Setting the Record Straight

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 101^st 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 50^th 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/ .