The responsibility of teaching Arkansas high school students in the 21st century about the desegregation of the state's schools in the 1950s, 1960s, and, yes, even into the 1970s carries with it a mixed bag. On the one hand, the events that followed the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 happened in their own neighborhoods, so students ought to be able to empathize with the joys, sorrows, defeats, and victories that were attendant to desegregation. On the other hand, the events can appear to students like most elements of an overly pedantic history curriculum—simply as things that happened "back in the day," way before they, or their parents, or even their grandparents were born.
In an attempt to mitigate these "it's just history" attitudes, my office sponsored a project from 2007 through 2012 called the Arkansas Delta Oral History Project. In it, students from an array of Arkansas high schools in the Delta participated in writing groups, led by University of Arkansas undergraduate students, designed to help them inquire into self-selected topics of local legend and lore. In the ADOHP, each student from the participating classes at the high schools would propose the topic he or she wanted to study—sometimes making an individual decision and sometimes getting guidance from the teacher—and then engaged in a prescribed sequence of tasks: conduct "book research" about the topic; identify someone with an informed perspective who had lived through the times when the topic came to the public forefront; and plan, practice, conduct, and transcribe an interview with that person. But the project didn’t stop there. Once the student had transcribed the interview, he or she was required to write something substantial, in a genre of his or her choice: a story, an essay, a series of poems, a play, a brochure, a website. We even had some students who manifest their work in interpretive dances, in drawings, in raps. I have over 300 of the completed works archived in my office. In 2016, Syracuse University Press published The Arkansas Delta Oral History Project: Culture, Place, and Authenticity, which chronicled the enterprise.
Among the more vigorous participants in the ADOHP were the students in English and journalism classes taught by Brenda Doucey at Pine Bluff High School. Doucey had lived through desegregation at nearby White Hall High School, so her students found a rich oral history resource in her and her acquaintances. Doucey and U of A mentor Krista Jones Oldham helped point the students to the perceptive research done by Johanna Miller Lewis on the implementation of Brown in Arkansas. Lewis explains following Brown Pine Bluff had cautiously delayed desegregation until school officials could see how the jittery situation in Little Rock was going to play out. Nonetheless, social resistance to even the idea of desegregation was intense, prompting the March 1955 establishment of a segregationist organization called "White America Inc."
In the face of this unease, Pine Bluff school officials in 1956 announced plans to begin integration but quickly decided to delay those plans for two years. In 1958, then, school leaders once again announced plans to implement desegregation, but this announcement prompted the meeting of segregationist leaders from 21 counties to convene in Pine Bluff and form the Association of Citizens' Councils of Arkansas. This move forced the school to postpone the implementation for another five years. During that time, parents of African-American students, the Pine Bluff chapter of the NAACP, and attorney Wiley Blanton repeatedly challenged the school board, eventually prompting it to begin integration of grades one and two in 1963.
It was these events that Doucey's students studied in their oral history projects. The students interviewed an array of Pine Bluff residents who had lived through the plans and delays, and the students produced a portfolio that combined the interview transcripts with imaginative "living journalism" pieces in which the students tried to capture, via poetry and fictionalized newspapers, what the era must have been like for Pine Bluff students. The student work is compelling. For example, one student, Daniel Harris, offers a poem that creates a narrative point of view, placing the reader in the mind’s eye of a Black student entering White Hall High School for the first time:
A change is very hard, especially in my senior year—
I don't want to go but our school end is near . . .
White Hall is the school I'm going to next week—
How will I get through integration? How will the other students treat me?
Will I get hit from behind? Will they lock me up somewhere?
Will they put anything in my food or treat me unfair?
Will they let me live to graduate or trip me down the stair?
In the students' fictionalized issue of the Pine Cone newspaper, Daniel Johnson's editorial embodied the viewpoint of a Black Pine Bluff student’s considering "the sudden and recent desegregation of the district." Another editorial penned by Kye Meadows took on the persona of a fundamentally religious white student who felt she should spend more time with a Black friend. The editorialist hoped that the recent turmoil would not lead to future tribulations: "The overall goal of integration was to bring everyone together and work toward a common goal. I feel this goal was accomplished, and a lot of barriers were knocked down."
The ADOHP, in short, gave Pine Bluff students not only the opportunity to learn the history of desegregation of their schools but also to relive the history vicariously, more than four decades later.
David Joliffe is a professor of English and Brown Chair of Literacy at the University of Arkansas.