History of Science and Technology Colloquium

On September 10, 1948, twenty-one year old Edith Mae Irby, the daughter of a sharecropper and a housekeeper, entered the University of Arkansas School of Medicine in Little Rock. Her enrollment marked the first desegregation of a Southern medical school and it occurred without court action, without hostile crowds, and without the need for federal troops. This presentation will analyze the factors that led to this historic admission and discuss how, in the words of a former Arkansas governor, it was accomplished "quietly and with dignity." It will also examine how the desegregation of the University of Arkansas School of Medicine challenges popular narratives of school desegregation in the South.

Cosponsored by the Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology of Medicine and the Program in the Hist