A Service of UA Little Rock
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Sue Cowan Williams

Seventy years ago this month, Sue Cowan Williams, chair of the English Department at Dunbar High School, won her lawsuit for equal pay between black and white teachers in Little Rock schools. She was chosen as the standard bearer for the case because of her impeccable credentials. Born and raised in Eudora, Arkansas, her parents, both schoolteachers, sent her to some of the best schools open to African Americans at the time. These included Spelman College in Atlanta and Talladega College in Alabama. She made straight “A’s” at a University of Chicago graduate class on “Methods of Teaching English.” Yet at the trial she was told by one of the city’s prominent white teachers that, “regardless of college degrees and teaching experience no white teacher in Little Rock is inferior to the best Negro teacher.”