Remembrances in Black: Personal Perspectives of the African American Experience at the University Of Arkansas, 1940s-2000s (review)

In 1948, Silas Hunt was admitted to the University of Arkansas School of Law, becoming the first African American to be accepted for graduate or professional studies at an all-white Southern university. However, it would be hyperbole to say that the university was actually "integrated" with Hunt's admission, given that he had to attend separate classes in the basement; was forced to live off-campus with a black family and walk to and from class several miles each day, even in the cold winters; and endured a fairly constant shunning from his classmates. Hunt died in 1949 before finishing his degree, but those black students who came after him, down to the present day, have both built upon his legacy and shared, to some extent, his experience of isolation.

While the University of Arkansas has retroactively embraced Silas Hunt, awarding him a posthumous degree and naming a scholarship after him, the stories of other black students have, for the most part, gone untold until the publication of Remembrances in Black: Personal Perspectives of the African American Experience at the University of Arkansas, 1940s-2000s, which consists of oral and written histories spanning more than fifty years, from the earliest days of tentative desegregation when George W. B. Haley enrolled in the law school in 1949, down to the twenty-first century with Quantrell Willis, who entered the university fifty years later as an undergraduate. Within the book lies a record of pride mixed with pain. The early students revel in their status as the first black graduates from the nursing or the journalism department, for example, even as they so clearly recall—either with a humor bred by the years or a shame still raw from the memory—the humiliations of those trailblazing years when they were excluded from all campus activities and amenities. Even students in the 1960s, such as George B. Miller, have little in the way of fond memories: "Now those three years were hell! There is no other way to describe it. I have not been back to the University of Arkansas. I have no desire to go back" (102). Some students could not endure the regular regimen of low grades for decent work and institutional racism (and, to their credit, editors Robinson and Williams interview some early dropouts, too). Others rose up in opposition to the strictures and the humiliations dished out to them by a lily-white administration and the student body, even going so far, in one instance, as to interrupt a pep rally to demand the end of playing "Dixie" at Razorback ballgames.

Of course, not everyone had the same experience at the University of Arkansas, and many of those interviewed still hold fast to Razorback traditions, return to campus regularly, and have even encouraged their children's attendance there. An awareness remains, however, even among the younger interviewees, that the university is far from putting forth its best effort in race relations and that national scandals such as the abrupt dismissal of basketball coach Nolan Richardson or the causeless demotion of Associate Vice Chancellor Lonnie Williams (the book's coeditor) are indicative of a continuing resistance to meaningful racial integration on all levels. As interviewee Randy Dorian Brown, Jr., a student from 2001 to 2005, notes, "There is a lot of institutionalized racism at the University of Arkansas and it is truly inherent within the university system throughout its traditions and its undertones" (274).

The editors organize the interviews herein chronologically by decade, with each chapter headed by an introduction providing the broader historical context. The editors conducted the interviews either in person or by telephone, though some contributors sent written responses to interview questions. With each individual narrative, the editors include the type of interview, its location, and the date. Robinson and Williams likewise...