David Pryor, a natural-born politician who spent thirty-four years in public offices, including governor, the state legislature and both houses of Congress, died April 20, 2024 at his home in Little Rock at the age of 89.

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture called him “arguably the most popular Arkansas politician of the modern era,” although the description might have covered a much longer stretch of history. He ran for public offices 13 times between 1960 and 1996 and lost only once—a 1972 race for the U.S. Senate against Sen. John L. McClellan. 

After McClellan’s death before the end of the term in 1978, Pryor defeated two other rising political stars for the Senate seat—Congressmen Jim Guy Tucker and Ray H. Thornton Jr., both of whom would be elected to other major state offices. Pryor would hold the seat until January 1997, when he retired, owing to heart problems and his dismay over the rising partisanship, wrath and extremism in Congress and national politics.

In 2002, years after he retired from the Senate, Pryor’s son Mark, a former state representative and attorney general, won his seat by defeating Senator Tim Hutchinson and served two terms.

His nearly 35-year career in the state and national capitols were marked by passionate and sometimes lonely efforts for better and affordable medical care for the elderly and poor, peace, public safety in the nuclear age, the direct election of American presidents, reform of the state’s ancient constitution and, perhaps most markedly, for collaboration among political foes and parties.

Former President Bill Clinton, who got his inspiration for politics and public service as a 20-year-old Georgetown University student in 1966 from the “Young Turk” state lawmaker from a couple of rural counties east of him in south Arkansas, said he and his wife, Hillary, were deeply saddened by the death of their friend and collaborator, who was always “honest, compassionate and full of common sense.”

In every office he held, Clinton said, Pryor “fought for progressive politics that helped us put the divided past behind us and move into a brighter future together. He was always one of America’s greatest advocates for the elderly, waging long battles to lower the cost of prescription drugs, and to improve nursing home and home care to help more people live in dignity.”

“David made politics personal—from his famed retail campaigning to his ability to calmly and confidently explain tough votes to his constituents,” Clinton said. Clinton was Arkansas’s attorney general in Pryor’s last two years as governor. He was elected governor in the same election that voters promoted Pryor to the US Senate.

“I first met him and Barbara in 1966 when David was running for Congress and over the next 58 years he would be my mentor, confidant, supporter and, above all, friend. Having him and Dale Bumpers in the Senate when I was president was an extraordinary gift. I never felt far from home, and I always trusted the unvarnished advice he gave, especially when the going got tough. I’ll always be grateful that he served as the inaugural dean of the Clinton School of Public Service, where his very presence embodied the nobility and joy of public service.”

David Pryor lived a mythical life of politics and public service, said his longtime aide in Congress, Carmie Henry—starting with his election as president of the third grade. He defined retail politics in Arkansas as a campaigner and in public office, cementing personal bonds with everybody in both parties and in every executive office, including the security workers all over the Capitol. He became easily the most beloved member of the Senate and also with Arkansas voters.

“If any one person’s career marked the changing of an era in American politics, it was David Pryor’s,” Henry said. “There are no David Pryors in Washington anymore.”

Pryor was a liberal Democrat long before it became a term of opprobrium. He was stirred to enter politics, first as a crusading weekly newspaper editor at Camden and then as a candidate for the legislature, by the rise of racial hatred and discord after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1954 outlawing segregation in the nation’s public schools. A senior and student leader at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, Pryor traveled to the Capitol in February 1957 to testify at a dramatic public hearing on a bill creating a state sovereignty commission that would stop racial integration and find and punish people and groups that supported integration—or “race mixing,” as it was commonly called. He thought the bill was a flagrant violation of the federal and state constitutions. He was blocked from testifying, he would learn, at the instigation of university officials, notably the president, who feared a backlash against the school. The passage of a raft of bills to maintain white supremacy and Gov. Orval E. Faubus’s signing them into law in early 1957 and then Faubus’s dispatch of National Guardsmen to prevent nine Black youngsters from entering Little Rock Central High School that fall turned Pryor and his new wife, the former Barbara Jean Lunsford, into crusaders and reaffirmed his notion from early childhood that politics was the best way to spend his life.

