For the Central Arkansas Library System and Little Rock Public Radio, I’m Mark Christ with an Encyclopedia of Arkansas Minute.
For a decade Arkansas required blood donations to be labeled with the donor’s race. Representative N.B. Murphy sponsored the bill, which was championed by Governor Orval Faubus. Faubus claimed a “great majority” of white Arkansans feared that sickle-cell anemia could be spread through transfusions, though scientists had already determined that “it is hereditary, and can be transmitted from one person to another only by intermarriage which results in the birth of children.”
Courting the business community as well as segregationists, he cooperated with the latter while eliminating overtly racist language from the legislation. He signed the blood-labeling bill into law on April 2, 1959.
Ten years later, Governor Winthrop Rockefeller signed the bill’s repeal, with the legislation again sponsored by N. B. Murphy, saying the blood labeling law “unduly hampered the collection of adequate supplies of blood for transfusions; that there is no scientific basis for qualifying blood.”
To learn more, visit Encyclopedia of Arkansas.net.
