Hoxie: The First Stand

On July eleven, nineteen fifty-five, the Hoxie School Board opened its classrooms to Black and white students together, making it one of the first Southern districts to act after the Supreme Court's Brown decision the year before. The reason was practical. Superintendent Kunkel Vance had told the board the district simply could not afford to keep running separate schools, and the board had voted unanimously to integrate two weeks earlier.

Twenty-one Black students walked into formerly all-white classrooms that morning. White supremacist groups descended on the town, organizing boycotts and rallies. Hoxie sued to stop the outside agitators, and in nineteen fifty-six the U.

S. Attorney General personally backed the school board in federal appeals court, the first time any Attorney General had done so on behalf of an integrating district. Hoxie's stand became a legal template for the decade of court battles that followed.