Bobby L. Roberts (1944–)

Bobby L. Roberts has made a major contribution to education, historic preservation, and the chronicling of Arkansas history. Owing to a sojourn as an archivist and another in politics and government to help his friend Bill Clinton, Roberts made important reforms for public libraries in Arkansas and the scholarly accumulation of Arkansas history. He turned the Central Arkansas Library System (CALS) into perhaps the most advanced public institution in the state outside the universities and one that has been recognized nationally. He was named the American librarian of the year in 1997 by one of the profession’s premier publications, Library Journal.

Bobby Leon Roberts was born on October 3, 1944, in Memphis, Tennessee, the only child of Arthur Leon Roberts and Ida Kirkpatrick “Goldiene” Roberts. He grew up in Helena (Phillips County). His father was a trucker, logger, and service-station owner and later operated a trucking firm. Roberts often traveled with his father on freight hauls around the South. As he would often describe his youth, Roberts preferred roaming the woods and swamps, getting into minor scrapes with his pals, and drinking beer and whiskey, which were omnipresent in Phillips County at midcentury. He had been enthralled with the Civil War from the time he was growing up in a home on the site of a Union artillery battery. He thought, mistakenly, that the wooded ravines he explored around Helena had been Confederate trenches during the Civil War. He would claim that he finished near the bottom of his class at Helena’s Central High School. He tinkered with cars at his father’s service station, drove a gravel truck, and was a salesman for Jim Walter Homes, a manufactured-homes distributor.

Neither parent had gone to college, but they insisted that their son do so. He briefly attended Arkansas State College (now Arkansas State University) in Jonesboro (Craighead County) and transferred to what is now the University of Central Arkansas in Conway (Faulkner County), where he received a BS in 1970. He continued his education—a master’s degree at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) in 1972, a Master of Library Science at the University of Oklahoma in 1974, and a doctorate in history and archival administration at UA in 1978. He joined a U.S. Naval Aviation Reserve unit and spent six years in the naval reserves. In 1969, he married Joan Skipper, who was also from Helena and worked as a librarian.

While he was studying for his doctorate at UA, he took a turn toward politics by accident. He had run into Bill Clinton at UA, where Clinton and his future wife, Hillary Rodham, were teaching law. Roberts had voted against Clinton in the Democratic primaries in his first successful race, for attorney general, in 1976. When Clinton was preparing for a race for governor in 1978, a friend told Roberts, then a graduate student, that Clinton was giving a talk at the Smokehouse, a barbecue restaurant at the base of Mount Kessler in Fayetteville. Roberts said he only went for the free barbecue, but it was a pivotal event for both men.

Roberts became one of Clinton’s trusted advisers throughout the politician’s career in Arkansas. While Roberts was teaching history, library science, and archival administration at UA and, later, at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, he and his wife worked in Clinton’s campaigns or in his office, Joan Roberts as the governor’s press secretary in his second term and Bobby Roberts in several roles—as the governor’s liaison with the Arkansas General Assembly and with state agencies dealing with public safety, and finally as a member of the state Board of Corrections.

When Roberts joined the board in 1986, the prison system had emerged from being under the control of the federal courts for a dozen years because of the unconstitutional treatment of inmates. The episode had cost the state millions of dollars to correct an inhumane system. Roberts and his fellow board members tried to make sure that this never happened again by controlling overcrowding and making certain that inmates were firmly managed but humanely treated.

Earlier, as Clinton’s legislative aide at the historic special session of the legislature on education in the fall of 1983, Roberts helped push through sales taxes for the schools and education reforms developed by a committee headed by Arkansas first lady Hillary Clinton. In 2013, Roberts and his library board named a new children’s library in Little Rock the Hillary Rodham Clinton Children’s Library & Learning Center.

While a graduate student at the UA, Roberts got a job in the library processing the papers of U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright. He was fascinated by the original sources and manuscripts. After he and his wife moved to Little Rock (Pulaski County), he began teaching at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and started its special collections, now the UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture. He then became the interim director of the Central Arkansas Library System and finally, in 1989, the CALS director.

Roberts and his wife divorced in 1987, and he married Kathryn Wilson Williams in 1995.

The state constitution had limited property taxes for city and county libraries to one mill. As a legislative aide to Gov. Clinton in 1991 (he had taken a leave of absence as director of CALS), Roberts had a constitutional amendment drafted to allow voters to raise taxes for public libraries across the state, and the Arkansas General Assembly placed it on the ballot in 1992. Roberts’s reform, Amendment 72, lifted the caps for city and county libraries to five mills for operations and another three mills for capital improvements. Voters approved the law in 1992 by a margin of 175,000 votes, and voters in Pulaski County repeatedly endorsed Roberts’s proposals to raise taxes or issue bonds to improve and expand library facilities. During the next twenty-seven years, CALS built, renovated, or expanded thirty library facilities in Pulaski and Perry counties. Roberts placed twenty millage proposals on the ballot, and voters approved sixteen of them.

Roberts started the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, the archival and genealogy division of CALS, with an endowment from banker and businessman Richard C. Butler Sr. In 2009, UA Little Rock and CALS partnered to create the Arkansas Studies Institute, where both of their archival and special collections divisions were placed.

With lifelong friend Carl Moneyhon, Roberts produced four books providing photographic histories of the Civil War in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi—all published by the University of Arkansas Press.

Roberts retired as director of CALS in 2016. In 2019, after an earlier vote of the CALS board, the Arkansas Studies Institute was renamed the Bobby L. Roberts Library of Arkansas History & Art.

For additional information:
Berry, John N., III. “Librarian of the Year 1997: BOBBY ROBERTS, Central Arkansas Library System.” Library Journal 123 (January 1998): 44–46.

Caillouet, Linda S. “Bobby Leon Roberts.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, April 9, 1995, p. 1D.

Schuette, Shirley, and Nathania Sawyer. From Carnegie to Cyberspace: 100 Years at the Central Arkansas Library System. Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2010.

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas