June 18, 2006

James Wesley Pruden was a Southern Baptist minister and the first chaplain, and later president, of the Capital Citizens’ Council, a white supremacist organization based in Little Rock (Pulaski County) that opposed the desegregation of Central High School. He verbally encouraged the mobs that showed up in front of Central High during the 1957–58 school year and raised money to bail out those arrested. An unsuccessful preacher whose personal agenda centered upon race, he fell back into obscurity after the school crisis.