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Silas Hunt @ UofA

Seventy years ago, in February 1948, the University of Arkansas became the first major public university in the South to voluntarily admit a black student without a lawsuit when it enrolled World War II veteran Silas Hunt in its Law School. Although Hunt was accepted, it was under a strict regimen of segregation. He was forced to study in a segregated classroom on his own in the basement of the law building. Hunt’s one-on-one tuition annoyed some of the white students who were crammed into an overcrowded lecture theater above him, and they began to sneak into his classroom. Later, university authorities set up a rail to partition black students from white students lest it be viewed as integration. The white students soon insisted that the rail come down.