… Indeed, in the coming years, these sources should provide a springboard for much-needed additional scholarship on these very subjects.” This collection of essays, memoirs, and documents seeks to fill this gap. But aside from this incident, historians have largely ignored the struggle for civil rights in Arkansas. “The battle to desegregate Central High School in Little Rock is widely recognized as one of the seminal moments in US history. I would add that the evidence they uncover has the potential to challenge the master narrative of the civil rights movement as a whole.” In this case, Wallach and Kirk note that the stories coming out of ‘ARSNICK,’ or the Arkansas branch of SNCC, significantly challenge the ‘master narrative’ of the organization. It’s a humbling and wonderful part of the scholarly process to be taken to task by others who find new approaches and new sources. “John Kirk and Jennifer Jensen Wallach come along and show us that Arkansas SNCC is a veritable gold-mine of historical evidence. Cynthia Griggs Fleming, The Journal of Southern History, February 2013 “Provides another piece of the puzzle as we seek a fuller understanding of the civil rights movement beyond Birmingham, Selma, Atlanta, and all the other places that have dominated movement literature for decades.” Journal of African American History, Spring 2013 “Provocative and accessible, ARSNICK offers unprecedented insight and new topics previously missing from civil rights history…a compelling read.” This collection serves as a corrective by bringing articles on SNCC’s activities in Arkansas together for the first time, by providing powerful firsthand testimonies, and by collecting key historical documents from SNCC’s role in the region’s emergence from the slough of southern injustice. In the five short years before it disbanded, SNCC’s Arkansas Project played a pivotal part in transforming the state, yet this fascinating branch of the national organization has barely garnered a footnote in the history of the civil rights movement. Thanks in large part to SNCC’s bold initiatives, most of Little Rock’s public and private facilities were desegregated by 1963, and in the years that followed many more SNCC volunteers rushed to the state to set up projects across the Arkansas Delta to help empower local people to take a stand against racial discrimination. SNCC efforts began with Bill Hansen, a young white Ohioan-already a veteran of the civil rights movement-who traveled to Little Rock in the early sixties to help stimulate student sit-in movements promoting desegregation. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) arrived in Arkansas in October 1962 at the request of the Arkansas Council on Human Relations, the state affiliate of the Southern Regional Council.
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