National States Rights Party

Formed in late 1950s, the National States Rights Party was a white supremacist political party that operated until the mid-1980s. The party membership chose Arkansas governor Orval Faubus as the party’s nominee for president in 1960.

Sources differ on the exact founding date and location of the party. Jeffersonville, Indiana; Knoxville, Tennessee; and Louisville, Kentucky, are all listed in various sources as the location, with various dates in 1957 and 1958 given as the founding date. Edward Fields served as the national director and Jesse Stoner served as the national chairman at the creation of the party.

A report compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) stated that the beliefs of the party focused on racism and anti-Semitism. African Americans were believed to be inferior to and harmful to the white race, while Jewish people were equated with Communists; the party advocated forcing Jewish Americans to emigrate to Israel. The report also included information that the party opposed Asian Americans on the West Coast and Hispanics in the Southwest.

In March 1960, the party picked Orval Faubus as its presidential nominee for the 1960 election. Meeting outside Miamisburg, Ohio, the group also nominated retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral John Crommelin as the vice-presidential candidate. It is unclear how Faubus responded to the nomination. Some sources report that he “snubbed” the nomination, while others claim that he gave tacit permission for his name to be put forth on the ballot. Faubus did not campaign for the office and endorsed the eventual winner, Democrat John F. Kennedy. Faubus also removed himself from the ballot in Florida but remained a candidate in other states, including Arkansas, where the state party president, Mrs. Edson L. Bishop, was a vocal promoter of Faubus.

Winning 28,952 votes in Arkansas, Faubus lost dramatically to Kennedy, who received 215,049 votes and won approximately 50.2 percent of the vote in the state. Pulaski County gave Faubus the most votes of any county, with 7,608 going to the governor, while Lonoke County gave him 14.9 percent of the total vote in the county, the highest percentage of any county in Arkansas. Nationally, the ticket received just under 45,000 votes, compared with the more than thirty-four million that Kennedy received.

Members of the party in Arkansas were few in number but participated in violent acts to help bring others to their cause. Emmett Miller and Robert Lloyd Parks, both of West Memphis (Crittenden County), were arrested on July 12, 1960, on the campus of Philander Smith College in Little Rock (Pulaski County) as they tried to light the fuse to forty sticks of dynamite placed under a staircase. Miller was indicted on a misdemeanor charge by a Pulaski County grand jury, while a federal grand jury indicted Miller, Parks, and another man on charges that they violated the Civil Rights Act. The case was eventually dropped to protect the name of an informant. Miller became the vice-chairman of the state party later in the year.

The Arkansas state party met in 1964 and nominated Kennedy Hurst to represent it in the gubernatorial race that year. Hurst dropped out of the race after several months. Two years later, Norman K. Anspach arrived in the Little Rock area and tried to reinvigorate the party but met little success. The party nominated John Kasper for the presidency in 1964 with Jesse Stoner as the vice-presidential candidate, and the ticket received a total of 2,965 votes in Arkansas—only receiving additional votes in Kentucky. Kasper received 442 votes in Pulaski County, the highest number in the state, while just over three percent of voters in Howard County cast their ballot for the party, the highest percentage in the state.

The actions of the party brought the organization to the attention of the FBI by 1964, and the agency began an intelligence program to gather information on the group. As part of the larger COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE program, the FBI also surveilled various Ku Klux Klan groups and the American Nazi Party.

The National States Rights Party did not run a candidate in the 1968 presidential election; instead the members supported segregationist former Alabama governor George Wallace’s efforts as the nominee of the American Independent Party. With the election split between three candidates, Wallace won Arkansas’s electoral votes with 38.65 percent of the vote, although Richard Nixon won the presidency.

The fractional nature of white supremacy groups pulled members away from the party to other organizations. By 1970, the group included only about 150 active members across the nation, with another 2,500 subscribers to the monthly newsletter, The Thunderbolt. With the party headquartered in Savannah, Georgia, active chapters were located in Arkansas, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, and Virginia.

Party chairman Jesse Stoner bombed an African American church in 1958 but was not convicted of the crime until 1980. Years of appeals and his efforts to work with other hate groups led to a schism in the party. The group did not put forward a candidate for the 1980 presidential election, but Stoner stated that he planned to vote for eventual winner Ronald Reagan, a Republican. Stoner served a term in prison for the bombing, leading to the dissolution of the party. Released in 1986, he died in 2005.

Ultimately, the National States Rights Party alone did not play a major role in electoral politics in Arkansas. Only through joining with other likeminded groups did they ever see any success, even when supporting native son Faubus.

For additional information:
Cook, Samuel DuBois. “Political Movements and Organizations.” Journal of Politics 26, no. 1 (1964): 130–153.

Drabble, John. “From White Supremacy to White Power: The FBI, COINTELPRO-WHITE HATE, and the Nazification of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s.” American Studies 48, no. 3 (2007): 49–74.

Gillespie, J. David. Challengers to Duopoly: Why Third Parties Matter in American Two-Party Politics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2012.

Martin, Douglas. “J. B. Stoner, 81, Fervent Racist and Benchmark for Extremism.” New York Times, April 29, 2005.

“National States Rights Party.” Federal Bureau of Investigation. https://vault.fbi.gov/National%20States%20Rights%20Party/National%20States%20Rights%20Party%20Part%201%20of%201%20/view (accessed February 22, 2024).

Newton, Michael. The National States Rights Party: A History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017.

Primuth, Richard. “Ronald Reagan’s Use of Race in the 1976 and 1980 Presidential Elections.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 100, no. 1 (2016): 36–66.

Rosenstone, Steven J., Roy L. Behr, and Edward H. Lazarus. Third Parties in America: Citizen Response to Major Party Failure. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.

David Sesser
Southeastern Louisiana University