ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, Volume 32 (Winter 1973)

From Utopian Isolation To Radical Activism: Commonwealth College, 1925-1935

By WILLIAM H. COBB*

Greenville, North Carolina

Commonwealth College, in many respects the most unique educational experiment in the pre-civil rights South, anticipated many of the perplexing issues now common to the American higher education scene. Initially founded in 1923 at Newllano Cooperative Colony, Vernon Parish, Louisiana, the school moved to Mena, Arkansas, after one year of operation. Having completed an academic term there, the college finally moved to a permanent site in western Polk County, Arkansas. Here the Commoners, as they called themselves, were able to support their little school with a colony of their own, thus apparently resolving the problem of financial independence from "bourgeois" interests. (1)

The founding premise of the college was simple and straightforward. It was a "resident labor school," and its single goal was to provide the working class with leaders who had an education which would enable them to make an immediate and meaningful contribution to the task of

 

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*Mr. Cobb received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Arkansas and his Ph.D from Tulane University. He is presently assistant professor of history at East Carolina University.

1. William Henry Cobb, "Commonwealth College Comes to Arkansas, 1923-1925," Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. XXIII (Summer 1964), 99-122.

 
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