On January 21 1963, Sarah E. Howard became the first African American student to integrate Dollarway High School. She later went on to become a nationally recognized lawyer and professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law before retiring.
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On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that separating children in public schools based on race was unconstitutional in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas case. Later that year, William Dove, a member of the Pine Bluff chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and a small group of Pine Bluff’s African American citizens requested that the Dollarway School District desegregate. Their request was denied. At the time, the Dollarway School District had two main segregated schools that housed all 12 grades, Townsend Park School for African American students and Dollarway School for white students.
In 1957, Dove requested that his five children be transferred to the Dollarway School District but his request was again denied. Later that year, three African American students, Earnestine Dove, Corliss Smith, and James Warfield, requested a transfer to Dollarway High School on three separate occasions and were denied each time.
In June 1959, NAACP attorneys Robert L. Carter of New York City and George Howard Jr. of Pine Bluff, who also served as the state president of the NAACP, filed a lawsuit against the Dollarway School Board in the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Arkansas, on behalf of the students in what became known as Dove v. Parham.
In an earlier desegregation case, Aaron v. Cooper, Arkansas voters, approved a constitutional amendment adopting pupil placement laws. Pupil placement laws required that local school boards make each student’s school assignments based on numerous factors unconnected to race. Unfortunately, the laws reinforced segregation by simply assigning students to the segregated school they had attended the previous year thus putting the burden of requesting a transfer on the student.
On August 4, 1959, Judge Axel J. Beck, a South Dakota judge temporarily assigned to the Eastern District of Arkansas, ruled that the school board had used the pupil placement laws as a cover-up for its pro-segregation actions. He stated that since the school board had not acted in good faith, the three African-American students should be admitted to the Dollarway School District immediately.
On August 6, 1959. Attorneys Robert V. Light and Herschel Friday appealed the decision to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis, Missouri on behalf of the Dollarway School Board and its president Lee Parham. Judge Beck had already returned to South Dakota so the school board requested that the case be heard by an Arkansas judge. On September 21, 1959, the Eight Circuit Court overturned Judge Beck’s decision and remanded the case to the U.S. District Court. This served as a victory for the pupil placement laws, forcing the African-American students to start the legal process of requesting a transfer again.
On February 19, 1960, Judge J. Smith Henley of Harrison, commanded the school board to end its practice of segregation and submit a desegregation plan to the court. However, he did not order the Dollarway School District to admit the three African American students. Judge Henley retained jurisdiction over the integration of Dollarway School District until the district reached unitary status in October 1970.
In 1961, attorney Howard launched a 15-month battle so his daughter Sarah E. Howard could transfer from Townsend to Dollarway High School. On October 24, 1962, Judge Henley ruled that “the Dollarway school board could continue to use its grade-a-year desegregation plan that year and to make initial assignments for the 1963-64 school year.” He was also concerned that the plan was not making adequate progress in eliminating unconstitutional segregation in the Dollarway School District. He also ruled that “the board must admit Sarah Howard, 14, Negro girl, to the 10th grade of the white Dollarway High School by the start of the second semester, in January, unless the board can convince the court by Jan. 1, 1963, that there is a valid reason for not admitting her under the criteria of the state pupil assignment law.”
On January 21, 1963, Howard became the first African American student to integrate Dollarway High School. Shortly after being enrolled at Dollarway High School, Howard endured an onslaught of both physical and verbal abuse, being pelted with stones, kicked, shoved, and cursed at school and while walking home. According to WA&P In Pine Bluff, the very next month her father withdrew her stating, “I have seen the knots and bruises on my little girl’s head. I can’t let her go back until she is adequately protected.” Eventually, Howard re-enrolled at Dollarway High School. In 1965, she became the first African American in Pine Bluff to graduate from an all-white school.
Howard attended Hanover College where she majored in speech and drama. In 1970, she earned a master’s degree in English and theater arts from the University of Kentucky (UK). She then performed and taught drama at Kentucky State University before enrolling in law school at the University of Kentucky. Though Howard initially hesitated to become a lawyer, fearing she would not live up to her father’s example, in an interview with UK’s Rosenberg College of Law magazine she stated, “I knew when I was seven years old that I wanted to be a lawyer. After dinner on Sundays, my dad would read portions of his briefs to us, so I grew up hearing legal arguments and understanding the power of legal recourse to redress the deprivation of constitutional rights.”
Howard Jenkins served as the Charles C. Baum Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law before retiring. In 2017, the University of Kentucky College of Law (now the UK J. David Rosenberg College of Law) inducted Jenkins into its Alumni Hall of Fame.
During her time as a professor, Jenkins devoted her academic life “to challenging her students to develop a commitment to diligence and competence in the study and practice of the law.” Jenkins is now a nationally recognized scholar in contracts and commercial law and an expert on the Uniform Commercial Code, the primary U.S. law governing commercial transactions. In the late 1980s and 1990s, her work helped people who would not have been represented in the reform of commercial law.
Jenkins is a member of the prestigious American Law Institute. She has served as chair of two American Bar Associate Universal Commercial Code Subcommittees. She served as chair of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Commercial and Related Consumer Law and as a member of the AALS Standing Committee on Recruitment and Retention of Minority Faculty and Students. She published numerous articles on Commercial Law issues, organized symposiums for renowned U.S. scholars, and wrote Volume 13 of the Revised Corbin on Contracts.
In 2021, Jenkins returned to her high school alma mater to encourage families to stay involved even in the face of Dollarway’s annexation with Pine Bluff schools. According to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, “Under state law, once a school district has been under state control for 5 years, the Board of Education can choose to annex the district with another, consolidate it with another to form a new district, return it to local school board governance, or reconstitute it with a different form of governance. If the state Board of Education approves, the department can return the annexed Pine Bluff district to local [Dollar School District] control by September 2023.”
In her speech, Jenkins stated, “Despite the changing landscape, the annexing Dollarway district is still a community. One where its schools need the support of its families.” After all, it was the involvement of families, like Jenkins' father, attorney George Howard Jr., that led to the desegregation of Dollarway schools.
Sources:
A trailblazer reflects on Dollarway | The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette - Arkansas' Best News Source (arkansasonline.com)
law.uky.edu - Alumna Sarah Howard Jenkins Followed in Her Father’s Footsteps to Become Nationally Recognized Legal Scholar
Written by: Ninfa O. Barnard
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