The Wrightsville Fire of 1959: How 21 Black Boys Were Burnt To Death In An Arkansas Reform School
- Johnny Bee
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
In the early hours of March 5, 1959, a locked dormitory at a rural Arkansas reform school went up in flames. Trapped inside, twenty-one African American boys (most no older than seventeen) burned to death. Forty-eight others clawed their way out through smoke and heat, some only surviving because they smashed through the wired windows with their bare hands.
The fire at the Arkansas Negro Boys’ Industrial School (NBIS) in Wrightsville is one of the most tragic yet overlooked events of the Jim Crow era. For decades, the story was largely forgotten—buried, quite literally, along with fourteen of the boys who were wrapped in newspapers and placed in an unmarked mass grave.
A Reform School in the Jim Crow South
The Arkansas Negro Boys’ Industrial School operated between 1927 and 1968 as a correctional facility for Black male youth. By 1936, it had two locations: one in Jefferson County near Pine Bluff and one in Wrightsville, about ten miles southeast of Little Rock. The Pine Bluff site became informally known as the White Boys School, reserved for white children, while Wrightsville held Black children.
The stated mission of NBIS was to keep young offenders out of adult prisons by placing them on a working cotton farm. Its first superintendent was Dr. Tandy Washington Coggs. In practice, the institution resembled a juvenile prison farm, with boys whipped for infractions and overseen by armed guards in earlier years.
Who Were the Boys?
By March 1959, the Wrightsville school held 69 boys aged 13 to 17. According to superintendent L. R. Gaines, most were there for minor offences such as hubcap theft—or, heartbreakingly, because their parents had separated and there was “no place for them to go.”
The boys lived in a rickety dormitory built in 1936 as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project. Time magazine described the building as dangerously unstable. Conditions were appalling. Sociologist Gordon D. Morgan, in his 1956 report, wrote:
“Many boys go for days with only rags for clothes… More than half of them wear neither socks nor underwear during the winter of 1955–56.”
There was only one 30-gallon hot water tank for the entire population, no laundry facilities, and undrinkable water. The school operated as cheaply as possible, with its young inmates providing farm labour rather than receiving education.
The Governor Knew
Governor Orval Faubus, best known for resisting the desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957, personally visited Wrightsville in January 1958. He admitted, “They really need help. They are using some old wood stoves which should be replaced.” Yet instead of increasing funding, Faubus cut the school’s budget by $7,100.
This hypocrisy would come back to haunt him just over a year later.
The Night of the Fire
At about 4:00 a.m. on March 5, 1959, smoke began to fill the Wrightsville dormitory. Sixteen-year-old Arthur Ray Poole, one of two inmate “sergeants,” smelled the smoke. Another boy, O. F. “Charley” Meadows, helped break open a window, providing a narrow escape route.
But most of the boys were trapped. The doors had been locked from the outside, and the windows were reinforced with heavy-gauge wire mesh. Four or five boys at a time squeezed through the broken openings, while behind them others screamed as the fire consumed the building.
Forty-eight escaped. Twenty-one died.
The Aftermath
The families of the victims reported that fourteen of the boys’ bodies were wrapped in newspapers and buried together in an unmarked grave at Haven of Rest Cemetery in Little Rock. For nearly sixty years, the site had no marker.
The survivors carried lifelong trauma. The wife of one survivor later recalled: “He dreamed about that fire until the day he died.”
Inside Arkansas, the tragedy was explained away as negligence rather than systemic racism. The Arkansas Claims Commission awarded families only a few hundred dollars in compensation, half of which often went to white attorneys.
Outside Arkansas, outrage was louder. The Greater King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit sent a telegram to Governor Faubus:
“We hold you and the Jim Crow system of the South just as responsible for the burning of the Negro children in Little Rock as if you had struck the match.”
Blame, Politics, and Silence
Faubus quickly sought to protect himself. He placed blame on superintendent L. R. Gaines, accusing him of negligence. Yet, the reality was more complex: Gaines had repeatedly reported the deteriorating conditions and lack of staffing to legislators.
A grand jury investigation returned no indictments, but its statement spread responsibility widely:
“The blame can be placed on lots of shoulders… the Board of Directors… the Superintendent and his staff… the State Administration… the General Assembly… and finally on the people of Arkansas, who did nothing about it.”
Despite these words, no real accountability followed. The tragedy “faded into the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement,” as one local news report later observed.
Rediscovery and Memorials
For decades, the fire at Wrightsville was scarcely remembered. It wasn’t until Frank Lawrence, brother of one of the victims, began working on a documentary that the story returned to public consciousness. Families marked the 50th anniversary in 2009 with a press conference at the Arkansas State Capitol.
Finally, in 2018, a memorial plaque was placed at Haven of Rest Cemetery, marking the boys’ grave. In 2019, another monument was unveiled at the Wrightsville Unit of the Arkansas Department of Correction, which now occupies the old site.
The names of the victims:
Lindsey Cross, 14; Charles L. Thomas, 15; Frank Barnes, 15; R.D. Brown, 16; Jessie Carpenter Jr., 16; Joe Crittenden, 16; John Daniel, 16; Willie G. Horner, 16; Roy Chester Powell, 16; Cecil Preston, 17; Carl E. Thornton, 15; Johnnie Tillison, 16; Edward Tolston Jr., 15; and Charles White, 15. William Piggee, 13 (the boy incarcerated for riding a white boy’s bike); O.T. Meadows, 13; Henry Daniels, 15; John Alfred George, 15; Roy Hegwood, 15; Willie Lee Williams, 15; and Gyce are now permanently remembered.
Why Wrightsville Matters
The Wrightsville fire reveals how systemic racism manifests not only in overt acts of violence but also in neglect, underfunding, and indifference. The boys were not hardened criminals. Many were orphans, poor, or had simply been born into a segregated system that offered them no alternatives.
Their deaths were preventable. The locked doors, the mesh-covered windows, the ignored pleas for funding—all point to a system designed to contain, not rehabilitate.
Like the stories of the Emmett Till murder or the Tulsa Race Massacre, the Wrightsville fire reminds us how easily tragedies of Black suffering have been buried in silence—and how important it is to bring them back into public memory.
Sources
Encyclopedia of Arkansas: “Wrightsville Fire” https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/wrightsville-fire-5346/
Gordon D. Morgan, The Negro Boys Industrial School of Arkansas (1956 Report)
Time Magazine, “Negro Boys Industrial School,” March 1959
Arkansas State Press archives (L. C. and Daisy Bates), 1959
KTHV (Little Rock), coverage on 50th anniversary, 2009
Haven of Rest Cemetery Memorial Project (2018)
