Desegregation in Higher Education

In 1948, Silas Hunt became the first African American student to enroll in a southern university in the twentieth century when he joined the University of Arkansas Law School at Fayetteville. The same year, Edith Mae Irby Jones desegregated the University of Arkansas Medical School in Little Rock, which is today the home of the UALR William H. Bowen Law School. African American undergraduate students enrolled at the University of Arkansas in 1955 when Billy Rose Whitfield, Maxine Sutton and Marjorie Wilkins joined the nursing program. In 1963, Billy Rose Whitfield’s brother, Robert Whitfield, successfully sued for integration of university dormitories. In 1969, the university hired its first black faculty member, sociologist Gordon D. Morgan. These were just a few steps in the larger story of African American struggles for higher education in Arkansas. I’m John Kirk of the UALR History Department and this has been an Arkansas moment.