Charleston High School Integration

Charleston did it quietly, and the quiet was deliberate. After Brown v. Board of Education, the five-member school board voted unanimously on July 27, 1954, to close the Black school and admit its students. The district had been paying about $4,500 a year to send Black high schoolers to Lincoln High School in Fort Smith, and the Rosenwald school needed repairs it could not afford. Leaders, including the local newspaper, kept the plan from outside reporters until September 13. Some schools refused to play Charleston's football team, and in December 1958 voters rejected segregationist board candidates two to one.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Wiederkehr Wine Cellars — 18 mi
  The oldest operating winery in Arkansas, begun in 1880 in a hand-dug cellar on St. Mary's Mountain by a Swiss shoemaker, in the village that grew around it.
• Subiaco Abbey — 21 mi
  A Benedictine monastery on a hilltop in Logan County, founded in 1878 for German-speaking Catholic settlers, with a 1959 abbey church and a boarding school for boys.
• Van Buren Historic District — 22 mi
  Eight blocks of Main Street on the Arkansas River, from Phillips Landing, with 1889 banks, a beer depot and a railroad depot, on the National Register since 1976.
• Mount Magazine State Park — 23 mi
  Arkansas's highest point at 2,753 feet: a sandstone-rimmed plateau above the river valley with a lodge, overlooks and hang-glider launches.

More markers nearby

• Skirmishes at Roseville — 17 mi
• Franklin County Court House — 17 mi
• Courthouse — 23 mi
• Albert Pike School House — 23 mi