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was a failure, and Hays suffered for his part in it. In July, Hays won the Democratic primary for his congressional seat against segregationist Amis Guthridge, a lawyer for the Capital Citizens’ Council. When Hays garnered 59 percent of the vote in this Democratic primary in a Democratic state, he felt assured of a November victory in the general election. Alford’s subsequent filing as an Independent came as a surprise to many, but the fact that his announcement was made just eight days prior to the November 4 contest was even more stunning. For his campaign manager, Alford chose Claude Carpenter, an aide to Governor Faubus and the state chair of the Democratic Party’s fundraising efforts. This connection clearly demonstrated how the governor felt about the Alford run and put a Democratic Party official in the position of working for an Independent against his own party’s nominee, thereby discounting his party’s candidate. Carpenter temporarily resigned his position with the party during the short campaign.80 To rouse the ire of segregationists, Alford’s campaign circulated photographs of Hays with black religious leaders. Adding to the drama, one day before the election, Attorney General Bruce Bennett legalized the use of preprinted stickers with Alford’s name and a box with an “x” already filled in. Some voters found these stickers on the tables of the election inspectors when they arrived at the polls. Hays lost his seat to Alford by a vote of 24,026 to 18,504. Alford said he would serve out his Little Rock term on the LRSD board, which would end with December elections.81 Whether to seat Alford in Congress as a Democrat despite his running as an Independent became an issue, but Wilbur Mills (D-AR) helped get Alford accepted as a Democrat.82 Congress did later investigate the election, but Alford remained in office until congressional redistricting in 1964 helped to unseat him.83 Election Day, November 4, 1958, was a triumph for segregationists, with Faubus’s election to a third term over Republican George W. Johnson, who polled only 50,000 votes. James D. Johnson, former leader of the Capital Citizens’ Council and Faubus’s opponent in 1956, won a seat on the Arkansas Supreme Court, where he soon earned the nickname “Justice Jim.” Additionally, voters agreed overwhelmingly to retain a 3 percent sales tax, something Faubus had endorsed.84 The morning before the election was the first day of classes for thirtyfour displaced students commuting to Conway to attend classes at Central Baptist College. Reverend A. R. Reddin, the president of the college, welcomed students to Central Baptist Academy after a team from the state Department of Education visited the campus to check the facilities and the planned curriculum.85 Myles Adams was one of the students who attended 78 ■ WHERE SHALL WE GO? Central Baptist Academy in Conway. As the year progressed, he estimated, about fifty students commuted from Little Rock on “the brand-new 1958 Chevrolet bus with a V-8 engine and dual exhausts with real loud pipes on it. The boys all got a kick out of that.”86 The college provided the bus and the driver, a college student who arrived every morning from Conway in his own car, drove the students to Conway, returned the bus to the church parking lot in the evening, and then once again drove his car back to Conway. Myles recalled that the driver was named Dan Fagala and that the high school students gathered at a Baptist church parking lot off Broadway near Seventeenth Street on the six days of the week that they had to attend classes. With the late start of the school year and several days missed for winter weather, they attended classes into June of that year.87 The American Baptist Association had opened Central Baptist College in Conway in 1952, in facilities that had once housed Central College for Women. Opening an academy for displaced high school students affected by desegregation in Little Rock served two purposes for the fledgling college . As historian Melvin Bender explains in his History of Central Baptist College, the new college’s finances were a “saga of survival” in the 1950s. The college’s president, A. R. Reddin, believed at the time that opening a high school academy would be a financial boon to the struggling new Central Baptist College. He later looked back with the belief that the college had survived the 1950s...

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