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Herbert L. Thomas Sr. (1899–1982)
At the age of twenty-three, Herbert L. Thomas Sr. started one of the most successful business ventures of the twentieth century in Arkansas and, in a long career in the public arena, immersed himself in the epic quarrels of the age—the 1952 highway scandal, the Adkins-Fulbright battles of the 1940s, racial integration of the public schools and colleges, and economic development.
Herbert Leon Thomas was born on February 14, 1899, in the now nonexistent community of Lone Prairie near Banks, a tiny Bradley County logging town. He was the seventh of nine children of John Covington Thomas and Minnie Lou Morrison Thomas. His father, the doctor in the sparsely settled logging and farming area, died when Thomas was ten. Thomas went to school in Banks, in Crossett (Ashley County), and in the Wesson community west of El Dorado (Union County), where he apparently started high school. His widowed mother moved the family to Little Rock (Pulaski County), and he graduated from Little Rock High School (later Central High School) in 1918. The high school yearbook, The Cage, recorded that he had been president of the junior class; on the basketball, baseball, and track teams; editor of the school newspaper; the most popular and most athletic boy; and the senior class’s “fashion plate.”
The next year, he married a high school classmate, Ruby Collier. They had two sons, Herbert Jr. and James, and twin daughters, Jean and Jane.
The 1920 federal census listed his occupation as having an awning and tent business. In 1923, he formed the Mutual Assessment Company, which became First Pyramid Life, headquartered in a room of a building at 2nd and Center streets in Little Rock that was known as the Southern Trust Building, which he later bought and renamed the First Pyramid Life Building (now Pyramid Place). On the board of Thomas’s fledgling company in 1925 was the aged and outgoing governor Thomas C. McRae.
Although his business interests were in Little Rock, Thomas missed the farm life of his childhood in Bradley County and, in 1939, bought a 175-acre farm three miles north of Fayetteville (Washington County) and moved with his family there. He soon became a director and owner of the McIlroy Bank in Fayetteville and bought City National Bank in Fort Smith (Sebastian County) and the Citizens Bank of Booneville (Logan County).
Wherever he was living, Thomas involved himself in the political tumults of the times. When Homer M. Adkins became governor in 1941, one of Adkins’s first acts was to dismiss members of the board of trustees of the University of Arkansas (UA) and to direct the firing of the university’s young president, J. William Fulbright, whom Adkins—a former Ku Klux Klansman—accused of being a closet integrationist. As a result of Fulbright’s firing, Arkansas adopted a constitutional amendment (Amendment 33) in 1942 to prevent governors from political meddling at state educational, correctional, or charitable institutions.
Thomas encouraged Fulbright to run for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1942 and directed his successful campaign against Adkins’s political ally, Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Karl Greenhaw, and then encouraged Fulbright to run for the U.S. Senate in 1944 against Adkins. Ironically, Adkins had just appointed Thomas to an eight-year term on the UA Board of Trustees. As chairman of the board, Thomas announced that the university would enroll African Americans in graduate programs, and Silas Hunt was admitted to the law school in January 1948 and attended classes starting in September.
That fall, Sid McMath was elected governor, and the Associated Press asked fifty prominent citizens, including Thomas, to write brief paragraphs summarizing what they thought Arkansas should do to emerge from its historic blight. Thomas’s recommendations included “elimination of the poll tax, a strong anti-lynching law and better facilities for Negro education.”
The Arkansas General Assembly and voters in a statewide election in 1949 enacted McMath’s highway-building program, financed by revenue bonds. But as McMath prepared to run for a third term in 1952, charges were made about political favoritism and fraud in the contracting and roadbuilding. The legislature created the Highway Audit Commission to investigate the allegations. Thomas was the co-chairman and spokesman, and its conclusions, voiced by Thomas, effectively ended McMath’s career. He was defeated in 1952 by Francis Cherry. Thomas became chairman of the Citizens Highway Committee, which developed the constitutional amendment—known as the Mack-Blackwell Amendment—that staggered ten-year terms of highway commissioners to prevent a governor from again exercising control of the highway-building agency.
