Negro Boys Industrial School Fire

On March 5, 1959 at four a.m., twenty-one African American boys age thirteen to seventeen perished in a fire in a locked dormitory twelve miles outside of Little Rock, Arkansas, near the community of Wrightsville. Forty-eight boys managed to escape death by breaking through heavily screened windows. Immediate steps to limit the political damage were deemed essential by Governor Orval E. Faubus. After personally inspecting the scene at six a.m. and conferring with black superintendent Lester Gaines, the governor was driven to the State Capitol at Little Rock where he held a press conference, pledging to "find the guilty in the tragedy as well as to absolve the innocent." He called for an appropriation by the legislature then in session to rebuild the burned dormitory. Within twenty-four hours the governor announced he had instructed the members of the state board, which had authority to oversee the institution, as well as the state police and the state fire marshal (all under his control), to investigate the fire and the deaths.

"There's absolutely no reason for this to happen the way it did except because of negligence of someone," Faubus said.

The governor was to learn shortly that though he had appointed the board members they had no intention of rubberstamping his conclusion. They soon came back with a report that unanimously decided that "this tragedy could not have been prevented, that everyone had attempted to carry [out] his duty…"

Central to the board's findings was that the responsibility for the fire and the deaths of the boys should be viewed more broadly than merely the alleged behavior of certain Negro Boys Industrial  School (NBIS) employees. In fact, at various times in its history, in dealing with the older boys, the Arkansas NBIS had largely been operated as a prison work farm. Besides brutal whippings, "many boys go for days with only rags for clothes. More than half of them wear neither socks nor underwear during [the] winter of 1955-56 when this study was in progress," wrote sociologist Gordon Morgan. Reporting on the fire, the Arkansas Gazette and Arkansas Democrat ran articles documenting wide disparities in the  conditions and treatment between the institution for white boys in Pine Bluff and the NBIS at Wrightsville.

Rejecting his board's conclusions, Faubus announced he would conduct his own investigation which took place in secret. In almost complete control of the various state boards due to his long tenure as governor, his "recommendations" that Superintendent Gaines, his wife, and three other employees be terminated were carried out by the board on March 25th.

Coming after the Little Rock Central High School Desegregation Crisis, which brought world-wide attention to the issues of equality and the meaning of democracy in the United States, the deaths of the boys would remain front and center, while Governor Faubus sought a criminal investigation by the Pulaski County Grand Jury for the purpose of indicting Lester Gaines. After an investigation in which 32 witnesses were called, the Public Institutions Committee stated in part, "the blame can be placed on lots of shoulders for the tragedy: the Board of Directors...the Superintendent and his staff…the State Administration one right after another through the past years…who should have been so ashamed of conditions…and finally on the people of Arkansas, who did nothing about it." Though no criminal charges were brought, family members were allowed pursuant to the statutory Arkansas Claims Commission to seek monetary damages.

The history of the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School, the fire which took the lives of 21 boys, and its shameful aftermath, were played out against a wider backdrop of an unyielding commitment to maintain white supremacy for as long as possible. It would not be until 1968 that an appeal to the federal Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals by Arkansas civil rights attorney John W. Walker resulted in a terse ruling by the court after continual delays by the state that "Arkansas statues requiring segregation of juveniles were clearly unconstitutional and under no circumstances should race be a determinative factor in assignment."

Today in 2017, nine life-size statues of the students who desegregated Central High School grace the lawn at the State Capitol. There are, of course, no statues of the boys who died in the fire. For the cynical, arguably, the statues of the Little Rock Nine are a cruel irony for those who are familiar with the increasingly bitter and possibly futile struggle to maintain a credible, desegregated public school system in Arkansas.