University of Arkansas

Former state senator and U.S. congressman John N. Tillman served as president of the University of Arkansas from 1905 to 1912. In the Arkansas State Senate he proposed the Separate Coach Law of 1891, a Jim Crow law to segregate African American passengers. The bill became law and was enforced for many decades.

The University of Arkansas admitted Silas Herbert Hunt of Texarkana, an African American veteran of World War II to the university's School of Law in 1948. Hunt's enrollment was regarded as the first successful school integration below the Mason–Dixon line of that era. While Hunt was admitted into the university, his attendance was not met without controversy. African American students were permitted to attend the university, under the condition that they enroll as graduate or law students, and be taught in segregated classes. Unfortunately, Silas Hunt was only able to complete one year of education. In April 1949, Hunt was admitted to the VA hospital, where he later died of tuberculosis, aggravated by injuries he had sustained in the war.

Roy Wilkins, administrator of the NAACP, wrote in 1950 that Arkansas was the "very first of the Southern states to accept the new trend without fighting a delaying action or attempting to... limit, if not nullify, bare compliance." In the fall of 1948, changes were made to the university's segregation policy, which allowed for the admittance of African American students into regular classes. The first to follow Hunt was a law school student by the name of Jackie L. Shropshire, would later go on to become the university's first black graduate in 1951. 1952 University of Arkansas Medical School graduate Edith Irby Jones, who was also admitted to the University of Arkansas in 1948, would be the first African American to be admitted in any Southern school. Several African American students followed in his footsteps, attending various graduate programs at the university. Arkansas was freely admitting African American students as early as 1957, while many southern states still prohibited black students from attending all white universities. The events in Little Rock at this time did some damage to race relations at the university that would not be fixed for some time.

The desegregation of the University of Arkansas was the first time a place of higher education in the south integrated African American students. It was the first to have black students enroll in any former confederate state since reconstruction. Fayetteville where the University of Arkansas is located was also the first southern city to implement an integration policy voluntarily. This is suggested to have been done from legal pressures to avoid litigation. This was also due to growing discontent with the separate but equal laws that were in place.

In 1969, the university created the Black Studies Advisory Committee to facilitate the creation of a Black Studies program, which began in the fall semester of 1968 with 19 courses offered.

In 1968 a group called Black Americans for Democracy or BAD was the first organization at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville specifically founded to raise black awareness and advocate for African American students. Even though African American students had been admitted to the school in previous years they were still the minority, "Fewer than 150 out of the 9,000 students at the Fayetteville campus were African American" (in 1969). Since there were so few black students this organization created a space for community and expression when they were still small in numbers. They started their newspaper because they felt black students were not covered well in the campus wide paper The Arkansas Traveler. The group organized a choir and drama club, developed black fraternities and sororities, as well as closely followed the hiring of black professors and administrators. By the end of the 1970s the black student population at the school had increased by four times its original amount. Then in 1979 BAD changed their name to Students Taking a New Dimension or STAND. They kept their student programs they created and Black Emphasis Week, a week dedicated to black culture and student life on campus.

In 2004, the university provided resources to help support the program, establishing the John White Scholarship, Sankofa Registered Student Organization, and Ghana study abroad tour. In 2008, The Black Studies program was renamed the African and African American Studies (AAST) program and expanded its course offerings and student enrollment. In 2014, the program moved to a new space in Memorial Hall and was added to the University Core. A year later, an online minor and graduate certificate in African and African American Studies was established. The university hosted its first annual AAST Graduate Fellows search symposium in 2016 and established the Roy S. Bryce-Laporte scholarship later in 2018. In 2019, the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees voted to rename halls B and C of the Northwest Quad in honor of Gordon Morgan and Margaret Clark, respectively. The university has also hosted guest lectures by Aldon D. Morris, Carol Anderson, and Nikole Hannah-Jones related to African and African American studies.

Notable people in African and African American history at the university

Gordon Daniel Morgan – an alumnus and one of the first Black professors at the University of Arkansas, and was hired to teach sociology

Margaret Clark – one of the first Black professors at the University of Arkansas, and was hired to teach world languages

Gerald Jordan – attended the University of Arkansas School of Journalism and Media, and is the university's current Faculty and Athletics Representative to NCAA and SEC

The most widely implemented automated mail sorting equipment in the world–the Wide Area Bar Code Reader–was developed by the University of Arkansas College of Engineering. A $50,000 grant from the United States Postal Service (USPS) to Professors Dwight F. Mix and J.E. Bass in 1989 began the research and development effort. By 1999, more than 15,000 University of Arkansas bar code readers were located in every major USPS facility, increasing the efficiency of processing 20 billion pieces of mail a year at a savings of $200 million. This R&D effort has spawned four additional electronic systems to help the USPS "read the mail."

During the 1980s, Professors Allen Hermann and Zhengzhi Sheng of the Department of Physics researched superconductivity, the phenomenon whereby Direct Current (DC) electricity, once started, can flow essentially forever. The Thallium-based material they discovered at Arkansas held the world's record for high temperature, 125K, for five years (1988–93) and drew international attention to the university. Their work led to patents and a manufacturing agreement, as well as further advances in high-density electronics.

University of Arkansas plant pathologists conducted research in the early 1970s that led to COLLEGO, the first biological herbicide for weed control in a field crop. Other UA scientists and students worked on the project that resulted in EPA registration of COLLEGO by Upjohn in 1982 for control of northern jointvetch in rice and soybeans. The work provided a model used worldwide to develop biological herbicides. Leadership in this area helped the U of A obtain grants from the USDA and others for construction of the Rosen Center for Alternative Pest Control.

Distinguished Professor Peter Stuart Ungar, a palaeoanthropologist and palaeoecologist in the Department of Environmental Dynamics, has pioneered novel methods of reconstructing the diets of extant and extinct animals. In particular, Ungar has used dental microwear to determine the diets of extinct hominins such as Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Homo naledi, overturning earlier assumptions about ancient hominin diets that were based solely on jaw and tooth morphology. In addition to his research on hominins, Ungar has also used dental microwear to study the diets of extinct victoriapithecids, cercopithecids, pliopithecids, lemurs, rodents, felids, hyaenids, canids, ursids, tragulids, cervids, bovids, suids, and tyrannosaurids. In 2024, Ungar was chosen to become a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America for his contributions to the study of the diets of ancient organisms.