When Orval Faubus took office for his second term as governor in 1957, Thomas and Hugh B. Patterson Jr., publisher of the Arkansas Gazette, urged him to try to raise the sales tax from two to three percent to better fund the state’s public schools and colleges, which were among the poorest financed in the country. Faubus agreed and won passage of the tax bill in the legislature only after agreeing with eastern Arkansas segregation leaders to go along with legislation at that session to prevent integration—principally a state sovereignty commission that would be empowered to block federal orders to desegregate. Referendum petitions held up the sales tax until voters in 1958 ratified it.
Thomas’s perhaps naïve philosophy was that when the state or a community was deeply divided on an issue, the solution was to form a “blue-ribbon commission” of equal members from both sides who would work out a mutually satisfactory resolution. It had seemed to work when a group he formed developed a plan for raising state capital for industrialization and another that strengthened state regulation of the trucking industry.
After Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to block integration at Thomas’s old high school in the fall of 1957, Thomas produced a plan in the spring of 1958 to create a biracial commission to guide school districts across the state in desegregating schools voluntarily before the federal courts ordered individual districts to integrate. The “Arkansas Plan,” as it was called, was the object of a fierce debate in the spring and summer of 1958. The plan was denounced by groups on both sides: segregationists, such as the Capital Citizens Council, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Arkansas. The NAACP’s leader, Daisy Bates, publicly denounced Thomas and said he had enrolled Black students at UA only because federal courts were “looking over his shoulder.” Thomas wrote a five-page, single-spaced letter to Bates begging to know how he had so aggrieved her and the NAACP so that he could apologize.
When the Arkansas Plan was shelved, Faubus and the legislature enacted a plan for the governor to close schools faced with integration after the district’s voters had acquiesced. Little Rock’s high schools were closed in the 1958–59 school year, known as the Lost Year, and some of the city’s civic leaders, notably women, set out to reopen integrated high schools in the fall of 1959. Led by Adolphine Fletcher Terry, women organized the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools. A few male business leaders, including Thomas, supported the WEC. Thomas’s daughter Jean Thomas Gordon was an early member of the women’s group. The city’s voters in a special election ousted the committed segregationists on the school board, and the new board reopened the high schools and proceeded with integration.
As the progress toward ending segregation throughout the city’s schools faltered in the mid-1960s, Jean Gordon entered the race to succeed Everett Tucker Jr., the president of the school board who had shepherded the schools’ progress since the 1958 election. After she was elected, she, others on the school board, and Thomas supported a plan devised by a team from the University of Oregon—the “Oregon Plan”—that would have allowed parents throughout the city to choose the school their children would attend. But in 1968, after a legislative act sped up school elections from the fall to spring, she and a colleague on the board were defeated, and the reconstituted board set out to adopt a plan that gerrymandered school zones to diminish integrated classrooms. A federal court order halted that plan and ordered a plan requiring widespread busing to achieve some racial balance in schools across the city.
When he was buying land near Heber Springs (Cleburne County) to develop a resort community called Eden Isle, Thomas encouraged U.S. Senator John L. McClellan to get the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build a long-planned flood-control and hydroelectric dam on the Little Red River near his resort and persuaded U.S. Representative Wilbur D. Mills, his congressman, to get President John F. Kennedy to dedicate the dam on October 3, 1963 (a few weeks before the president’s assassination in Dallas, Texas). Thomas threw a lavish party at his palatial new home the night before the president’s appearance and sat on the stage with Faubus and the state’s congressional delegation for Kennedy’s speech. Thomas lived at Eden Isle (home to the famous Red Apple Inn) for the last twenty-two years of his life.
Thomas died on March 11, 1982. He is buried in Pinecrest Memorial Garden Mausoleum in Alexander (Pulaski and Saline Counties). At the time of his death, First Pyramid operated in twenty-five states and had $1.2 billion of insurance in force.
For additional information:
“Businessman Dies at Age 73; Herbert L. Thomas Founded Insurance Firm.” Arkansas Gazette, March 12, 1982, pp. 1A, 8A.
Herbert L. Thomas Sr. Papers. Arkansas State Archives, Little Rock, Arkansas. Finding aid online at https://digitalheritage.arkansas.gov/finding-aids/186/ (accessed July 18, 2024).
Nelson, Rex. “Opinion: The Passion Project.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, July 29, 2023, p. 7B.
“The State and the Thomas Plan.” Editorial, Arkansas Gazette, June 11, 1958, p. 4.
Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas
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