Wiley Branton

Wiley Austin Branton Sr. was born on the thirteenth of December 1923 at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, the son of Wiley A. Branton — a Pine Bluff taxicab business owner of the Black-Pine-Bluff middle class — and Pauline Branton, a teacher. The Brantons were Black professional Pine Bluff of the inter-war period.

He was placed at the Pine Bluff Coloured Schools and at the Arkansas A. M. and N. — the historically Black Arkansas State College, subsequently the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. He served the United States Army Air Forces during the Second World War from 1942 to 1945 as a Tuskegee Airman pilot trainee.

He completed the bachelor’s at the Arkansas A. M. and N. in 1950 on the G. I. Bill and was admitted in 1950 to the University of Arkansas School of Law at Fayetteville — by federal court order under the post-Sweatt v. Painter desegregation period — as one of the first Black students at the Law School. He completed the LL.B. there in 1953.

He was admitted to the Arkansas state bar in 1953 and opened a private practice at Pine Bluff in 1953 — the principal Black-Arkansas private legal practice of the period.

He served the Arkansas NAACP State Conference as the principal litigation counsel from 1955 onward — including the principal Aaron v. Cooper case at the Little Rock Crisis of September 1957, in which nine Black students were enrolled at the Central High School at Little Rock under federal court order on the fourth of September 1957. Branton was the lead counsel for the Little Rock Nine plaintiffs from the original September 1956 filing of the case through to the Supreme Court argument of Cooper v. Aaron on the eleventh and twelfth of September 1958.

He argued the Cooper v. Aaron case before the United States Supreme Court alongside Thurgood Marshall (placed in this archive) on the eleventh of September 1958 at the special emergency oral argument. The Supreme Court decided the case unanimously on the twelfth of September 1958 in favor of the Little Rock Nine — the decision being the principal post-Brown enforcement decision of the Court.

He was named in 1962 the founding director of the Voter Education Project — a Southern Regional Council voter-registration programme funded by the Taconic and Field Foundations at over six hundred thousand dollars per annum — at Atlanta. He directed the VEP between 1962 and 1965 across the period during which the Project conducted the principal Black voter-registration of the American South. The VEP registered over six hundred and eighty-eight thousand Black voters across the southern states during the period — and was the principal direct civilian programme that made possible the August 1965 Voting Rights Act.

He was named in 1965 to the Office of the Attorney General of the United States as special assistant to Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and held the position from 1965 to 1967 — the principal Black federal civil-rights enforcement officer of the Department of Justice of the period.

He was named in 1978 the dean of the Howard University School of Law and held the deanship for five years until 1983.

He died at Washington, D.C. on the fifteenth of December 1988 of complications of a heart attack, at sixty-five.

He is honored here as the lead counsel of the Little Rock Nine.