Charleston, Arkansas, a small community of less than a thousand people, led the South. Months after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education to end racial segregation in the country's educational system, fourteen African-American students enrolled at the previously all-white Charleston public schools. Few people—Arkansans included—had ever heard of the town, and most outside of its borders were oblivious to its progressive feat as the first school district in the former Confederate states to desegregate. Scrutiny arrived three years later, only when the Little Rock Central High School Desegregation Crisis emboldened segregationists, and triggered competitive elections on the Charleston School Board as fierce as anything up or down a ballot.
Making a Decision
Like in school districts across the country, the five-person school board in Charleston considered its response to Brown. They solicited counsel from a local lawyer, the only lawyer in town, named Dale Bumpers.
"Better to do it voluntarily than under a court order," he told them.
Some forty African-Americans lived in the area, two miles east of town in a locale known as the Settlement. The predominately rural and economically poor area had limited educational facilities. Grade-school children studied at Carver Elementary School, an old, one-room school house funded by philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, and Christine Wiley served as its sole teacher. Older children bused to all-black Lincoln High School in Fort Smith at the district's expense. All amounted to $4,500 of annual funding that the school preferred to eliminate from its balance sheet.
Superintendent Woody Haynes sought the community's reaction. Haynes attended a meeting of the Commercial Club, a notable monthly gathering of the town's businessmen, and informed the group of likely desegregation. According to Bumpers' account, response was muted.
The school board gathered for a late-night session over the summer and voted unanimously to desegregate. They closed the Settlement's schoolhouse, fired Wiley, and opened the town's grade and high schools for 11 students to enroll that August. The historic moment passed quietly, as the community shunned outside public attention.
Desegregation
Push back comprised of minor, while frustrating, incidents in comparison to Little Rock. On the morning of the first day of school, Haynes discovered a racial slur painted on the school's exterior wall. He and the maintenance staff quickly removed it before students arrived. When the new African-American students joined Charleston's athletic teams and marching band, some schools refused to participate in games or competitions. In other cases, Charleston recoiled and told its black athletes and band members to stay home.
In 1957, Governor Orval Faubus sparked the Little Rock crisis that led to a volatile, political situation in Charleston. School board members rehashed the debate about desegregation and professed their support for Faubus. It led to Superintendent Haynes' resignation along with two school board members.
The city announced local elections for March 1958 to refill board seats. Segregationist and moderate factions each recruited their candidates, with Bumpers running as a latter. He recounted the unusually heated campaign in his memoir and described threats made against residents in the Settlement. Under the cloak of nighttime, white aggressors regularly raced past houses and shouted racial epithets at residents.
On Election Day, the city had never witnessed such high voter turnout for the school board seats. On a typical year, 100 to 150 voted. In 1958, 500 went to the polls. Bumpers and his fellow moderate won with 60 percent of the vote.
Segregationist outrage continued throughout the 1958-1959 academic year. On the night before the school opened for students, vandals had painted racial epithets on the school's edifice facing the highway. Superintendent Edgar Woolsey, the school janitor, and four others removed the paint overnight.
Among the first to desegregate, Barbara Williams Dotson and Joe Ferguson became the first two African-American graduates of the high school. Another figure in the effort, Dale Bumpers became a governor and a U.S. senator.
"Charleston Celebrates Integration," Southwest Times Record (Fort Smith, AR), June 11, 2007, 1A, 8.
Bumpers, Dale. The Best Lawyer in a One-Lawyer Town: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2003.
Kirk, John. "Not Quite Black and White: School Desegregation in Arkansas, 1954-1966." The Arkansas Historical Quarterly 70, No. 3 (Autumn 2011): 225-257.
Stephan, A. Stephan. "The Status of Integration and Segregation in Arkansas." The Journal of Negro Education 25, No. 3 (Summer 1956).
Jared Craig is the virtual exhibit coordinator at UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture. His research interests include political history in the American South, folklore, crime history, and the media.