Story by Mary Katherine Shapiro, December 16, 2020

It’s intimidating for any freshman to walk on to the University of Arkansas’ campus for the first time. For Black students in the 1960s, it was even more intimidating because the University was just beginning to desegregate its campus.

  Professor Gerald Jordan felt overwhelmed as a Black student at UA in 1966. There were more students in his freshman biology class than at his high school, and most of the students were white.

  Jordan lived in Humphreys Hall, which was an all-male dorm at the time. The residence halls would have social events where men from Humphries would be paired up with women from Hotz. The organizers of these events kept students separated by race and never paired a Black student with a white student.

  “When there were no other African American women to be paired with, we were just left out,” he said. 

  Jordan said some parents wouldn’t allow their children to be roommates with a Black student. If they were assigned a Black roommate, sometimes they would demand to switch rooms, he said.

  White students didn’t just avoid Black students in the dorms. “If you sat at one of the long tables at Brough and there were white kids at the other end, they would get up and leave,” Jordan said.

  Professor Jordan went on to graduate school for journalism at Northwestern, served in the military and now he is back at his alma mater teaching journalism. He said he has seen a lot of changes on campus since he was a student.

  “No one is bashful about using the terms diversity, equity and inclusion,” he said. “The question is how effective are they at implementing that.”

  This past summer, many Black students shared stories of being excluded at UA using the Twitter hashtag #BlackAtUark. The following Tweets are documentation of some of the conversations that happened by using this hashtag. These conversations show that racism is still a problem on campus today. 

  It is time to go beyond having conversations about diversity and inclusion and take action to make campus a safer space for all students.