Little Rock’s Sugar Hill: White flight, the Black middle class and a place called University Park

“University Park began as an idea, a stubborn redoubt against the notion that Black citizens should be corralled in the old eastern and southern zones of the city. When plans for a new subdivision were first announced by the Little Rock Housing Authority, local Black leaders denounced it as a tool of segregation. Then, John Walker, a young civil rights attorney who’d recently opened the first integrated law firm in Little Rock, began agitating his friends and community members to resist in a different way: buying up lots and moving in.”