Time Period: World War II through the Faubus Era (1941 - 1967) - Starting with A

Amazing Adventures of My Dog Sheppy, The

In a 1958 effort to promote economic development and tourism in Stone County, a group of local investors under the leadership of Harold M. Sherman filmed a thirty-minute television pilot titled, “The Amazing Adventures of My Dog Sheppy.” A poor script, inept casting, amateurish acting, and the on-camera killing of a bobcat combined to produce a show that could not be pitched to the national networks. The film is significant, however, for documenting Stone County before the Ozark Folk Center or Blanchard Springs Caverns opened to the public. The television pilot was the brainchild of Harold Sherman. This Michigan native was the author of more than sixty books, a motivational speaker, and a Hollywood script writer. In 1958, television shows …

Amendment 33

Amendment 33 was the first of three constitutional amendments ratified by voters in the decade after the beginning of World War II to try to curb political interference with large government agencies and institutions. It prohibited the governor and the Arkansas General Assembly from diminishing the powers of state agencies and institutions, as well as from interfering with their governing boards by dismissing members before their terms expired or increasing or reducing the membership of the boards. The amendment, ratified in 1942, followed Governor Homer M. Adkins’s purging of the board of the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) in order to fire the university’s president J. William Fulbright, who was the son of a political foe of …

Amendment 44

aka: Interposition Amendment
On November 6, 1956, Arkansans voted to adopt an amendment to the state constitution that would allow Arkansas law to supersede federal law. The “interposition” amendment, as it was called, was in response to the looming integration of Arkansas schools. Similar amendments were adopted across the South after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision that declared public school segregation unconstitutional. Although the idea of interposition gained popularity in 1954, the precedence for the argument can be traced back to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions put forth by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson in 1798 and 1799. James D. “Justice Jim” Johnson, an Arkansas politician from Crossett (Ashley County), first presented the idea of an interposition …

Amsler, Ernest Guy

Ernest Guy Amsler, who was born and educated in Mississippi, moved to southern Arkansas with a law degree after World War I and spent forty-five years practicing in Arkansas courts—the last seventeen as a trial judge at Little Rock (Pulaski County) and justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court. He retired as circuit judge in the Sixth Judicial District in 1966 to accept an interim appointment to the Arkansas Supreme Court. Guy Amsler was born on November 9, 1895, in Leakesville, Mississippi, one of eleven children of farmers Jakob Anton Friedrich Amsler and Flora McLeod Amsler, who were Swiss immigrants. He served in World War I, received a law degree from the University of Mississippi at Oxford in 1921, moved to …

Anderson, Andrew Lee (Killing of)

On July 17, 1963, an African American teenager named Andrew Lee Anderson was killed while fleeing from a posse of white citizens and sheriff’s deputies. Anderson’s killing, and its classification as an “excusable homicide,” illustrates how white citizens of Crittenden County could commit acts of violence against Black citizens with impunity at this time and shows how the legal system failed African Americans. Earlier that day, sixteen-year-old Anderson had been mowing a lawn in Marion (Crittenden County) when a white woman accused him of sexually assaulting her eight-year-old daughter. The mother followed Anderson in her car and called for help, attracting some neighbors and local law enforcement who took over the pursuit. The armed posse was composed of six sheriff’s …

Anderson, Bruce Roy

Bruce Roy Anderson was a prominent Arkansas architect and watercolorist in the mid-twentieth century. Bruce Anderson was born on October 7, 1907, in Newport (Jackson County), the son of George Roy Anderson and Amelia Frei Anderson. He had an older brother, Maxwell, and sister, Bernice. Anderson attended Little Rock (Pulaski County) public schools and graduated from Castle Heights Military Academy in Tennessee. He received a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Auburn University in Alabama in 1929. In 1936, Anderson earned a Master of Architecture degree from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Anderson married Helen Venus McClain on December 25, 1931. They had one son, Bruce R. Anderson Jr. Anderson began his architectural career in …

