Forty Minutes of Hell by Rus Bradburd

Author:Rus Bradburd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Otto “Bud” Zinke was a University of Arkansas physics professor for three decades. He arrived on the UA campus in 1959, a year after Frank Broyles. Although he was a diligent antiwar activist in the Vietnam War era, he does not consider himself to be a radical, especially along racial lines. “I came back from World War II, and it wasn’t so much that I was involved with blacks,” he recalls, “I simply didn’t want to live in a country that had second-class citizens.”

He’s no dreamer. “I don’t get into fights unless I think I can win them,” he says. He worked to quietly integrate the Fayetteville swimming pool, as well as the Ozark Theater.

He was a young member of the senate council, the ruling body elected by the faculty senate. Nearly everyone on the faculty was in favor of integration, according to Zinke, or at least the more modest concept of desegregation. Zinke says he will never forget a senate council meeting in the late 1960s.

The university had slowly begun making steps to change the face of the campus, but Zinke and his colleagues knew that football and Frank Broyles were the symbolic center of the university. The senate council decided to confront Broyles.

“If Frank Broyles had said we were going to integrate, nobody would have challenged him,” Zinke says. “So we called Broyles in, and asked him to integrate his team.”

The room got quiet as Broyles stood. “The faculty was challenging his eminence,” Zinke says.

According to Zinke, Broyles said, “I’ll go home to Georgia before I have any niggers on my team.”

A stunned silence followed. “I’ll never forget the day,” Zinke says. “He just stood there very brazenly, and said that with his slow Southern drawl.”

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