In 1955 Hoxie, in Lawrence County, was a town of 1,855 strung along two railroads. Its schools split the fall term so children could pick cotton, and the district kept one poorly maintained elementary school for fewer than thirty Black children. Older Black students were bused to an all-Black school in Jonesboro. Brown v. Board of Education was a year old. Fayetteville and Charleston had integrated quietly in the fall of 1954, but Hoxie's would be the first to meet active resistance. When the Hoxie school board met in 1955 it voted unanimously to desegregate.
July 11
Superintendent Kunkel Edward Vance gave three reasons: integration was right in the sight of God, it obeyed the Supreme Court, and the district could not afford two school systems. Twenty-five Black children registered among about a thousand white pupils, and twenty-one came on the first morning, July 11. Nothing happened. Ethel Tompkins, one of those students and later the first Black graduate of Hoxie High School, recalls that all went smoothly until Life magazine photographed the children playing together.
After Life
The issue reached newsstands on July 25. On August 3 about 350 segregationists packed Hoxie City Hall, resolved not to support the schools and began a boycott the next day. They said half the white students stayed home, which Vance disputed. Outsiders arrived. On August 13 two representatives of the Little Rock chapter of White America attended a rally in Hoxie, where a petition with more than a thousand names demanded that all five board members resign. They refused. Governor Orval Faubus said the state would not intervene. Tompkins says the segregationists also visited Black families to urge them to keep their children home. Most townspeople, Black and white, did not answer the harassment, and it stayed mostly verbal. Tompkins says the board closed the first term two weeks early.
The New York Times called it "a battle in a test tube." The board answered by suing the segregationist leaders. In November 1955 Judge Thomas C. Trimble found they had "planned and conspired" to block integration, and in December he made the injunction permanent. Vance resigned the next day, saying the crisis had weighed on his decision. The segregationists appealed. Attorney General Herbert Brownell joined the board's side, the first time the Justice Department backed any district trying to comply with Brown. On October 25, 1956, the Eighth Circuit ruled for Hoxie.
Before Little Rock
The Encyclopedia of Arkansas calls the defeat a turning point. Segregationists stopped pressuring school boards and went after politicians, and in September 1957 Faubus was the one standing in the national spotlight at Central High. By then Hoxie had faded from the headlines, though its classmates went on graduating together, and Tompkins finished in 1961.
Hoxie: The First Stand opened its museum in the town in early 2026, with an exhibition hall named for Tompkins. In the same county, Powhatan Historic State Park keeps the 1888 courthouse of the county's former seat. Two years after Hoxie came Little Rock Central High School, where the nation's attention went.