Andrews, Lloyd

aka: Arkansas Slim
aka: Slim Andrews
Lloyd “Arkansas Slim” Andrews was best known for film roles as a sidekick to western stars in the 1940s through the early 1950s and, after that, as a host of children’s television programs. Before his move to Hollywood, he had been a comedian and musician in tent shows traveling throughout the mid-South. In his later years, he was a featured guest at film festivals. He was a member of the Screen Actors Guild and a lifetime member of Musicians Local 47 of Hollywood. Lloyd Andrews, also known as “Arkansas Slim” and “Slim Andrews,” was born on December 8, 1906, the seventh son of Norma Blau and George Willis Andrews, who had a farm on Spavinaw Creek in rural Benton County …

Annals of Arkansas

The Annals of Arkansas comprise four volumes of narrative and biographical histories of Arkansas, written by several experts in the state’s history and edited by Dallas Tabor Herndon, who was director of the Arkansas History Commission (now the Arkansas State Archives). The Annals were meant to revise, re-edit, and continue preserving and recording the historical record of Arkansas’s development initially begun by Herndon’s previous multi-volume study, Centennial History of Arkansas, published in 1922. In short, the Annals of Arkansas and the Annals’ forerunners—the Centennial History of Arkansas and Fay Hempstead’s Historical Review of Arkansas—form the beginnings of an authoritative study of Arkansas history. The first two volumes of the Annals contain brief but informative historical entries on various subjects organized …

Antrim, Richard Nott

Richard Nott Antrim was a career U.S. Navy officer who received a Medal of Honor for saving the life of a fellow prisoner of war held by the Japanese during World War II. He moved to Mountain Home (Baxter County) after retiring and lived there the rest of his life. Richard Nott Antrim was born in Peru, Indiana, on December 17, 1907, the eldest of two sons and a daughter of the farming family of Nott W. Antrim and Mary Antrim. Richard Antrim entered the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, in 1927, graduating on June 4, 1931. He married Jean Packard in Chicago on June 16, 1931, and they had a son and two daughters. Antrim served on U.S. …

Appleby, Jack

aka: John Tate Appleby
Arkansas native John Tate (Jack) Appleby was a biographer of English kings of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and a long-time associate editor of the American Historical Review. He is best remembered in the Borough of St. Edmundsbury in southeastern England, where he served in the U.S. Army Air Force during the final months of World War II and traveled by bicycle then and just after the war. Appleby’s memoir of those times, Suffolk Summer, has remained in print since its publication in 1948. Jack Appleby was born on June 10, 1907, in Fayetteville (Washington County) to George and Gertrude (Baylor) Appleby. Along with his brother Charles, George Appleby owned a number of orchards and canning factories in and …

Arkansas Blood Labeling Bill

aka: HB 385
On April 2, 1959, Governor Orval E. Faubus signed HB 385 (Blood Labeling Bill) into law, requiring blood banks to label the donor’s race. The bill was introduced by N. B. Murphy of Ashley County, who later called for the repeal of the bill in 1969. Faubus claimed the law would ease the minds of the “great majority” who feared transmission of sickle-cell anemia through blood transfusions. Despite thorough medical research stating that sickle-cell anemia cannot be spread through blood transfusions and knowing “it is hereditary, and can be transmitted from one person to another only by intermarriage which results in the birth of children,” Faubus and the “great majority” believed there was “always room for error” and that the …

Arkansas Children’s Colony

aka: Conway Human Development Center
Dedicated on October 4, 1959, the Arkansas Children’s Colony was a state-supported center that served Arkansas’s mentally handicapped children. The colony, set on a little over 400 donated acres in Conway (Faulkner County), provided a school and a home away from home for as many as 1,000 developmentally disabled, school age children. Governor Orval Faubus lobbied strongly for funds to build a facility to serve the state’s mentally challenged children. On January 25, 1955, the Arkansas General Assembly created Act 6, which engendered Arkansas’s first facility to serve such children. Arkansas was the forty-eighth state to open such an institution. A donation of $1,200 was made to the facility, and workers began construction in 1958. Less than two years later, …

Arkansas Council on Human Relations (ACHR)

