NEWS & POLITICS
THE SAGA OF BONNIE AND JACK MESSAGES TO JFK FROM THE FAUBUS CLAN REVEAL A HOUSE DIVIDED. BY ERNEST DUMAS
JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM
W
‘JIMMIE HIGGINS’: Orval’s father Sam Faubus, in a letter to former Gazette editor Harry S. Ashmore, reveals he’d been writing the Gazette for years under a pseudonym.
18 JULY 2021
ARKANSAS TIMES
ith your forbearance, I shall recount an important and long-ago but poorly noted interlude in Arkansas and American history in which I was a callow spectator. It involved the soon-to-be assassinated president of the United States, an aged leftist hillbilly in the Arkansas Ozarks, the hillbilly’s adoring daughter, the governor of Arkansas and assorted politicians and journalists. Those events of 58 years ago offer a good lesson and perhaps an antidote to the craziness that afflicts Arkansas and the nation this spring. I refer to the revival of so many old conspiracy myths that, at least since the Red Summer at the end of World War I, sometimes plagued but more often only enlivened the body politic. You know: The socialists/communists are coming. They are coming for your guns. They are driving working people into unions to destroy capitalism and freedom; erasing history by banishing memorials to heroes like Robert E. Lee who betrayed the nation; trying to steal elections from Donald Trump; ennobling Black people at the expense of others; and teaching schoolchildren racial theories to make them hate America. You heard all those plots from the lips of Arkansas legislators and Trump Republicans everywhere this spring as they passed laws to protect memorials to defenders of slavery, stop teachers from talking about the role of race and discrimination in Arkansas and American history, reverse the easy access to the ballot that produced a historic tide of votes during the pandemic of 2020 (adding 11 million votes, by the way, to Trump’s total from 2016), and even prevent transgender youngsters from getting medical assistance, which socialists are supposed to believe they should be able to get. Too much there to refute, so little space. Let it suffice that you will be hard-pressed to round up 10 real socialists in Arkansas, from the ivory towers to the hills and swamps. But let’s think only about the biggest absurdity — the horror of talking about race or any other form of bias in classes where kids are supposed to learn history. It arises from fury around the discovery of the latest — critical race theory or The 1619 Project — of thousands of ideas postulated by academicians, educators and failed commanders about how the lineage, successes and failures of nations and states should be treated by teachers and historical writers. The owner of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and other newspapers was so scared of the race-theory plot that he humiliated himself and his publications by using his $25 million gift to the University of North Carolina to try to stop the school from hiring a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist because she supported the idea of emphasizing race in history studies. Southerners horrified by critical race theory and the idea of recognizing the introduction of slavery to America as somehow important could profit by reading a few books
