The Segregation and Desegregation of Arkansas: An Overview

The earliest state-mandated segregation in Arkansas occurred with the passage of Act 52 of 1868, which established segregated education for Black and white students. The quandary in which most Black citizens found themselves required them to consider which would be the lesser of two evils: exclusion or segregation. Rather than be marginalized entirely, at least when it came to education, they chose separate albeit inferior educational facilities. The ways in which Black Arkansans responded to segregation varied from place to place in the state. For the Black middle class, resistance to segregation often came in the form of enhanced dedication to economic independence and community self-sufficiency even as it fought for first-class citizenship. For those who were less fortunate, de jure segregation, rural labor, and—if female—domestic service characterized the depraved standard of living to which they were subjected.

For Black residents of urban areas like Little Rock, the inconvenience of arbitrary racial proscriptions did not blind them to economic and professional opportunities. Whatever tension local whites may have felt because of their presence, by the last two decades of the century, there was a small but independent class of Black artisans, craftsmen, and other professionals. Racial segregation also meant that Blacks were able to take advantage of educational opportunities, and Black teachers were assured of jobs in Black schools. An act passed in 1871 provided for separate but equal school systems, and it also required the training of black faculty to teach in them; this teacher-training void was filled with the opening of the Branch Normal College (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff) in Pine Bluff in 1873. Philander Smith College, formerly known as Walden Seminary, which provided access to higher education for Black Arkansans, was founded in 1877.

By the 1920s, in addition to the laws mandating separate educational institutions, Arkansas also had seven laws requiring the physical segregation of the races. Because of the relatively small number of Blacks in Arkansas compared to those in the Deep South, Jim Crow segregation was far less onerous. Relationships across the racial divide remained relatively fluid; relations between Blacks and whites often varied by class and location. Some Little Rock neighborhoods, for example, continued to enjoy integrated housing.

In Arkansas, such civil rights organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) continued its activism as new organizations formed. In 1940, Black leaders in the state formed a new organization, the Committee for Consideration of Educational Problems of Negroes. Recognizing that separate education clearly did not mean equal education in Arkansas, Black leaders recommended improvements in Black schools and improved economic opportunities. However, they were cautious not to demand an end to the system of segregation itself. It was not until the 1950s that demands for desegregation intensified. Such activism most notably involved desegregating public schools and institutions of higher learning throughout Arkansas.

Although the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock in 1957 and the story of the Little Rock Nine are well known as documented in the state's history, some educational facilities in Arkansas had been desegregated earlier. The first Black student to desegregate an institution of higher education in the post-Reconstruction South was Silas Hunt, who enrolled at the University of Arkansas School Of Law in 1948. As for the state's public schools, Charleston schools were the first in the former Confederacy to desegregate following the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, followed soon thereafter by Fayetteville schools, whose school board was actually the first to approve desegregation.

Throughout Arkansas, particularly in areas with sparse Black populations such as Van Buren, Fort Smith, Bentonville and Hot Springs, schools desegregated with barely a second glance from its citizens. It was only in Hoxie in 1955, after the school board unanimously concluded that integration was "morally right in the sight of God," that some local whites became angry and threatened to boycott the schools. In Little Rock, the open defiance of desegregation in public schools was obvious. Only 16.7 percent of Black students attended integrated schools by the mid-1960s. By 1976, Black students constituted the majority of the Little Rock public school population. In the 1980s, the figure was at about seventy percent as white parents fled to surrounding suburban communities. Desegregation did not lead to full integration.

Desegregation efforts in Arkansas were not limited to schools. In the 1960s, Black students from Philander Smith College attempted to desegregate the Woolworth's lunch counter in downtown Little Rock. They succeeded in 1963. Unfortunately, like segregation in the late nineteenth century, desegregation also occurred at varying rates statewide. As in most Southern states, desegregation and recognition of first-class citizenship for all people in Arkansas was an arduous and painful process.

This article was adapted from an Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture entry.