A key facilitator in the desegregation of public schools and businesses in the state, the Arkansas Council on Human Relations (ACHR) was formed in December 1954 out of the reorganization of the board of the Arkansas branch of the grassroots organization, the Southern Regional Council. Initial funding came from a grant, via the Southern Regional Council, from the Ford Foundation, as well as the assistance of Fred K. Darragh Jr., a noted Arkansas agribusiness leader and philanthropist. In the wake of the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision, Nat Griswold, the first director, recognized two basic problems hampering efforts to desegregate Arkansas’s public facilities: white opposition to integration and political disunity among African Americans. The …

Arkansas Diamonds

The Arkansas Diamonds professional football team competed in the Continental Football League in 1968 and 1969. The Continental Football League, a fledgling professional league, operated from 1965 to 1969. A. B. Chandler, former Kentucky governor and Major League Baseball’s second commissioner, was the league’s first commissioner and provided the upstart league with a recognized level of credibility. Nevertheless, by 1968, Chandler had departed and the league was struggling to survive. Still, the Continental Football League provided players with an opportunity to be paid to play, although in 1968 team payrolls were capped at $5,000 per game, and no player could earn more than $200 per game. Furthermore, the league offered players a chance to continue playing after their collegiate careers …

Arkansas Faith

Arkansas Faith was a short-lived newsletter published by the White Citizens’ Council of Arkansas in 1955 and 1956. Subscribers to Arkansas Faith paid a three-dollar membership fee to join the White Citizens’ Council of Arkansas and received the newsletter as part of their membership. The newsletter followed the larger Citizens’ Council of Mississippi’s format. Such publications were copied hundreds of times around the country. Although each chapter had a distinct name and local flair, they all followed a similar format that included articles featuring Christian nationalism, anti-Semitic tropes, opinion pieces from a white supremacist perspective, and pieces on anti-communism, segregation, and politics. Arkansas Faith was edited by Curtis (Curt) Copeland, a transient segregationist newspaperman who co-founded the White Citizens’ Council …

Arkansas Girls State

aka: Girls State
Arkansas Girls State is a summer program of education that has been sponsored by the American Legion Auxiliary, Department of Arkansas since 1942. As of 2014, it has provided training for more than 55,000 Arkansas girls in the fundamental aspects of citizenship and practical government. The purpose of Arkansas Girls State is to educate young women of high school age in the duties, privileges, and responsibilities of American citizenship and to provide an opportunity for them to participate in the actual functioning of their government. The National American Legion Auxiliary, which had established a Boys State program in 1935, first sponsored Girls State in 1937–38, and as of 2014, fifty-one departments have such a program. More than 25,000 high school students …

Arkansas Judge

Arkansas Judge (1941) is the sixth in a series of eleven comedies made by Republic Pictures from 1938 to 1943 featuring the Weaver Brothers and Elviry (consisting of Missourians Leon, Frank, and June Weaver), a popular “rube” vaudeville and radio act. The Weaver series also included Down in “Arkansaw” (1938), the first film in the series. In his book Hillbilly, Anthony Harkins noted that the years 1937–1945 saw “the hillbilly stereotype at high tide” in popular culture, with the Weavers and Judy Canova making pictures at Republic, Arkansan Bob Burns appearing in films for Paramount (including The Arkansas Traveler, 1938), and the Lum & Abner show on the radio. Arkansas Judge was the only movie in the series set in …

Arkansas Loan and Thrift

Arkansas Loan and Thrift Corporation (AL&T) was a hybrid bank that operated for three years outside state banking laws with the help of political connections in the 1960s before coming to a scandalous end. A U.S. district judge halted the operations and placed the company in receivership in March 1968, and a federal grand jury indicted three officers of the company, as well as a former Arkansas attorney general. AL&T became a symbol of the corruption and lethargy that were the products of Governor Orval Faubus’s twelve-year control of the statehouse and, in the opinion of Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, the Democratic Party’s unfettered reign in government since Reconstruction. It was jokingly called “Arkansas Loan and Theft.” The grand jury indictment …