Wrightsville Fire of 1959 Memorial, Haven of Rest Cemetery

This memorial was dedicated in 2018 to remember a tragic event that occurred on March 5, 1959, when twenty-one African-American boys ages 14-to-17 burned to death because the doors of their dormitory at the Arkansas Reform School in Wrightsville were locked from the outside. The marker was dedicated at the Haven of Rest Cemetery in Little Rock, the largest African American cemetery in the state and the place where 14 of the victims were buried. This mysterious fire occurred in the early morning hours of 4:00 on a wet and cold morning due to previous thunderstorms. The fire claimed 21 victims while forty-eight children managed to knock open a window and escape the inferno.

There were survivors, but they were forever traumatized. One survivor’s wife detailed in an interview before her husband passed away from cancer, how her late husband continued to have dreams about the fire. Decades later, this monument remembering the twenty-one victims was placed in Little Rock at Haven of Rest Cemetery, where fourteen of the twenty-one victims, those who were burned so badly that they could not be identified, had been buried in a mass grave.

Those buried here include the remains of 14-year-old Lindsey Cross, 15-year-old Charles L. Thomas, 15-year-old Frank Barnes, 15-year-old Carl E. Thornton, 15-year-old Charles White, 15-year-old Edward Tolston Jr., 16-year-old R. D. Brown, 16-year-old Jessie Carpenter Jr., 16-year-old Johnnie Tillison, 16-year-old Joe Crittenden, 16-year-old John Daniel, 16-year-old Willie G. Horner, 16-year-old Roy Chester Powell, and 17-year-old Cecil Preston.

Stockley, Grif, “Negro Boys Industrial School Fire of 1959,” 13 June 2018, Encyclopedia of Arkansas,https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/negro-boys-industrial-school-fire-of 1959-5500/.

Twenty-One Black Boys Burned to Death After Being Locked in Segregated and Neglected Arkansas “Reform” School, Equal Justice Initiative . Accessed June 1st, 2024. https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/mar/5.