Cox, David Adrian (Dave)
David Adrian Cox was an obscure Poinsett County farmer who, at the age of forty-eight, ran a quixotic campaign in 1962 to unseat Governor Orval E. Faubus, the most powerful Arkansas politician of the twentieth century. Faubus ran for governor nine times, but Cox was the only opponent who claimed that the act that made Faubus internationally famous—sending soldiers to prevent African American children at Little Rock (Pulaski County) from attending school with whites—was immoral. Faubus’s few critics and his thirty-eight other opponents in those races attacked him on other issues altogether, or else objected that by defying court orders to integrate he did not observe law and order. No Arkansas politician of the era except Cox dared publicly support …
