Forrest Rozzell (1908–2004)

Forrest Rozzell served three terms in the Arkansas House of Representatives, where he sponsored and pushed bills raising the salaries and expanding the benefits of public school teachers. After his defeat for a fourth term, he continued the work outside the legislature, as field secretary and then executive secretary of the Arkansas Education Association (AEA). He spent forty-six years in education as a teacher, a principal, and a superintendent. He also drafted an initiated act to close all school districts with fewer than 350 students and consolidate them with nearby districts. It failed narrowly in the 1946 election, but two years later voters approved Rozzell’s second effort by a margin of nearly two to one.

James Forrest Rozzell was born on August 18, 1908, to John Holland Rozzell and Della Holland Rozzell at Gore, Oklahoma, a tiny village forty-three miles west of Fort Smith (Sebastian County) that had been part of the Cherokee territory before Oklahoma statehood in 1907. His father was a dry-goods salesman until he started farming. The family, including Rozzell’s brother and sister, moved to Pulaski County when he was small. His father farmed south of Little Rock (Pulaski County), and he attended Pulaski County and Little Rock schools, graduating from Little Rock High School (now Central High School) in 1927. He received a BA in 1931 at the College of the Ozarks (now University of the Ozarks) at Clarksville (Johnson County), where he was a member of the debate team, competing with teams from universities in Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and around Arkansas. He received an MS in education and a law degree from the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County).

He married Agnes Bessie Carroll of Rogers (Benton County) in 1935; they had four children. He was hired as an elementary teacher at Hensley in the Pulaski County school district south of Little Rock and then became principal of the consolidated county high school at Scott on the Pulaski-Lonoke county line.

In 1938, Rozzell ran for state representative from Pulaski County and was one of the seven Democrats from the county elected. His newspaper ads said he had one major interest—improving the public schools in Pulaski County—and for the three biennial sixty-day sessions of his three terms, the newspapers reported all his legislative efforts to increase funding for the public schools, most notably his attempts to raise the minimum salaries for teachers. Arkansas had always ranked last or next to last in public school per capita spending and for teacher salaries. During the Great Depression, teachers often were paid in scrip or not at all. After Governor J. Marion Futrell and the legislature cut taxes in 1933, Arkansas became the only state that contributed no matching for federal emergency aid to the states. The administration of President Franklin Roosevelt finally gave Arkansas a deadline of spring 1935, after which the federal subsidies through employment and poverty programs would stop. Fearing riots, Futrell summoned a special legislative session and begged for taxes. The legislature levied a sales tax, ended prohibition on alcohol, legalized track betting, and taxed liquor, but by 1939, when Rozzell took office, the schools were still poverty projects. Governor Futrell had considered secondary schools a waste of tax money, and in much of rural Arkansas, schooling was unavailable to many households. Rozzell’s bills raised or repurposed taxes and directed the funds to public schools.

Act 324 of 1939, written by Rozzell, levied the income tax on the salaries of federal government employees in Arkansas (soon after permitted by a congressional act signed by Roosevelt) and channeled the taxes mainly to public schools. A 1941 act sponsored by Rozzell revised various fiscal laws to shift $900,000 a year from other programs to the schools. The primary beneficiaries, Rozzell said, would be teachers who were making less than $600 a year. While he was a teacher or administrator in the Pulaski rural schools, and then at a Little Rock junior high school, Rozzell also was executive secretary of the state teacher retirement system, which had been created by a legislative act in 1937. At the time, it was apparently a part-time job, considering the tiny appropriation for Rozzell’s pay.

Rozzell ran for a fourth term in 1942 but lost in a Democratic runoff primary, in which his opponent used Rozzell’s support for and by labor unions to suggest that he opposed charging union pickets with being criminally responsible for any violence that occurred on the picket lines at plants regardless of who had committed the violent act.

Although scarcely publicized at the time, Rozzell—along with his congressman, Brooks Hays—drafted much of the platform of the national Democratic Party at the 1952 national convention at Chicago. The platform continued President Harry S. Truman’s advocacy for repeal of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, and also for civil rights for African Americans—but deftly, without driving Southern segregationists out of the party, at least for the moment.

In 1957, when Governor Orval E. Faubus sent the National Guard to Central High School to prevent nine Black students from enrolling, triggering weeks of turmoil at the school, President Dwight Eisenhower federalized Faubus’s soldiers and sent federal troops to escort the students past the mob surrounding the school. That day, Rozzell was scheduled to speak to a women’s civic club at noon. He scrapped his written speech and instead delivered a passionate rebuke of the mob, Faubus, and others who were afraid to speak up for the basic human rights of all people, the foundation of American democracy, he said.

The Arkansas Gazette the next morning reported on his thundering speech, after observing that his daughter was a student at Central High: “How can I as a responsibly intelligent citizen dedicated to the perpetuation and extension of the American heritage appear before you this afternoon and talk on the subject of Public Education and refuse to take cognizance of the situation that prevails at Central High School without giving a lie to everything I stand for? I cannot and I shall not. We have been taught that the constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the land…and that the supreme authority for determining the meaning of the Constitution is the Supreme Court of the United States.” (There was apparently little reaction to the speech.)

Rozzell also was the architect of the 1968 lawsuit of Epperson v. Arkansas that struck down the 1928 initiated act prohibiting discussion of the theory of evolution in Arkansas public schools. As the head of the Arkansas Education Association, he persuaded Susan Epperson, a science teacher at Little Rock’s Central High School, and Hubert H. Blanchard, his executive assistant at the AEA (whose daughter was a student at Central), to be plaintiffs in his evolution suit in Pulaski Chancery Court. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the law violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

Rozzell and the pastor of his church in Little Rock’s Hillcrest neighborhood, the Reverend Colbert S. Cartwright, were among the very few men in Little Rock and the state who advocated for integration both in the schools and public facilities during the Central High crisis and the two decades that followed. He retired as director of the AEA in 1977 and died on September 4, 2004. He is buried in Crestlawn Memorial Park in Conway (Faulkner County).

For additional information:
Dumas, Ernest. “Forrest Rozzell.” Arkansas Times, September 9, 2004. https://arktimes.com/columns/ernest-dumas/2004/09/09/forrest-rozzell (accessed June 10, 2026).

“Education Proposal Will Head Ballot.” Arkansas Gazette, June 15, 1948, p. 14.

“Former Leader of Union for State’s Teachers Dies.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, September 8, 2004, p. 9B.

“He’ll Retire June 30, 1977, Rozzell Says.” Arkansas Gazette, August 25, 1976, p. 7A.

Rozzell, Forrest. “Can ‘Just Anyone’ Teach? No Substitute for a Qualified Teacher.” Arkansas Gazette, August 30, 1952, p. 4A.

“Rozzell Deplores Violence, Calls for ‘Noble Example.’” Arkansas Gazette, September 25, 1957, p. 12A.

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas