Civil Obedience: An Oral History of School Desegregation in Fayetteville, Arkansas, 1954–1965

By Julianne Lewis Adams and Thomas A. Deblack

Among the many changes that have occurred in our country in the last forty years, few have been as significant as those heralded by the Supreme Court's decision in the Brown vs. Board of Education case in 1954. By declaring racially segregated public schools unconstitutional, the court set in motion forces that resulted in the dismantling of the legal structure of Jim Crowism. The impact of the Brown decision was national in scope, but in no other region was its impact more far-reaching and traumatic than in the South. In Arkansas, as in other Southern states, racial segregation was not merely a well-stablished way of life, it was firmly imbedded in law.

While school desegregation generated much noise and some violence elsewhere in the South, the city of Fayetteville, Arkansas confronted the issue and resolved it with a good deal of dignity and grace, becoming the first Southern city to accommodate the Brown decision.

Through this fascinating collection of interviews with those who were involved in the desegregation process—students, teachers, administrators, civic leaders, and members of local groups—we learn of the determination of citizens to obey the law of the land and to see that freedom and equality took priority over their commitment to a school system that patently discriminated against one group of citizens.

In our continuing efforts to create a society in which all races and cultures can coexist, Civil Obedience is a story worthy of our full attention.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 1994
• ISBN: 9781610750981

Book preview

PREFACE

In 1954 the United States Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional. For a decade and a half thereafter, the reaction of the South to the court’s mandate to rid the region of its time-honored pattern of separate but unequal schools for blacks and whites ranged from violent opposition to peaceful acquiescence. The crisis that developed in Little Rock over the integration of its Central High School in 1957 gained widespread notoriety for Arkansas as a hotbed of white racism and a leader in the phenomenon known as massive resistance, a strategy to thwart the aims of the second Reconstruction. Certainly no previous incident in the history of Arkansas had attracted such sustained attention or so profoundly influenced the popular image of the state.

Most of the historical literature devoted to the South’s response to the Brown decision and the broader assault on Jim Crowism that followed in its wake has focused on larger cities in the region such as Little Rock, Birmingham, Greensboro, Montgomery, and New Orleans. Few studies have been concerned with smaller communities such as Fayetteville, Arkansas, whose response to school integration was vastly different from the course pursued by Little Rock. Because the Fayetteville experience is a part of the Southern response to the Brown decision and because it offers rich insight into the process by which desegregation occurred in a small city, we attempt in this work to collect and preserve the memories of those involved in that process. As would be expected, the recollections recorded here reveal a wide variety of perspectives and therefore provide different interpretations of events related to school desegregation in Fayetteville.

We are indebted to numerous people for assistance in this project. First and foremost among them is John Lewis, a native of Fayetteville, who as a student at the local high school observed desegregation in progress. It was he who initially suggested that the story of the community’s experience in responding to and implementing the Brown decision was not only unusual but also worthy of being preserved in written form. Closely associated with the project from its inception, Lewis not only assisted in identifying persons who, in one capacity or another, had participated in the drama of desegregation, but he also helped in scheduling interviews and secured the financial support necessary for completing the project. We are deeply indebted to the Happy Hollow Foundation and the Bank of Fayetteville for providing such support.

We owe a special debt of gratitude to all those who consented to be interviewed, took the time to review the transcriptions, and agreed to the publication of their recollections of events that significantly altered racial patterns in Fayetteville. We appreciate their candor, their tolerance of tape-recorder failures, and their graciousness in receiving us. Unfortunately, we were not able to interview all of those involved in the desegregation process, but we have attempted to include here the recollections of a cross section of school board members, school administrators and teachers, students, and citizens of the community who, either as individuals or as members of organizations, were involved in the desegregation of Fayetteville’s schools. The result is a collection of interviews, conducted in 1992–93, which provide widely different perspectives and explanations not merely of the school desegregation process, but of the integration of other public facilities as well. While there was general agreement on some aspects of the process, the interviewees substantially disagreed on others. Their recollections of events associated with school integration also revealed a wide variety of emphases and what different individuals considered to be of primary importance.

