Defining Moments: Historic Decisions by Arkansas Governors from McMath through Huckabee

ORVAL FAUBUS: 1955-1967

ORVAL FAUBUS 1955–1967 He was just a human country boy, who believed like we have always believed back here in the hills that even the plainest, poorest fellow can be Governor if his fellow citizens find he has got the stuff and the character for the job. —ROBERT PENN WARREN, ALL THE KING’S MEN Orval Faubus liked being governor. He liked the power and the trappings, but most of all he liked the fact that people knew who he was.Even the swells who lived in the Heights in west Little Rock knew him now. They may have looked down on him as that hillbilly or country bumpkin from Greasy Creek in the Francis Cherry campaign,but by golly jingle they knew who he was now,and they had to deal with him. At issue in August  was race or,more specifically,the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School by a plan designed by Virgil Blossom, superintendent of the Little Rock public schools.Though the number of integrating blacks had originally been much higher,it had fallen to just nine,primarily due to fear  Orval Faubus as governor. Courtesy of Butler Center photos, Arkansas Studies Institute Collection, Little Rock. in the African American community—fear about lost jobs and the safety of their children. Those nine were selected because of their academic talent. The curriculum at Central High was rigorous , and the nine students in this test case had to be able to cope with the challenge. The Blossom plan, Faubus knew, as he mulled over the editorials by Harry Ashmore in the Arkansas Gazette, had seemed inspired: begin by integrating only at the high school level with a few talented African American students.Then get the city leadership on board,as Blossom had done,with a multitude of civicclub speeches. The civic leaders in Little Rock, as a result, now were resigned to what was coming. They might not like it, but it was the law, and they were resigned. Faubus knew that Blossom was pleased with himself. He knew that Blossom saw his plan as a blueprint for integration across the South and perhaps even as a springboard for his own candidacy for governor.1 Faubus, no doubt, smiled to himself, even while his stomach twisted in knots. What the city fathers in the capital city had failed to realize was that the average citizens might not agree with Blossom or his plan or the U.S. Supreme Court, which called for desegregation of the public schools in . The Supreme Court did not make laws, Faubus knew. Congress did. And Faubus believed the people knew that. He had been on the hustings in  against a rabble-rousing segregationist, Jim Johnson, who stirred the pot of racial hatred like a master and with great aplomb. An increase in taxes might be an attractive issue for the ordinary demagogue, but nothing compared to racial bigotry as the means to mobilize the masses in the South. Jim Johnson had known this for years. Now Orval Faubus did. Faubus had smoothed the editorial page of the Arkansas Gazette flat on the table in front of him. “Time of Testing,” the ORVAL FAUBUS  editorial crowed on the front page of the Arkansas Gazette, as it called for law and order.2 “What law?” he thought. “The Brown desegregation decision? That’s not law. The Gazette wants integration .”Yes,not even his friend Harry Ashmore,who supported him editorially in the Francis Cherry campaign and against Jim Johnson, understood the simmering hatred that needed only a spark to convert it into a boiling fury. Johnson knew how to provide that spark. Faubus had seen it firsthand. And it frightened him. His office had received the constant telephone calls.3 The callers had warned of violence at Central High School perpetrated by caravans of armed men driving to Little Rock to halt integration . There will be blood on the streets, the callers warned. How real were the threats? He did not know.But he had gotten the calls. And Blossom had, too. Yes, all eyes were on Orval Faubus now. The question was what would he do? Orval Faubus believed in education. He had been a public school teacher himself during the height of the Great Depression, teaching for forty dollars a month in the hamlets of Accident,Pinnacle, and Greasy Creek in Madison County, and he recognized that...