Arsnick: The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas

17. The Civil Rights Movement in Pine Bluff

17. The Civil Rights Movement in Pine Bluff VIVIAN CARROLL JONES Vivian Carroll Jones is an Arkansas native who became involved with SNCC in Pine Bluff as a high school student. After high school, she married and had three children. In 1973, she became the first African American to be hired by the city attorney’s office. This was a bittersweet victory, however, and she quickly filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission due to discrimination at the workplace. This experience led her “to pursue higher education and entrepreneurship,” and she earned a degree in social studies from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, a health sciences degree from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and a degree from the Agape School of World Evangelism. For over twenty-five years she worked as a nurse and health educator at South Central Career College, Aspen’s Career One, Jefferson Hospital, and at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Her unpublished memoir, “Arkansas’s Pine Bluff Civil Rights Movement,” is excerpted here. SNCC was born out of a student cry from a people who demanded that freedom and inequality was long overdue and out of a need to challenge man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man . . . Late in the summer of 1962, two young field representatives from SNCC’s headquarters came to our town . . . The representatives were a young black man by the name of Jim Jones and William (Bill) Hansen, who was white. Robert (Bob) Whitfield came also and would become the spokesperson for SNCC and the Pine 166 Bluff Movement. Whitfield and Jones were students at what was then AM&N College. Reverend Benjamin Grinage was also a field representative for SNCC. These men became key figures in orchestrating and organizing the Movement in Pine Bluff. There were many . . . who gave their time, love, prayers, finances, and their physical involvement. There were many whites who were instrumental and involved in areas that were not known by the media . . . Let us not forget the courageous high school and college students , many of whose parents lost their jobs because of their children’s involvement in the Movement . . . I felt a sense of mission, a sense of assignment, a sense of calling, a sense of being set aside for a purpose, for an hour of history at hand . . . The time had come for the nation to look at itself and turn from the practices of injustice and segregation. When we look back on human history, we see that God has always used a people that he would set aside to bring His will on earth. The Movement in Pine Bluff and throughout the South, I believe, was God using people, who happened to be students, both black and white, to bring about His purpose and change the earth . . . At sixty-one years of age, I look back through the years past and I see teenagers out until 10:00 P.M. knocking on doors, selling two-dollar poll taxes to individuals who had never voted. I see myself and other teenagers walking in picket lines for hours, sitting-in at lunch counters, libraries, movie theaters, being attacked by police dogs, along with many other injustices and indignities . . . In August of 1963, Arkansas governor Faubus would come to Arkansas AM&N College to dedicate the new Vocational Arts Building. Governor Faubus would be met by student protesters from the college and the Pine Bluff Movement, which included protesters from the four high schools . . . The feelings of the protesters were that the governor had not been supportive of educational improvements at the college level. During Governor Faubus’s dedication and speech, we peacefully marched in single file carrying signs that read, “Governor, would you send your children here?” and “Beautiful buildings do not represent quality education .” The police and state troopers stood by as we quietly and orderly carried the protest signs. There were no arrests that day. During the governor ’s speech, flyers were passed out to the crowd, which announced upcoming mass meetings, where issues and concerns of the community would be discussed. The president of AM&N College, Dr. Lawrence Davis Sr., was not in agreement with our protesting the governor’s presence on campus and would later dismiss those students who were part of the protest and the Pine Bluff Movement. THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN PINE BLUFF 167 President Davis was an excellent educator and leader who pursued the...