We also appreciate the contributions of Dr. Winston Simpson and his staff for making available school board minutes; Andrea Cantrell and her associates in the Special Collections department of Mullins Library at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, who identified and made available relevant manuscript materials; and Fayetteville High School faculty, especially Susan Colvin, Susie Brooks Stewart, and Barbara Stripling, who uncovered important documents in the school library. Jeanie Wyant and Mary Kirkpatrick performed invaluable services in transcribing, typing, and editing the interviews. The Department of History of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, made many contributions to this project. Gary Shepard skillfully transformed poor quality photographs and negatives into suitable form for inclusion in this work.

It is our hope that this collection of reminiscences will contribute to and make easier the task of those who later undertake writing a definitive history of school desegregation in Arkansas and the South.

INTRODUCTION

SCHOOL DESEGREGATION IN FAYETTEVILLE: A FORTY-YEAR PERSPECTIVE

Willard B. Gatewood

On September 11, 1954, stories regarding the admission of black students to the previously all-white public high school in Fayetteville, Arkansas, appeared in newspapers around the country. At the opening of the fall term on the previous day, five black students entered Fayetteville High School; two more enrolled a few days later. According to a wire service news story, Fayetteville was the first city in the Confederate South to break the segregation tradition following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.¹ The ruling referred to the court’s far-reaching decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas of May 17, 1954, which overturned the separate but equal doctrine of 1896 and declared as inherently unequal separate schools for blacks and whites.

For more than a decade following the Brown decision, school districts in the South employed a variety of strategies to circumvent the court’s ruling. Efforts to bring about the racial integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, provoked a bitter and acrimonious struggle that received international attention. The so-called Little Rock crisis² obscured developments in school desegregation elsewhere in the state, which in some instances contrasted sharply with those in the capital city. Especially dramatic was the contrast between the responses to the Brown decision by the school districts in Little Rock and Fayetteville.

When the court handed down its decision, racial segregation prevailed in the schools as well as in the institutional life generally throughout the South. In Arkansas racially separate schools were statutory rather than constitutional. The state’s constitution, ratified in 1874, merely provided for free public schools and vested in the legislature the power to designate supervisory officers. The legislative statute that placed the management of local schools in independent school districts required each district to establish separate schools for white and colored persons. In 1954 Arkansas had 423 school districts, of which 184 had no black students. The state had 1,450 white schools and 634 black schools. The average expenditure per pupil was $102.25 for whites and $67.75 for blacks. Despite official rhetoric about providing separate but equal education for both races, schools for blacks were patently unequal to those for whites. At the time of the Brown decision, no cases seeking the end of segregated schools in Arkansas were pending in federal courts, but petitions were on file with several school boards charging that black students were being denied equal educational opportunities.³

Within the context of the segregated society that existed throughout Arkansas, both Fayetteville and Little Rock possessed reputations for enlightened racial policies and practices. That their responses to school desegregation in the mid-1950s took such radically different paths resulted in large part from differences in local conditions, especially in regard to the size of the black population, the role assumed by community leaders, economic considerations, and the influences of geography and historical experience.

Located on the Arkansas River near the center of the state, Little Rock was the only city in Arkansas worthy of being classified as an urban center. Its proximity to the plantation region to its east and south, where the overwhelming majority of African Americans lived, meant that the city possessed a large black population—23,559 blacks (non-whites) out of a total of 102,213.⁴ The capital city, linked economically to the region’s cotton culture, also partook generously of the values and traditions associated with the Deep South. Regardless of the part played by cultural factors and the racial composition of the city’s population in influencing Little Rock’s response to the Brown decision, the vacillation of the community’s traditional leadership appears to have been of primary significance. Whether out of fear of the economic consequences of involvement in desegregation or because they were closet racists who secretly agreed with Gov. Orval E. Faubus’s segregationist stance, the city’s establishment refused to pursue a resolute course that would encourage the rapid and peaceful integration of local schools.⁵

