The 1955 integration of the public schools in Hoxie, Arkansas, one of the first responses to the Brown v. Board of Education decision in the south, will provide the basis for a panel discussion on Saturday, March 27, in the theatre of the Fowler Center on the Arkansas State University campus.

Part of Delta Blues Symposium X: the 1950s, the panel will be moderated by C. Calvin Smith, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Heritage Studies and retired professor of history at ASU.

Joining Smith on the panel will be Tom Dillard, director of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies at the Central Arkansas Library System at Little Rock and executive editor of “The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture”; DoVeanna Fulton, an assistant professor of English at the University of Memphis who has focused her research on the Civil Rights Movement; Robert L. Jenkins, professor of history at Mississippi State University and editor of “The Malcolm X Encyclopedia”; and Ben Johnson, professor of history at Southern Arkansas University and author of “Arkansas in Modern American, 1930-1999.”

The panel will address such concerns as the milieu of race relations in Arkansas and the Delta out which the integration of Hoxie emerged, the context of the 1950s, and Hoxie’s impact on the later development of the Civil Rights Movement in the Delta.

A showing of the film “Hoxie: The First Stand” will occur at 3:15 immediately following the panel.

Delta Blues Symposium X is sponsored by the Department of English and Philosophy with help from the Department of Music, Department of Theatre, Department of Political Science, Heritage Studies Ph.D. Program, Office of the President, and Museum.

For further information on this panel and other Delta Blues Symposium activities, contact the Department of English and Philosophy at Arkansas State University at 870-972-3043. A full schedule of Symposium activities is available at www.clt.astate.edu/blues.

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