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C H A P T E R 4 Desegregating the University of Arkansas School of Law IN 1948,WHEN Branton and Silas Hunt planned their mission to desegregate the University of Arkansas School of Law and Governor Laney was attempting to avoid it, related activity was taking place at the university , which housed the only state-supported law school in the state. The university, founded in , was located in the extreme northwest corner of the state, about as far away as one could get from the majority of the state’s Negro population. Despite this distance, several Negro men had appeared to attend classes during the school’s inaugural session. Since the school “was a Federal Land Grant College under the Morrell Act of ,”its charter could not exclude nonwhite students.1 The men were not dismissed. However, some faculty members were unwilling to instruct them,so the university’s chancellor did the teaching.The atmosphere must have been forbidding, though, because they did not return after the first semester.Thereafter, for a time, the University of Arkansas educated only white students. Pine Bluff’s Branch Normal school was opened in  and drew most of the state’s Negro college students.One history of the university suggests this result was intended.2 About ,it is said that Scipio Jones, a Negro resident of Little Rock,attempted to enroll at the university in Fayetteville.3 He was not admitted. Jones later became a prominent lawyer in Little Rock and handled a number of civil rights cases there.4 When the Murray case was decided in ,J.S.Waterman,then dean of the university’s law school,brought the case to the attention of thenuniversity president J.C.Futrall,who dismissed the Maryland state court’s  1KILPATRICK_pages_i-108.qxd 6/27/07 10:17 AM Page 37 decision as unlikely to occur inArkansas.5 Two years later,in ,probably in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Gaines decision, Edward W. Jacko Jr. applied to the university’s School of Law.When he was rejected, Jacko did not persist.6 There was no further testing of Gaines in Arkansas until ,when Scipio Jones contacted the university on behalf of Prentice A. Hilburn. Jones did not ask that Hilburn be admitted, only that the university pay tuition for Hilburn’s attendance at an out-of-state school.7 Jones must have known of the Gaines decision,but his letter only hinted at the possibility of a suit. Either he or his client was unwilling to engage in the legal fight that would have been required to force the university to open admissions to Negroes. Unlike other southern states,Arkansas had not developed a formal policy of paying out-of-state tuition for Negro graduate students in order to avoid integration.Hilburn’s request was the first and,although the university initially rejected the idea that such a cost should come from its budget ,it ultimately granted Jones’s request.Perhaps this was done to avoid a lawsuit.When the legislature enacted a statute in  that provided funding for out-of-state graduate tuition for Arkansas’s Negro students, it was after a conference sponsored by the university.8 This was the very action prohibited in Gaines, and both the state and the university had to know they were defying the Supreme Court.Adding insult to injury, the legislature stated that the sums paid for tuition were to be deducted from the budget of Pine Bluff’sAM&N College,reducing already limited resources for Negro undergraduate education inArkansas.Three years later,approximately $, was being devoted annually to out-of-state tuition for over one hundred students.9 In March ,Clifford Davis applied for admission to the University of Arkansas School of Law. By this time, the dean of the School of Law was Robert A. Leflar, who recognized the power of Gaines and believed that desegregation was inevitable.Leflar stalled on Davis’s application while he discussed his conclusions with the university’s president and its board of trustees.These men left the decision to Leflar, but hinted that action should be “postponed as long as possible.”When Davis pressed for an answer,Leflar suggested that Davis apply for out-of-state tuition and attend law school at Howard University. Leflar explained that he was working on the issue of Negro admissions, but that Davis should talk with J. R.  INTEGRATINGTHE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS SCHOOL OF LAW 1KILPATRICK_pages_i-108.qxd 6/27/07 10:17...

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