Desegregation of Little Rock Public Services
Also, it was just like you said, one level at that movie, and no Whites, because that was the movie that we could go to. There was one other movie, when I was a child, going to Stevens (sic.), which was the Lee on Thirteenth Street. And I believe the old movie theater is still there. But we would have to pass Lee School, because it was segregated, go to Stevens School, because that’s where all the Blacks went. But the Lee Theater was there, and we had to sit in the balcony. They would not let us—we couldn’t sit with the Whites; it was separate. So we’d get a chance to go, the children would, because we could. They would let Blacks come in there, but we weren’t integrated.
--Little Rock native, Effie Bowers
Public Library
The Negro Branch Library was located at 922 West Ninth Street until 1942, when the library moved to 1413-1415 West Sixteenth Street. In 1951 the Little Rock Public Library integrated and allowed blacks over the age of 16 and students who had reached the 7th grade to use the Library but required children and blacks who had not reached the 7th grade to continue to use the Negro Branch Library. On June 1, 1951, the Little Rock Public Library changed the name of the Negro Branch Library to the Helen Booker Ivey Branch Library (also known as the Children’s Department). The Ivey Branch Library served a portion of the Little Rock’s African American community until 1963.
Public Transportation Systems
In Little Rock, a city ordinance required African Americans to sit from the rear and whites to sit from the front; yet overcrowding sometimes led to non-segregated seating. The United States Supreme Court ruling of South Carolina Electric and Gas Company v. Fleming (1956), ordered the desegregation of intrastate transportation and waiting rooms. However, national newspapers reported the desegregation of public transportation. Like the national newspapers, local city officials across Arkansas and other parts of the South misunderstood the ruling and began to desegregate public transportation systems. In April 1956, bus companies in Little Rock, Hot Springs, Pine Bluff, and Fort Smith initiated desegregation plans. Although officials discovered the mistake, desegregation plans continued in Arkansas. Browder v. Gayle (1956), a later Supreme Court ruling, would order the desegregation of public transportation.
Student Activism
Propelled by the momentum of the national Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, black Arkansans worked further to dismantle Jim Crow. In 1960, Philander Smith College launched a sit-in movement in Little Rock. While this tactic had been employed by thousands of blacks and whites in other southern cities, including the highly successful Greensboro, North Carolina sit-in movement, the Little Rock sit-in movement lacked a firm support network and faced limited success. On March 10, 1960, fifty Philander Smith College students staged a sit-in to protest downtown Little Rock’s F.W. Woolworth segregated lunch counter. After refusing to serve the black students at the white-only lunch counter, store officials alerted the police to the student demonstration and immediately closed the lunch counter. All but five of the Philander Smith students vacated the lunch counter after its closure. Chief of Police Eugene G. Smith arrested the five students under Arkansas Act 226 that made it illegal to remain on the business premises when asked to leave. The Little Rock NAACP came to the students’ defense by providing bail bond for them. However, the students lacked support from the college. Upon the students’ arrest, Philander Smith College president M. Lafayette Harris condemned the students’ action saying the college would not “subscribe to mass action in dealing with problems.” Arrested on three charges, including loitering, creating a disturbance in a public place (1958 Arkansas Act 17), and refusing to leave business premises (1959 Arkansas Act 226), the five students appeared for trial on March 17, 1960 and were sentenced to $250 fines and thirty-day jail sentences. The Philander Smith College students continued their sit-in demonstrations without the college’s support. On April 13, 1960, police arrested two more Philander Smith students at Blass Department Store, who were charged under Act 17 and fined $418 with ninety-day jail sentences. The same day police arrested six additional students at Pfeiffer Department Store, who were charged under Act 226 and fined $250 with sixty-day jail sentences.
Summer break at the college consequently ended the first Philander Smith student sit-in movement; however a new group of Philander Smith Students, calling their organization Arkansas SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) attempted to revive the movement. Worth Long, a twenty-four year old Philander Smith student and one of the new leaders of the Little Rock movement, successfully coordinated and managed the student demonstrations; however, the protests waned and eventually came to a stop. James Penick, a local banker and chairman of the Downtown Negotiating Committee, met with downtown store managers to discuss the end of segregation practices following the Woolworth lunch counter campaigns and store boycotts. As a result, Little Rock desegregated its lunch counters in January 1963. Later the city lifted racial restrictions in hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, the zoo, auditorium, and public parks.
