Hoxie: The First Stand

56 minutes
Source: California Newsreel

This documentary tells the story of one of the earliest, most important, and least remembered school integration battles in the South. In the summer of 1955, the school board of a small, rural Arkansas town voluntarily desegregated its schools. The newly formed White Citizens' Council saw this as a test for southern resistance to the Supreme Court's desegregation decision in Brown v. the Board of Educationand soon descended on the town. However, the school board held its ground. Eventually, they drew an extremely reluctant federal government into a case that nullified state segregation laws. Segregationalist leaders were so furious over the loss that they turned on Governor Faubus in the next primary, forcing him out of his previous moderate stance and setting up the 1957 confrontation in Little Rock, Arkansas.