The Saga of Bonnie and Jack: A walk back in history with Orval Faubus, his family and JFK

The Saga of Bonnie and Jack

By Ernest Dumas

With your forbearance, I shall recount an important and long-ago but poorly noted interlude in Arkansas and American history in which I was a callow spectator. It involved the soon-to-be-assassinated president of the United States, an aged leftist hillbilly in the Arkansas Ozarks, his adoring daughter, the governor of Arkansas, and assorted politicians and journalists.

Those events of 58 years ago, in my mind, offer a good lesson and perhaps an antidote to the craziness that afflicts Arkansas and the nation this spring. I refer to the revival of so many old conspiracy myths that, at least since the Red Summer at the end of World War I, sometimes plagued but more often only enlivened the body politic. You know: The socialists/communists are coming.

They are coming for your guns. They are driving working people into unions to destroy capitalism and freedom; erasing history by banishing memorials to heroes like Robert E. Lee who betrayed the nation; trying to steal elections from Donald Trump; ennobling Black people at the expense of others, and teaching schoolchildren racial theories to make them hate America.

You heard all those plots from the lips of Arkansas legislators and Trump Republicans everywhere this spring as they passed laws to protect memorials to defenders of slavery, stop teachers from talking about the role of race and discrimination in Arkansas and American history, reverse the easy access to the ballot that produced a historic tide of votes during the pandemic of 2020 (adding 11 million votes, by the way, to Trump’s total from 2016), and even prevent transgender youngsters from getting medical assistance, which socialists are supposed to believe they should be able to get.


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https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2021/06/27/the-saga-of-bonnie-and-jack-a-walk-back-in-history-with-orval-faubus-his-family-and-jfk