Brown II- Bentonville

Sixty years ago, in May 1955, the United States Supreme Court handed down its school desegregation implementation order, widely known as Brown II. This followed the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision a year earlier. Brown II gave guidelines for how school desegregation should proceed. In 1954 and 1955, four school districts successfully desegregated in Arkansas. The Bentonville School District in northwest Arkansas had only one African American high school student called Carl Stewart. He had previously been privately tutored at the home of African American teacher Cinco Dickerson. Stewart was quietly enrolled at Bentonville High School in the fall of 1955. Not until over a year later did a school official that had since moved away from the district leak the news. In 1957, Carl’s brother Charles also enrolled at the school. I’m John Kirk, of the UALR History Department, and this has been an Arkansas Moment.