The two hundred miles between Little Rock and Fayetteville scarcely provided an accurate measure of the distance that separated the cultures each represented. Located in the Ozark Mountains in the northwest corner of Arkansas, Fayetteville was the seat of Washington County and served as a trading center for a prosperous agricultural region. Originally populated mainly by people from Tennessee, the Carolinas, and other southern states who carved out small farms and apple orchards in the valleys and on the hillsides, the vicinity around Fayetteville stood in sharp contrast to the plantation country in eastern Arkansas. Few blacks, slave or free, lived in northwest Arkansas in the antebellum era. At the outbreak of the Civil War, pro-Union sentiment was strong in the area, which in the postwar period provided substantial and persistent support for the Republican Party. The commitment to education by citizens in northwest Arkansas was evident in the existence of schools and academies throughout the area. In 1872 Fayetteville outbid all other towns in the competition for the state university. The presence of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville was an important influence on the character of the town.⁶

The slow but steady growth of Fayetteville accelerated in the decade following the end of World War II. For the first time the University’s enrollment exceeded five thousand students. Poultry and wood products had emerged as major industries in the area. In addition to the Frisco Railroad and curving mountainous highways which linked Fayetteville to the outside world, Scheduled Skyways began operation in the postwar era, and in December 1954 Central Airlines inaugurated regular service with six flights daily. Two years earlier the city opened a new, commodious high school facility for whites.⁷

Fayetteville’s population in the 1950s was overwhelmingly white. Out of a population of eighteen thousand, about four hundred were African Americans. The black population resided in a section commonly known as Tin Cup, located east of the county courthouse. Fayetteville blacks were primarily employed in the service trades, especially as domestics, cooks, and custodians. Some black veterans who returned home to Fayetteville after the war and who had acquired specialized training in the armed forces took advantage of the G.I. Bill to further improve their vocational skills. Some were able to advance up the occupational ladder, especially in the automotive service trades. A few black women also secured training that improved their job skills but were often unable to gain employment based on their newly acquired qualifications.⁸

Black education in Fayetteville began with the establishment in 1866 of a school, known as Henderson School, by the American Missionary Association, a northern philanthropic organization dedicated to the uplift of newly freed slaves. Even after the local school board assumed responsibility for black education, Henderson School continued to serve the black community despite the fact that it was located in a predominantly white neighborhood as a result of changes in the town’s residential patterns. In 1934 the Civil Works Administration, a New Deal agency, hired fifteen black men to demolish an old all-white school and transport the materials to Tin Cup. These materials were used to construct Lincoln School, which was completed in 1936 by another New Deal agency, the Works Progress Administration. Lincoln School served the black community for a generation, from 1936 to 1965.⁹

Although Fayetteville provided public elementary and secondary schools for whites, it operated only a single school through the ninth grade for blacks and made no provision for their education beyond that grade for many years. Not until 1947 did the town’s school board begin paying tuition, room, and board costs for those black students who wished to attend high school. The board worked out arrangements with Fort Smith, sixty miles away, and later with Hot Springs, two hundred miles away, for accommodating its black high school students.¹⁰ Such an arrangement was in effect when the Supreme Court rendered its decision in 1954.

Despite its small size, the black population in Fayetteville had created a viable community. In addition to a school and two churches, one Baptist and the other Methodist, the community possessed several fraternal orders. A black correspondent familiar with Fayetteville’s African-American community spoke about it in glowing terms in 1893. He reported that its residents were generally prosperous and thrifty, a majority of whom own their own homes in which happiness and independence are conspicuously blended. Blacks, he pointed out, lived in safety, exercised their right to vote without fear of intimidation, and were guaranteed fair trials. Convinced that Fayetteville whites were not as bloodthirsty as southerners are generally supposed to be, he was certain that there existed no other town south of Mason and Dixon’s line where the two races are getting along better and the Negro is afforded fairer play.¹¹ Although this account obviously contained exaggerations, the writer’s principal point was that compared to other towns in Arkansas, especially those in the eastern and southern portions of the state, Fayetteville’s blacks often did escape the grosser forms of racism.

