University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff

Overview

The University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff is a public historically Black university in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, the second-oldest public college or university in the state. Founded in 1873, it was one of about 180 state-founded normal schools nationwide, authorized by the Reconstruction-era legislature as the Branch Normal College and opened in 1875 with Joseph Carter Corbin as principal. It operated nominally as part of the “normal” department of what became the University of Arkansas, but was run separately as a compromise that kept the state’s institutions racially segregated, even though the flagship Fayetteville campus had briefly been integrated when it opened in 1872. In 1890, federal amendments to the Morrill Land-Grant Acts designated it a land-grant college, since states maintaining segregated systems were required to fund a separate land-grant institution for Black students. It severed formal ties with the University of Arkansas in 1927.

Dr. King’s 1958 Commencement Address

On June 2, 1958, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the commencement address at what was then Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical & Normal College, before 233 graduates and more than 1,000 guests. College president Lawrence A. Davis Sr. invited King in recognition of his leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, despite receiving death threats for doing so during the charged climate of the Civil Rights Movement. King urged the graduates to pursue desegregation “through the use of nonviolence, understanding, and goodwill.”