World War II to Faubus Era

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Entries - Entry Category: World War II to Faubus Era - Starting with C

Caldwell, Arthur Brann

Arthur Brann Caldwell served in several capacities with the federal government over nearly four decades, including as an assistant to a U.S. senator and a U.S. vice president and as an officer in the Department of War. He also had a long career as a lawyer and administrator with the Department of Justice. A. B. Caldwell was born on September 1, 1906, in Mammoth Spring (Fulton County) to John Caldwell and Margaret Sterling Caldwell; he had one sibling. Caldwell’s father served as assistant attorney general of Arkansas before he became librarian of the Arkansas Supreme Court. Caldwell attended the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County), where he was very active in Glee Club and other musical groups and served in …

Civil Rights Movement (Twentieth Century)

The 1957 desegregation crisis at Central High School in Little Rock (Pulaski County) is often viewed as the most significant development in the civil rights struggle in Arkansas. However, this event is just one part of a struggle for African-American freedom and equality that both predates and outlasts the twentieth century. African Americans in Arkansas at the turn of the twentieth century were in an embattled state, as they were across the rest of the South. They were politically disfranchised and increasingly segregated in most areas of public life. In the Arkansas Delta, where the vast majority of Arkansas’s black population was concentrated throughout the twentieth century, blacks were often bound to the land by exploitative peonage contracts with white …

Committee on Negro Organizations (CNO)

The Committee on Negro Organizations (CNO) was an Arkansas-based civil rights organization that focused its efforts on voting rights. Seeking both to expand the voting opportunities for the state’s African American population, as well as their voting participation, it was a forerunner of the movement whose efforts came to fruition with the enactment of the national Voting Rights Act in 1965. The CNO was organized by Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) attorney William Harold Flowers. Flowers had previously written to Walter White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), requesting assistance for the local chapter of the NAACP. However, NAACP attorneys Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall replied with little more than sympathy. Consequently, Flowers …

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) is a civil rights organization founded in Chicago, Illinois, in 1942 that pioneered the use of nonviolent direct action tactics in the civil rights movement. Most notably, the organization gained national prominence in 1961 through sponsoring the Freedom Rides, which sought to test supposedly desegregated bus terminal facilities. Although CORE was a marginal presence in Arkansas compared to other civil rights organizations, it established a chapter in the state, in Fort Smith (Sebastian County), that lasted from 1962 to 1965. CORE was an offshoot of the pacifist organization the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). In 1942, it held some of the civil rights movement’s first sit-ins, targeting lunch counters in Chicago. In 1947, along with FOR, …

Council on Community Affairs (COCA)

The Council on Community Affairs (COCA) was an African-American civil rights leadership group in Little Rock (Pulaski County) that was active in the 1960s. Growing out of a need to provide coordinated black leadership in the city after the 1957 Central High School desegregation crisis, COCA was spearheaded by a group of young medical professionals. The group was careful to incorporate and bring together different figures and power bases within the black community. Through this coordinated leadership, COCA was successful in helping to desegregate Little Rock’s downtown facilities. Placing pressure on the Little Rock school board to move ahead more quickly with school desegregation, it also pressed for more and better political and economic representation for black citizens in the …

Culbreath, Lee Edward (Murder of)

Lee Edward Culbreath, a fourteen-year-old Black youth, was shot to death on December 5, 1965, in Portland (Ashley County) by a white man who, during his trial, was accused of belonging to the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Lee Edward Culbreath and another boy were riding a bicycle together when Culbreath got off at a café and his friend continued toward another store to look at a Christmas tree. As Culbreath stood outside the café, three shots were fired from a black truck, with one striking and fatally wounding him. An Arkansas state trooper stopped the truck shortly afterward and arrested Ed Vail of Hamburg (Ashley County), a forty-year-old mechanic, and his brother James, a barber. Both brothers were charged with …