Matthew Moore: The story of the Little Rock Nine and the integration of Central High School is well documented and told in history textbooks inside and out of Arkansas. But two years prior, in 1955, another school district in Arkansas became one of the first African American schools in the United States to fully integrate.
Hoxie, Arkansas, in northeast Arkansas, is now the home of a museum commemorating that integration, and it’s scheduled to open this Saturday, Jan. 24. Marty Scarbrough, with our partner station KASU in Jonesboro, spoke with Ethel Tompkins, president of the museum board and a student who integrated the school in 1955.
Tompkins says after Brown v. Board of Education made segregated education unconstitutional, two schools decided to integrate right away.
Ethel Tompkins: They were Charleston and Fayetteville. They integrated theirs rather quietly. However, when the Hoxie school board decided to do their integration, everything went smoothly until Life magazine came along and did a pictorial history of the integration, showing that the kids were getting along peacefully, played together. In the beginning, everything was fine.
About a week after that magazine went on the stands, several anti-integration groups, the White Citizens Council and a couple of others got together and decided that they would come to Hoxie to disrupt the integration process. So that was the beginning of the little bit of dissension that we had.
Now, the citizens generally went — had no concerns about the integration — but when the groups came in, they started passing the flyers and things, telling the people that they should not be integrating the schools, that biblically Black and white students should not be getting an education together, that it was against Arkansas statutes, just various things to plant the seed into the citizens mind that this was not a good thing.
So some of the citizens signed a petition to remove the school board. They also visited our various families to try to convince them that it was not good to have the students go to school together, and that they should hold their students out of school. So that started a small boycott, well, small for us, since we’re a small town, to remove the students and to shut down the school.
Well, since we were on a strict term, the first term was almost getting ready to end. So the school board decided to go ahead and shut it down two weeks early. And then after that, with the harassment that the school board was getting and some of the other families were getting harassed, so the school board told the group, “OK, let’s go to court and see why you believe this is against the law”. This is an abbreviated version. A lot went on between that, but that’s just some of the basics of it. I could go on forever. But when they went to court, the different courts that they went to sided on the side of the school board.
Now, one thing that a lot of people don’t know or don’t realize, that the decision that the Arkansas Supreme Court made, those decisions are being used even today, from 1955 until the present day. Every once in a while, a decision in the Supreme Court, U.S. Supreme Court and other courts, will reference the Hoxie decision that the court made as part of their suits that they have. So even though this has been, you know, 70 years ago, they are still using our decision. So that puts us in history, a lot of history that nobody knows about.
Also the way we got our name, Hoxie: The First Stand, is that the Hoxie integration was the very first to stand against the opposition. Also, we were the first to get the federal government involved. Up until Hoxie, the federal government was not involved in enforcing the Supreme Court decision. But when we had ours, several attorneys and board members requested the intervention from the federal government stating that this is a federal law. So you need to help us enforce that, because that’s all we’re doing. We’re trying to enforce the federal decision, and we’re getting harassed. And so we need help in that. So that’s why we were the first to stand against opposition. And that’s how we got our name.
Marty Scarbrough: My guest is Ethel Tompkins, president of the Hoxie: The First Stand board. That’s the name of the museum now open in Hoxie. But there will be a grand opening for this on Saturday, Jan. 24, from 10 a.m. to noon.
Well, I would like to go back and ask you to elaborate on some of the aspects of that story of how Hoxie was integrated. One of which I know that at the time, the school board and the superintendent, their intentions were that they recognized the disparities, didn’t they? And saw this as a way to rectify those. But also it was somewhat of a practical thing for them to integrate the schools, wasn’t it?
Tompkins: Yes. Financially wise, because our little school that we had, they were not able actually, you know, financially wise to keep our equipment, actually our building and equipment up to date. Our building, we had no indoor plumbing, no indoor heating. Our heat was provided by, we had this large stove in the middle of the room that we kept putting in wood and stuff to keep it going to the winter time. Our air conditioning, we just raised the window and hopefully that breeze would come through that.
We had one teacher for all the grades. Also, the material that we had was outdated. We got leftover materials from wherever they could find to send to our school. So the teacher that we had had to invent or write her own material. But she did a very good job, she was very good at keeping us up to date and learning on a higher plane than some of the other schools.
Scarbrough: I want to let our listeners know that you were among those children as part of this integration into the Hoxie schools back in 1955. I know that you were a youngster at the time, but did you have any concept at the time of the significance of what was going on and the conflict that these people from outside of your community were stirring up in Hoxie?
Tompkins: I had no idea. My thought was, as in our neighborhood, all the kids played together and well, on school day, we would go a couple of blocks together, and then they would continue on to the white school and I would veer off and go to my little school. So when my dad got the letters there telling him to send me to the white school this coming Monday, the only thought that I had, along with the other kids, was that we can all walk to school together. We can play together. That was the only thing we had in mind. We did not really, or I did not really think anything of it. To me, it was just a new, exciting adventure.
Moore: That was Ethel Tompkins, president of the board of the new museum in Hoxie that commemorates the integration of the schools. She spoke with Marty Scarbrough with KASU in Jonesboro.
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