The first African American student to enroll in a white southern university post reconstruction era was from Texarkana!

Silas Hunt, who was a student at the Booker T. Washington school, was also the first African American student to enroll in a white Southern university since the Reconstruction era. He was accepted into the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville and enrolled in 1948. Unfortunately, he died in 1949 at the age of twenty-seven from tuberculosis before finishing his law degree.  Mr. Hunt was a World War II veteran and a trailblazer in the integration of higher education opportunities—specifically in Arkansas. Learn more!

The old Booker T. Washington school building which Mr. Hunt attended was the first African American high school in Texarkana, and currently is home to the nonprofit organization We Are Washington, which is investigating funding sources to fund a mural featuring Silas Hunt.