There When We Needed Him: Wiley Austin Branton, Civil Rights Warrior

Journal of Southern History, Nov, 2008 by Cherisse Jones-Branch

There When We Needed Him: Wiley Austin Branton, Civil Rights Warrior. By Judith Kilpatrick. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007. Pp. x, 221. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-55728-848-6.)

Wiley Austin Branton is an often overlooked personality in the history of the civil rights movement. Judith Kilpatrick highlights the contributions of this Arkansas native son and in doing so reveals the complexity of race and race relations in the Natural State as African Americans struggled for first-class citizenship in the twentieth century.

Branton was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 1923. At the time African Americans composed one-third of the town's population, and from the time of Reconstruction the black community had benefited from limited political and economic advantages. Although the members of the Branton family enjoyed middle-class status due to their entrepreneurial ventures and fair complexions, the Brantons were not immune to racial prejudice in Pine Bluff. Wiley's earliest experiences with racism left him determined to fight against its ravages. Such was the case when, after being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, he and a friend questioned the treatment of African Americans in the military in a 1944 pamphlet titled "Waste of Manpower." Branton was investigated but was honorably discharged in 1946.

Returning to civilian life, Branton was determined to ensure African Americans' access to first-class citizenship. In the late 1940s he was a member of the Arkansas NAACP State Conference Board, and he participated in voting drives and developed workshops that helped African Americans learn how to vote. Also during this time he and a friend attempted to enroll at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville after reading about other African Americans who had successfully desegregated institutions of higher learning. Branton's friend was admitted, with restrictions, to the university's law school in 1948; after finishing undergraduate credits in Pine Bluff, Branton entered the law school in 1950.

Branton's attacks on racial injustice continued into the 1950s and beyond. After establishing a law practice in Pine Bluff, he joined Thurgood Marshall as counsel for the Little Rock Nine. In the 1960s Branton, as the executive director of the Voter Education Project, was once again instrumental in registering black voters, and he was the executive secretary of Lyndon B. Johnson's President's Council on Equal Opportunity. In the late 1960s Branton turned his attention to the nation's pervasive poverty and became the executive director of the United Planning Organization. As the federal government increasingly cut funding to poverty programs, Branton was attracted by the platform of the Alliance for Labor Action (ALA) and its dedication to unionizing workers, particularly those in the South. In 1969 Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers and a supporter of civil rights for African Americans and working people, recruited Branton to become the director of social action for the ALA. In the 1970s Branton returned to private law practice, but his civil rights activism did not wane. He worked with the Voter Registration Fund and a host of organizations, including the NAACP and the National Bar Association, until his death in 1988.

Kilpatrick's exploration of the life of this "civil rights warrior" is an important contribution to the growing scholarship on African Americans and civil rights activism in Arkansas.

CHERISSE JONES-BRANCH

Arkansas State University