Aaron v. Cooper

This February marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Aaron v. Cooper lawsuit, the first of many court battles to desegregate Little Rock schools. Little Rock’s response to the U. S. Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education was to build two new high schools: Hall High in the west and Horace Mann High in the east. Although the schools were built in predominantly white and black neighborhoods, assurances were made that they would not be segregated by race. However, when Horace Mann opened in February 1956, it was assigned an all-black teaching faculty. Hall was assigned an all-white teaching faculty. This clearly designated them as “white” and “black” schools. Aaron v. Cooper was filed because of a perceived lack of good faith in planning for school desegregation. I’m John Kirk, director of UALR’s Institute on Race and Ethnicity, and this has been an Arkansas Moment.