calsfoundation@cals.org
May 29, 1951
Founder and head of the American Baptist Association Benjamin Bogard died at his home in Little Rock (Pulaski County). He is buried at Roselawn Cemetery. Bogard was Arkansas’s leading fundamentalist Christian in the 1920s. In 1928, his efforts resulted in a law banning the teaching of evolution in Arkansas public schools; it remained in place until 1968, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned it. A prolific author and a pioneer of radio evangelism, he was honored by Ripley’s Believe it or Not for preaching “every Sunday for 61 years without missing a single Sunday.”