Brown II- Fayetteville

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. Four days after the Brown decision, the Fayetteville school board announced that it would allow nine African-American high school students to attend the local high school with 500 whites. Previously, these students had been bused to segregated schools at Fort Smith and Hot Springs, distances of 60 and 150 miles respectively, at a cost of $5,000 a year. Fayetteville’s superintendent of schools Wayne White told reporters that, “segregation was a luxury we could no longer afford.” I’m John Kirk, of the UALR History Department, and this has been an Arkansas Moment.