Jean Gordon (1926–2024)

Jean Thomas Gordon devoted her long life to education, social justice, women’s rights, environmental protection, and peace. A few months before she died at the age of ninety-seven, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editorial pages continued to carry her letters supporting efforts to secure peace in eastern Europe and the Middle East and urging pursuit of nuclear arms control.

Jean Thomas was born on September 30, 1926, to Herbert L. Thomas Sr. and Ruby Collier Thomas in Little Rock (Pulaski County), along with a twin sister, Jane. She also had two older brothers. In 1923, her father had founded what became Pyramid Life, an insurance firm that by 1926 had 10,000 policy holders. Her father would go on to a diversified career in business, farming, banking, real-estate development, and the fringes of government and politics. He was a friend and adviser of every Arkansas governor from J. Marion Futrell to Bill Clinton. Herbert Thomas’s interest in social and economic reforms would help shape the pattern for his daughter’s crusading life.

When she was a teenager, the family moved to a 175-acre farm north of Fayetteville (Washington County), where her parents became the community’s leading citizens. The statewide newspapers regularly reported on her father’s prize-winning cattle and farm produce, while their athletic daughter won blue ribbons with her horse, My Ann Dare. Horseback riding and swimming were her favorite pastimes. She graduated from Fayetteville High School in 1943 and from Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 1947 with a major in philosophy. She married Frank Gordon Jr. in 1949; they had three children before divorcing later in life.

Wellesley’s most famous graduate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, would move to Little Rock thirty years later when her husband was elected attorney general. Jean Thomas Gordon worked on Bill Clinton’s campaign, hosting his first event in Little Rock, a coffee with her neighbors.

In the mid-1950s, Gordon plunged into the long sequence of battles over school segregation and civil rights that followed Governor Orval Faubus’s attempt to circumvent federal court orders to desegregate Little Rock schools, starting with Central High School. She was secretary of the Arkansas Council on Human Relations, a liberal organization established in 1954 to advance the cause of racial justice in the South, financed by the Ford Foundation and Little Rock businessman Fred K. Darragh Jr. She was an early member of the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC), which formed in 1958 when Faubus closed the city’s high schools (known as the Lost Year) and pushed a constitutional amendment that would have closed schools in districts that tried to desegregate. The Arkansas Supreme Court removed the proposed amendment from the 1958 general-election ballot because the ballot title did not inform voters about the radical things it would do such as close schools and fund private segregated schools with public school funds.

Gordon joined the battle to keep Little Rock schools open and racially integrated in the years after the historic constitutional crisis in 1957 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent federal troops to Central High School to carry out federal court orders for nine Black children to attend the school. She ran for and was elected to the Little Rock School Board in 1965 at the peak of the struggle over carrying out court orders to fully integrate the city’s schools. The school board was divided over how to comply with court orders to desegregate elementary and junior high schools while fully ending discrimination. The board and its superintendent, Floyd W. Parsons, sought expert advice and hired a team from the University of Oregon, recommended by the National Education Association to produce a plan. Known as “the Oregon Plan,” it called for giving parents a choice about the schools their children would attend. Gordon and another liberal on the school board, Dr. John A. Harrel Jr., were defeated more than two years later by segregationists who succeeded in scrubbing the Oregon Plan.

The Oregon Plan’s defeat and new federal court orders calling for widespread busing to achieve racial balance brought about the creation of private schools across Pulaski County and white migration to heavily white suburban school districts in Faulkner, Lonoke, and Saline counties. Race- and financially-based migration would vex the state’s education system, public policy, and the courts far into the next century, most notably the LEARNS Act of 2023, which diverted public school funds to private, parochial, and home schools.

The experience of negotiating in the clash of local politics over the pace of desegregation proved invaluable to Gordon’s later encounters with members of Congress and other national leaders in the cause of nuclear disarmament and a reformed military budget.

Gordon married Walter Clancy, a former Catholic priest and educator who shared her passion for civil rights, in 1988. Born in Helena (Phillips County), Clancy studied for the priesthood at St. John’s Seminary and then joined a group of priests who became embroiled in the civil rights movement. He drove a group of students to Washington DC in 1963 for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom to hear Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech on August 28, 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial.

The struggle for peace and for preventing nuclear holocaust and global annihilation became Gordon’s passions for the rest of her life. Betty Bumpers, wife of U.S. senator and former governor Dale Bumpers, started Peace Links along with other Senate wives to protest the nuclear arms race with Russia mobilized by President Ronald Reagan. Their idea was that American women could form lasting relationships with women in the Soviet Union to promote peace instead of war. Gordon helped establish Arkansas Peace Links and the Arkansas Peace Center.

When the Cold War ended and Peace Links dissolved, Gordon asked Betty Bumpers for her mailing list and, with a group of likeminded women, founded Arkansas WAND. WAND had its roots in the Women’s Party for Survival, founded by Helen Caldicot, and was known as the Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament. In 1991, WAND changed its name to Women’s Action for New Directions to reflect its expanded mission as the end of the Cold War lessened nuclear tensions. In 1997, Arkansas WAND coalesced around the issue of opposition to the construction of a chemical weapons incinerator at the Pine Bluff Arsenal. The arsenal continued with the incineration, but WAND became part of a lawsuit questioning its methods. Arkansas WAND led and sponsored demonstrations, vigils, lectures, and an annual Mother’s Day Luncheon for Peace; produced a film on nonviolence; and sponsored the building of the Beacon of Peace and Hope, a monument on the north bank of the Arkansas River. Until her death, Gordon was at her computer every morning researching the cost of war and often penning a letter to the editor in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Arkansas WAND’s de facto home was Gordon’s house, and she hosted monthly potlucks and lectures. She lived at the same address as when she was elected to the school board in the 1960s.

Gordon died on February 1, 2024, at her home.

For additional information:
“Businessman Dies at Age 73; Herbert L. Thomas Sr. Founded Insurance Firm.” Arkansas Gazette, March 12, 1982, p. 1A, 8A.

Lancaster, Grant. “Jean Gordon, LR Civil Rights Activist, Dies at 97.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, February 4, 2024, p. 5B. Online at https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2024/feb/03/jean-gordon-little-rock-activist-for-peace-and/ (accessed July 18, 2024).

Obituary of Jean Thomas Gordon. https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/name/jean-gordon-obituary?id=54275011 (accessed July 18, 2024).

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas