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Arkansas General Assembly of 1958: Anti-School Desegregation Legislation

Sixty years ago this month, the Arkansas General Assembly convened a special session to pass a whole raft of prosegregation legislation. Act 10, introduced by Attorney General Bruce Bennett, ordered all public school teachers to disclose group memberships. The intent was to harass and intimidate members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which the state blamed for school desegregation. Some teachers refused to divulge the information. These included Little Rock teachers B. T. Shelton and J. O. Powell, as well as University of Arkansas professor Max Carr. Backed by the NAACP and the American Association of University Professors, the three appealed to the US Supreme Court, which struck down the Arkansas law and defended the “rights to personal, associational, and academic liberty” of teachers. I’m John Kirk, director of UA Little Rock’s Anderson Institute on Race and Ethnicity, and this has been an Arkansas Moment.