Congressman from the 3rd district whose family owns KURM Radio?

Do you remember anything from your Arkansas History class in grade school? I remember we had a textbook that was waaaaay out of date. It ended with Governor Francis Cherry, I think, who preceded Orval Faubus. That was quite a while before I was even born. So no mention even of Little Rock Central High.

But I do have some fond memories of that book, though--- stories of the Caddo, Quapaw and Osage Indians; the story of Petit Jean, a female French explorer who posed as a boy; stories of Spanish Louisiana; William Woodruff, founder of the Arkansas Gazette; early governors Sevier, Izard, and Yell; statehood in 1836; the Civil War and the Battle of Pea Ridge; the Brooks-Baxter War and Reconstruction; exotic pictures of the Arkansas River, Crowley's Ridge and Lake Chicot; and almost no mention of Northwest Arkansas.

What most people do not realize is that Faubus was a graduate of Commonwealth College. A socialist college in Arkansas. You have to read the wiki on it. Looking back, I almost believe that Faubus standing in the Central High doors was a setup, maybe even with Eisenhower. Take a read about it and let me know.

Maybe he was a kind of governor in the mold of Huey Long. I get the feeling that he was something of a racist, though, given that he was from an extremely racist county (the whole county was one giant "sundown town&quot , and the Little Rock crisis was just a year after the signing of the Southern Manifesto.

At any rate, I think he helped paint a bad image of our state (Hannah-Barbera was particularly fond of poking fun at Arkansas), which lasted for several decades. During my first trip to the Northeast, it seemed like the only thing anyone knew about Arkansas was the Little Rock crisis that had happened more than 20 years earlier.