January 10, 1967

Winthrop Rockefeller was inaugurated as Arkansas’s thirty-seventh governor. Arkansas’s first Republican governor since 1872, Rockefeller is primarily remembered for his achievements in civil rights, such as the integration of draft boards; too, he was the only Southern governor to eulogize Martin Luther King Jr., an action that likely staved off riots in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Rockefeller was a “transitional leader” in the sense that he helped discredit the “Old Guard” domination of the Orval Faubus years and, in so doing, made Arkansans more receptive to political and social change.