Update: My book, There When We Needed Him: Wiley Austin Branton, Civil Rights Warrior, may be ordered online from University of Arkansas Press.

Introduction

In September 1956, Wiley Austin Branton, a Black attorney from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, filed suit on behalf of 33 schoolchildren and their parents in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas to force the Little Rock School District to admit the children to Central High School. That action began a chain of events that led President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to protect the children in their efforts to attend school. It also catapulted Wiley Branton to national prominence in the civil rights arena.

Branton went on to become the first Director of the Voter Education Project in Atlanta, which funneled private money to grass roots groups in the eleven former Confederate states for use in educating and registering Black voters. From there, he went to Washington, D.C., where he became a member of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, working on implementation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Over the rest of his career, among other positions, he was Dean of Howard University’s School of Law and a partner in the international law firm of Sidley & Austin (now Sidley Austin Brown & Wood). Branton died in 1988.

Despite the record of his achievements, by September 1997, Wiley Branton was virtually forgotten by the larger world. When President William Jefferson Clinton and Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee helped to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the United State Supreme Court’s decision in Branton’s Little Rock case (Cooper v. Aaron), Branton’s name was hardly mentioned.

Similarly, when I began research into Branton's life for a biography, an early question was, "Who were his role models?" Answering that question led to the discovery of almost 100 Black men who had been admitted to practice law in the State of Arkansas before 1950, when Branton had begun to study law at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Most of the 100 earlier lawyers, too, had been forgotten, even by the Black community in Arkansas. The research now runs on parallel lines.

This web site is intended to serve two purposes:

• First, to make available to the public currently known information about Arkansas’ early Black lawyers and about Wiley Austin Branton.
   
• Second, to encourage your contribution to the expanding information database.

Help Needed
Anyone reading this publication who has information they feel will be helpful to this project should contact me.

About Judith Kilpatrick
Judith Kilpatrick is an Associate Professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law, Fayetteville, where she has taught since 1994. She teaches in the areas of professional responsibility and lawyering skills (interviewing, counseling, negotiation, alternative dispute resolution, mediation and law practice management). She also directs a Mediation Project that works with the Benton and Washington County juvenile courts. She received her J.D. degree (1975) from the University of California, Boalt Hall School of Law, and LL.M. and J.S.D. (1992, 1999) degrees from Columbia University School of Law in New York. Prior to arriving in Arkansas, she taught for three years in the Lawyering Program at New York University, was a visiting professor in Paris, France, for three summers, directed the Center for Trial and Appellate Advocacy at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, produced CLE programs for trial lawyers at California Continuing Education of the Bar in Berkeley, and was in private practice with a litigation firm in San Francisco. Her current research interests are in legal history. She is working on a biography of Wiley Austin Branton, one of the first African-American graduates of the University of Arkansas School of Law, and has written an article on African-American lawyers in Arkansas before 1950. Other writing primarily has been in the area of professional responsibility.