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all-white Dollarway School. Pine Bluff attorney George Howard Jr. filed suit (Dove v. Parham) on behalf of the students in federal district court in February 1959.69 While the district court initially ordered the school board to enroll the three plaintiffs, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the decision. In 1960, the district announced it would consider applications from black students to enter the first grade at Dollarway School. Attorneys for the board argued before the court that it was acting within Arkansas’s Pupil Placement Law by considering only first graders for assignment to the white school.70 Judge J. Smith Henley of the circuit court approved the district’s plan and in September 1960, one black first grader, Delores Jean York, became the first to attend Dollarway School.71 The case made headlines when the Dollarway School District received five thousand dollars from the state to assist with its legal expenses in fighting the lawsuit. This payment was the first made under Arkansas Act 358 of 1959, in which the state legislature appropriated funds to the state board of education to assist local school districts in their fight against desegregation.72 Attorneys for the black plaintiffs continued to challenge the district’s policy of disallowing lateral transfers (those other than in the first grade), and in 1963, the federal court ordered the district to admit its first black secondary student (and attorney George Howard’s daughter), Sarah Howard, to Dollarway High School. On the second day of classes, racial violence broke out as Sarah Howard reported harassment by several of her fellow students, and her uncle, William Howard, became involved in an altercation with a white youth when he attempted to pick up the black children from school. After the school board sent home a notice to all parents indicating that it would not tolerate physical violence at the school and would punish perpetrators, the black students returned and reported no additional incidents of violence.73 In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and, as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare began devising guidelines for compliance, 11 more Arkansas school districts announced desegregation measures, bringing the total number of desegregated districts to 24 out of the approximately 228 districts with students of both races. While some, mainly smaller districts with few black students, desegregated all twelve grades, others implemented freedom-of-choice plans that largely maintained separate attendance zones for black and white children but allowed a few black students the opportunity to request transfers to previously all-white schools. Black leaders maintained that 16 Johanna Miller Lewis other pressures—economic or even physical threats—could be placed on students and their parents to prevent them from applying to all-white schools and that these plans continued to place the burden of desegregation on the black students.74 Statewide by the fall of 1964, approximately 930 black students attended classes with whites, representing just over 3 percent of the total black enrollment for the 24 districts.75 In early 1965, the federal Office of Education announced it would require school districts to file statements of compliance detailing their desegregation efforts in accordance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act or forego federal aid. The office additionally set its target date for full desegregation in public schools as the fall of 1967. According to Francis Keppel, federal commissioner of education, for a district to meet the federal guidelines it needed to file an assurance that the district is already in compliance and either submit a final federal court order or an acceptable plan for desegregation.76 By 1965–66, only four districts in the state were still involved in active litigation: Little Rock, Fort Smith, El Dorado, and West Memphis. Plaintiffs in West Memphis agreed to dismiss their case in 1966 after the school district agreed to open all-white West Memphis Senior High to black students wishing to transfer from Wonder High School. In 1963, black plaintiffs in Fort Smith, represented by attorney George Howard Jr., demanded that black students be transferred to Fort Smith Northside High School. The United States Supreme Court ultimately decided the case in 1965. The Court ordered the district to immediately integrate its high schools, in effect invalidating the stair-step desegregation plan used by many districts across the state. Howard also represented the plaintiffs who sued the El Dorado School District in 1964. The parents of six black high school students sued on behalf of...

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