A majority of the white residents of Fayetteville undoubtedly considered themselves Southerners and subscribed to the mores and values, racial and otherwise, associated with the region. The community’s white leadership practiced a form of genteel paternalism toward its black residents within a strictly segregated society. African Americans in the town may well have had little fear of lynching and other forms of physical violence as the writer in 1893 maintained, but they scarcely enjoyed the blissful existence he described. As elsewhere in the state, the poll tax acted as a deterrent to voting by blacks and indeed by a large proportion of the town’s poorer whites. Except for several ministers, one or two small entrepreneurs, and especially Lincoln School teachers, Fayetteville’s black community in the 1950s lacked a middle class as usually defined in terms of income, occupation, and education. Even if Fayetteville’s black population had been substantially larger, its access to political power and decision making would undoubtedly have remained extremely limited.¹²

Nevertheless, several factors helped to differentiate Fayetteville from the typical small town in Arkansas, factors which blended to shape an environment that helps explain the town’s quick and positive response to the Brown decision in 1954. First, the small size and stability of Fayetteville’s black population made it possible for whites and blacks to know each other as individuals and to keep the lines of interracial communication open. Second, the presence of the state university in the town contributed significantly to its response to the prospect of racially desegregated schools. The University of Arkansas was the first such institution in the South after Reconstruction to admit African Americans. Following the admission of Silas Hunt without any litigation to its school of law in 1948, a few black students enrolled in various professional and graduate programs.¹³ By 1954 the townspeople of Fayetteville had grown accustomed to a limited degree of racial desegregation in their midst. In addition, the University faculty included a substantial number of individuals reared and educated outside the South and native Southerners with advanced degrees from non-Southern institutions, who gave expression to attitudes and values that made Fayetteville more cosmopolitan and racially tolerant than many towns of comparable size in the state. Fully aware of the increasing assaults on Jim Crowism in the post–World War II years and deeply concerned about the racial discrimination practiced in their town, individual faculty members assumed conspicuous roles in the civic life of the community and figured significantly in efforts to improve the quality of local public schools. Such involvement undoubtedly dramatized for them the gulf that existed between black and white education and strengthened their desire to eliminate such blatant inequities.¹⁴ Finally, in the 1950s, the business leadership in Fayetteville exhibited a degree of pragmatic enlightenment that often did not exist in other parts of Arkansas. Committed to the economic development of the town and region, local business people focused much energy on enhancing the town’s water supply and transportation facilities. But they were keenly interested in education and saw the link between good schools and economic development, themes pursued regularly in the Northwest Arkansas Times, the local newspaper owned by the family of Sen. J. William Fulbright. Proud of the town’s reputation for progressivism and abreast of court actions affecting various forms of racial segregation, business leaders were intent on preventing anything likely to tarnish the town’s image and thereby jeopardize its economic development. A confrontation over school desegregation, therefore, posed risks which spokesmen for the business community were not willing to take.¹⁵

The Fayetteville school board in 1954 consisted of six prominent and highly respected businessmen. The chairman, Ray Adams, was a florist, and the secretary, Hal C. Douglas, was Senator Fulbright’s brother-in-law, publisher of the Northwest Arkansas Times, and general manager of the Fulbright family’s diverse enterprises. The other members were Clark McClinton, owner of a highway construction company; Henry Shreve, manager of the local Campbell Soup Company operation; William C. Morton, owner of an insurance agency; and Haskell Utley, a real estate broker.¹⁶ Fully apprised of the existence and progress of cases in the federal courts involving school desegregation, the board members were scarcely caught by surprise when the Supreme Court rendered the Brown decision. Although minutes of board meetings were extraordinarily brief and recorded only board actions, it seems safe to assume that the school superintendent, Virgil Blossom, and his successor, Wayne White, at least informally discussed with board members possible outcomes of pending school desegregation suits. On at least one occasion, the board considered a letter from a prominent Fayetteville physician and his wife, both members of old southern families, who advocated the admission of black students to the all-white high school.¹⁷ Superintendent White later reported that while no blacks ever agitated for school desegregation, a group of white citizens had already hired a lawyer to bring about integration when the school board announced its decision to integrate the high school.¹⁸ Whatever previous discussions had taken place or the extent of pressure applied on behalf of desegregation, the Fayetteville school board voted unanimously on May 21, 1954, four days after the Brown decision, to integrate Fayetteville Senior High School (grades ten, eleven, and twelve) at the beginning of the fall term.¹⁹ The Arkansas State Press, a black weekly published in Little Rock by L. C. and Daisy Bates, observed that the board’s action could lead to the assumption "that all the brains and law-abiding white people of Arkansas live in