On the morning of March 5, 1959, Luvenia Long was listening to gospel music when a news bulletin interrupted her radio program.
The Fire and its circumstances should have provoked southerners to investigate the realities of their ``separate but equal institutions.`` However, white supremacy ruled the investigations, and the grand jury declared the event to be an anomaly..
After the Central High School desegregation crisis in 1957, the boys\' deaths eighteen months later were once again an embarrassment to Arkansas.
Immediately after the fire, an unsigned editorial in the Arkansas Democrat noted long-term deterioration, including the wiring, of the buildings.
In hindsight, the disaster at Wrightsville could have been predicted.
Grif Stockley\'s research adds to an evolving understanding of the Jim Crow South, Arkansas\'s history, the lawyers who capitalized on this tragedy, and the African American victims.
A careful telling of the history of the School and fire, the book provides readers a fresh understanding of the broad implications of white supremacy.
Black Boys Burning presents a focused explanation of how systemic poverty perpetuated by white supremacy sealed the fate of those students.
Instead, he was among the twenty-one Boys between the ages of thirteen and seventeen who burned to death.
To her horror, Lindsey was not among the forty-eight Boys who had clawed their way through the windows of the dormitory to safety.
Her son Lindsey had been confined there since January 14, after a judge for juveniles found him guilty of stealing from a neighborhood store owner.
Fire had engulfed the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville, thirteen miles outside of Little Rock.
On the morning of March 5, 1959, Luvenia Long was listening to gospel music when a news bulletin interrupted her radio program
