Joel Anderson spent his childhood watching buses barreling down U.S. 67, passing his hometown of Swifton on a 50-mile daily journey to schools that wouldn’t reject the Black children on board for the color of their skin.

In his segregated schools, Anderson, who is White, heard jokes and taunts about his Black peers, but he was largely unaware of situations he would later come to view as injustices.

He developed a passion for racial equality as a freshman at Harding University, where a mix of conversations with peers from integrated schools and teachings on biblical principles led him to examine his worldview.

“Jesus said the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself,” Anderson says. “Neither one of them is optional.” This teaching made it unacceptable to split school enrollment by racial lines or to allow violence against civil-rights workers to go unchallenged, he says.

Anderson, now the chancellor of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR), encounters attitudes that echo the naiveté of his youth when he returns to his rural northeast Arkansas birthplace.

It’s a situation he hopes to change.

In November, UA trustees approved Anderson’s plans to establish an Institute on Race and Ethnicity on the Little Rock campus, a project that grew from a commitment he made when he took office to make diversity a defining mark of his administration.

The institute, set to launch this fall, will serve as an “information clearinghouse,” collecting research, statistics and historical materials related to race relations in the state. Faculty associates from a variety of disciplines will contribute to its research, and students will be invited to develop projects related to the institute’s mission.

Patterned after similar programs in Mississippi and Minnesota, the institute will aid in mediated discussions on race throughout the state.