Hoxie, AR. 1955. from Arkansas Underground on FaceBook...
Two years before the world watched nine students try to enter Little Rock Central High School, a small school district in Lawrence County, Arkansas quietly and voluntarily integrated its schools without a federal court order, without a National Guard escort, and without making the national news. 🇺🇸 The Hoxie school board voted to desegregate in the summer of 1955, citing both the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board ruling and their own documented belief that it was simply the right thing to do.
The documented history of Hoxie's integration shows it proceeded peacefully until the White Citizens Council organized outside resistance and flooded the community with agitators from across the region, forcing the school board to temporarily close the schools and seek federal court protection. The federal court ruled in favor of the Hoxie school board, producing one of the first documented federal court decisions protecting a local school board's right to integrate against organized outside resistance. The Hoxie school board members who made that decision did so knowing the resistance it would bring, in a state and a region where that kind of courage had a documented price. Their names are in the record. Their story is almost entirely absent from the civil rights history Arkansas tells about itself. 📋
What does it say about the way civil rights history gets told that Hoxie, Arkansas integrated its schools voluntarily and peacefully two years before Little Rock, produced a landmark federal court ruling, and has been a footnote ever since? And what would the civil rights history of Arkansas look like if Hoxie had gotten the recognition its school board earned?
