FAYETTEVILLE,
Ark.
— When history teachers
discuss the major players of the Civil Rights Movement, few, if any, mention
Wiley A. Branton. Even in his native Arkansas, most young residents do not recognize
the man who created and directed the largest voter registration effort in U.S. history and represented the students who
would pioneer integration in the Little Rock School District.
“From
1948, when Branton first became involved in voter registration efforts, to the
end of 1967, the number of black voters in the South increased from 5 percent
of those eligible to over 50 percent,” said Judith Kilpatrick, professor and
associate dean at the University of Arkansas School of Law. “Much of this
momentous change was due to Branton’s 20 years of public service, yet we don’t
hear much about him when we talk about leaders of the Civil Rights Movement.”
This is not because Branton doesn’t deserve
the recognition, said Kilpatrick, who this fall will publish When We Needed Him: Wiley Austin Branton, Civil
Rights Warrior, the first biography of the Pine
Bluff native and alumnus of the University
of Arkansas School of Law. Rather, it is at least partially due to Branton’s
lack of any need to make headlines for his critical work in public school
integration and voter registration. Despite this effort and the important
positions he held within the administration of President Lyndon Johnson,
Branton’s personal and lawyering skills were best suited to “getting the job
done” without excessive fanfare, Kilpatrick said.
“The stories of the most well-known
personalities -- Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins and several others -- of
the Civil Rights Movement have been related by the men themselves or told in
biographies by others,” she said. “But these men were not the entire story. If
they may be likened to generals in a war, then there were hundreds of
lieutenants who worked behind the headlines. Wiley Branton was a principal
lieutenant.”
After returning from service in World War
II and many years before Johnson asked him to direct the Voter Education
Project, Branton joined the local branch of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People and participated in local voter registration
drives. Branton also participated in the successful integration of the University
of Arkansas
when he helped his friend Silas Hunt seek acceptance to the law school. Branton
tried to enroll as an undergraduate but was turned down. That experience
convinced him that he wanted to be a lawyer too, so after graduating from the
Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal
College,
which later became the University
of Arkansas
at Pine Bluff,
Branton again applied to the University
of Arkansas.
He was the third African American student accepted by the law school. He graduated
in 1953.
Only three years after he opened his law
practice, Branton represented 33 black high school students and sued the Little
Rock School Board for its failure to implement a court-approved desegregation
plan following the U.S. Supreme Court’s famous 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The suit
led to the Little Rock Crisis that tested the Brown decision and the authority of the federal government. The court
ruled in favor of Branton’s clients, and the crisis was resolved only after
President Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to Little
Rock to enforce federal court
orders to admit nine black students.
Branton went on to direct the Voter
Education Project and work under Vice President Hubert Humphrey in Johnson’s
Council for Civil Rights, which coordinated the federal government’s civil
rights efforts following enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Branton
also worked for the U.S. Department of Justice and later served as dean of Howard
University’s
School
of Law.
Over the next several months, as Arkansas
prepares to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock
Crisis, Kilpatrick will put the finishing touches on the biography, which will
be published by The University of Arkansas Press.
For more information about Wiley Branton and
Kilpatrick’s research, please visit http://www.arkansasblacklawyers.com/
.