BOOK/MEDIA REVIEWS

Abstract

Remembrances in Black: Personal Perspectives of the African American Experience at the University of Arkansas 1940s-2000s, edited by Charles R. Robinson II and Lonnie R. Williams. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2010. 358 pp., hardback: $45.00, paperback: $29.95.This collection of oral history interviews presents the stories and perspectives of students and a number of staff, administrators, and faculty of color who at some point in the last sixty years attended or worked at the Lafayette campus of the University of Arkansas. Organized by chapters that represent a decade each (the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and the 2000s), the recollections paint a complex panorama of the often uneasy relationship between the university- a historically all-White, segregated institution-and its minority students. Helpful introductions by the editors precede each chapter/decade of oral histories, threading together the personal reflections into a meaningful narrative whole.Comprising 78 interviews in all, the book is striking for what it undermines: a fairytale historiography moving intractably out of an evil, racist past to a redeemed present of racial parity and uncompromising integration. To the contrary, a deep ambiguity permeates the personal reflections when read as a collection. This ambiguity is captured in the story of Silas Hunt, the first Black student admitted to the university in modem times. The editors tell how he died of tuberculosis before completing his degree, perhaps contracting the disease from the several miles he walked every day in the winter to and from his off-campus residence with a Black host family because the university prohibited him from living in the White dormitories on campus. With the admission of Silas Hunt to the Fayetteville campus in 1948, however, the University of Arkansas also became the first public university in the South to officially desegregate outside of a court order. Therefore, read in chronological order, the recollections mirror the wider developments of the Civil Rights Movement and the uneven developments in the years since Jim Crow. Their strength is as repositories of the living memories of the actual players at one institution of higher learning when legal and social pressures and student activism from within forced the university to first acknowledge and then sometimes change its discriminatory practices and structures.As such, this collection provides a microcosmic corrective to the mainstream (European) American myth of unimpeded racial progress. The voices combine to tell the race story at the University of Arkansas as one of advances in some areas, backtracking on others, and sidestepping in still others. Subsequently, a reader randomly opening the book and reading the following statements by one of the interviewees, Randy Rorian Brown, Jr., who worked for a time as an administrator at the university, would have a hard time placing him by decade. Brown variously asserts:* It was sometimes difficult because I remember sitting around the room and being not only one of the very few people of color, but at times, the only African American in the room during senate meetings.* Even though I was an executive, very few knew me or even showed an interest in knowing me. I always felt like an outsider trying to fit...* There is still a lot of institutionalized racism at the University of Arkansas and it is truly inherent within the university system throughout its traditions and undertones.Are these sentiments reflections on his experience in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, or the decade that just ended in 2010? The correct answer would be from decade just passed.Not all respondents had his reactions, to be sure. And many-even some of those who underwent the most severe treatment while at the University of Arkansas-vow their undying love for the institution. But in each of the decades similar sentiments emerge from a wide variety of students, staff, and administrators. …