Another organization, the Council on Community Affairs (COCA), helped the peaceful desegregation of public facilities in Little Rock. COCA formed in 1961 by a group of black medical professionals (Dr. William H. Townsend, Dr. Maurice A. Jackson, Dr. Garman P. Freeman, and Dr. Evangeline Upshur). COCA emerged under the cloud of a July 1961 Freedom Ride through Arkansas. Freedom Riders, sponsored by the Chicago-based Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), set out to test the Boyton v. Virginia (1960) that outlawed segregation of interstate transit facilities. On May 13, 1961, two groups of Freedom Riders intending to travel by bus from Atlanta, Georgia to Jackson, Mississippi were attacked by white mobs in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama. The savagery of the events captured the nation’s attention and brought President John F. Kennedy to arrange National Guard escorts for the two groups of Freedom Riders.
In July 1961, five Freedom Riders set out from St. Louis, Missouri for Louisiana on Midwest Trailways. The interracial group of three women and two men all hailed from outside Arkansas—two from New York and Missouri, and one from North Carolina. The trip through Arkansas was relatively eventless, but in Little Rock on July 10, 1961 over four hundred whites and twelve police officers confronted the Freedom Riders at the bus terminal at Main and Markham streets. The mob taunted the group as they entered the segregated “Intra-State” bus facility, where they were arrested by the Chief of Police for violation of Arkansas law. The group spent the night in jail and by the next morning pled “not guilty” in Little Rock Municipal Court. City officials, not wanting to add to the city’s tarnished racial image, sought to expedite the proceedings. Judge Quinn Glover, rejected the defendant’s constitutional arguments, and handed down fines of $500 and a six-month prison sentence to each defendant—all suspended if the defendants “leave the state of Arkansas and proceed to their respective homes.” At first the defendants agreed, thinking they could continue their trip to Louisiana; however, once they realized the literal meaning of Judge Glover’s deal, one of the Riders announced he would “much rather be dead in my grave” than be a “slave to segregation.” City and business leaders convinced Judge Glover to back off his demand and the Freedom Riders continued to Louisiana.
Dismayed by the city’s treatment of the Freedom Riders, COCA formed and allied itself with potential rivals and as an “umbrella group” for organized activism. COCA appointed black leaders to chair committees on “Coordinating,” “Political Affairs,” “Employment,” “Religion,” and “Health and Welfare.” After failing to get the city to voluntarily desegregate public facilities, COCA filed a federal suit against the city board on March 8, 1962 for failing to desegregate “public parks, recreational facilities, Joseph T. Robinson Auditorium and all other public facilities.” The suit was ruled in COCA’s favor on February 15, 1963.
The Black Power Movement emerged in the mid-1960s as a new expression of racial consciousness among African Americans and represented racial dignity and self reliance. While the Black Panther Party became the nation’s leading advocates of Black Power, Black United Youth (BUY) emerged as Arkansas’s Black Power youth group. In the late-1960s, BUY sought to aggressively combat poverty and obtain fair access for African Americans in employment, housing, and educational opportunities. Tactics employed by Bobby Brown, BUY’s president, and BUY members irritated Little Rock’s white city officials resulting in Brown’s exile and the demise of the organization. Although the organization failed, it helped champion new ideals of racial solidarity and a new wave of social activism illustrated in the 1970s.
Like BUY, Arkansas Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), an interracial splinter organization from the Boston-based National Welfare Rights Organization, emerged in 1970 to combat Arkansas’s poverty and to obtain fair housing opportunities for impoverished Arkansans. ACORN’s stance on political activism as a grassroots campaign allowed the organization to swell nationally and assist in the formation of a Little Rock branch of the New Party, a grassroots electoral organization founded in Wisconsin.