| Arsnick
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Arkansas
Edited by Jennifer Jensen Wallach and John A. Kirk
A
comprehensive overview of a significant but previously neglected
episode in civil rights history
UALR
Kicks Off Black History Month (John Kirk interviewed)
"Provides
another piece of the puzzle as we seek a fuller understanding
of the civil rights movement beyond Birmingham, Selma, Atlanta,
and all the other places that have dominated movement literature
for decades."
—Cynthia Griggs Fleming, The Journal of Southern
History, February 2013
“John
Kirk and Jennifer Jensen Wallach come along and show us that
Arkansas SNCC is a veritable gold-mine of historical evidence.
It’s a humbling and wonderful part of the scholarly
process to be taken to task by others who find new approaches
and new sources. In this case, Wallach and Kirk note that
the stories coming out of ‘ARSNICK,’ or the Arkansas
branch of SNCC, significantly challenge the ‘master
narrative’ of the organization. I would add that the
evidence they uncover has the potential to challenge the master
narrative of the civil rights movement as a whole."
—Wesley Hogan in Arkansas Review
"The
battle to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock is
widely recognized as one of the seminal moments in US history.
But aside from this incident, historians have largely ignored
the struggle for civil rights in Arkansas. This collection
of essays, memoirs, and documents seeks to fill this gap.
... Indeed, in the coming years, these sources should provide
a springboard for much-needed additional scholarship on these
very subjects."
—Choice, Dec. 2011
"Wallach
and Kirk’s volume is an excellent starting point for
understanding SNCC’s statewide campaigns."
—H-Net
Reviews, January 2012
The Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) arrived in Arkansas
in October 1962 at the request of the Arkansas Council on
Human Relations, the state affiliate of the Southern Regional
Council.
SNCC efforts began with Bill Hansen, a young white Ohioan—already
a veteran of the civil rights movement—who traveled
to Little Rock in the early sixties to help stimulate student
sit-in movements promoting desegregation. Thanks in large
part to SNCC’s bold initiatives, most of Little Rock’s
public and private facilities were desegregated by 1963, and
in the years that followed many more SNCC volunteers rushed
to the state to set up projects across the Arkansas Delta
to help empower local people to take a stand against racial
discrimination.
In the five short years before it disbanded, SNCC’s
Arkansas Project played a pivotal part in transforming the
state, yet this fascinating branch of the national organization
has barely garnered a footnote in the history of the civil
rights movement. This collection serves as a corrective by
bringing articles on SNCC’s activities in Arkansas together
for the first time, by providing powerful firsthand testimonies,
and by collecting key historical documents from SNCC’s
role in the region’s emergence from the slough of southern
injustice.
Jennifer
Jensen Wallach is assistant professor of history
at the University of North Texas and the author of Closer
to the Truth Than Any Fact: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow
and Richard Wright: From Black Boy to World Citizen.
John
A. Kirk is chair and Donaghey Professor of
History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the
author or editor of five books, including An
Epitaph for Little Rock: A Fiftieth Anniversary Retrospective
on the Central High Crisis and Beyond
Little Rock: The Origins and Legacies of the Central High
Crisis (The University of Arkansas Press).
June
6 x 9, 302 pages, 31 photographs, index
$24.95 (s) paper
ISBN 978-1-55728-966-7
$65.00 (s) library cloth edition
ISBN 978-1-55728-968-1
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