Springs ophthalmologist and a president of the Garland County Historical Society).