David Hampton Pryor was born Aug. 29, 1934, in Camden, the third of four children of William Edgar Pryor and Susan Newton Pryor. His father ran a car dealership, was Ouachita County sheriff for four years and was always politically connected and influential. Governor Ben T. Laney (1945–1949) was a neighbor and family friend, although Laney’s leadership of the Southern white-supremacy  movement and his disloyalty to the Democratic Party in 1948 disturbed young Pryor, whose hero was Gov. Sid McMath from next-door Magnolia and Hot Springs, who had thwarted Laney’s Dixiecrat party and carried Arkansas for President Harry S. Truman that year. Pryor’s mother, who was known as Susie, had been a champion of women’s suffrage, and was the first woman to run for public office in Arkansas, losing a race for circuit and county clerk in 1926. She later won a school board race.

His autobiography, A Pryor Commitment, published in 2008 by Butler Center Books, gave a self-effacing and often humorous account of growing up, pursuing popularity and providential encounters with famous political figures that would shape his destiny. He was an unusually gregarious child who sought friendship with everybody and was attracted to politics almost from the time that he could read, perhaps owing to his father’s engagement in politics and with politicians. (The elder Pryor raised the money in 1942 that kept Congressman John L. McClellan from leaving the US Senate race, which he won in a Democratic runoff primary with Attorney General Jack Holt. McClellan was later shocked and embittered that his patron’s son would run against him. He had expected Pryor to succeed him when he retired.) 

Pryor wrote that he ran for president of Mary Bragg Wheeler’s third-grade class at Camden and that the teacher sent him and the other two candidates into the hall while the class voted.

“Sweating under the tension,” Pryor remembered, “I promised God that if He would let me win this election, I would never again run for political office. Our teacher called us back into the room. I had won! Before I sat down, I was already planning my race for fourth-grade president.”

His boyhood hero was the Razorback and Olympic star Clyde Scott from Smackover, 16 miles down the road from him, to the extent that 50 years later he stuttered trying to talk to the sainted old man, by then a retired insurance executive for Jackson T. “Jack” Stephens. Pryor was a football star for the Camden High School Panthers—a triple-threat tailback who made the all-district team. His memoir, however, confessed that he actually hated football and every minute of practice and the games, but social pressure forced him to stay with it. “Any Camden boy in the 1950s who entertained the slightest interest in peer acceptance—and who could circle the practice field in a heavy uniform without crumpling to earth—went out for football,” he said. Pryor dreaded “the 200-pound linemen” who smashed him to the ground nearly every play. 

Pryor wrote that after seeing the 1950 movie Born Yesterday, starring William Holden and Judy Holliday and set in political Washington, he ran home and sent a letter to Congressman Oren Harris of El Dorado, a family friend, asking if he could be a congressional page that summer. Harris agreed. Pryor drove to Washington, finally found the Capitol and reached the House doorkeeper’s office, where he was rebuked for being late and sent to the Senate, where there was an emergency—an all-night filibuster after all the Senate pages had gone home. When he reached the Senate floor, Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin (the anticommunist conspiracist who was later censured by the Senate) snapped his fingers at Pryor, scribbled a note, fished out a ten-dollar bill and handed him a ring of keys. 

Pryor’s account: “Here, son,” he said. “Get a taxi and go to this address, and on the floor of the closet in the bedroom you’ll find my bedroom slippers. Bring them to me.” It was David Pryor’s first act of public service. 

After Pryor enrolled as a freshman at Baylor University at Waco his father died suddenly and he canceled his enrollment and went instead to Henderson State Teachers College at Arkadelphia, 45 miles up Highway 7. When he arrived on campus late he was greeted by a sign in front of Womack Hall, the men’s dormitory, saying “David Pryor for Freshman Class President.” He was elected. After a year, he transferred to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. He took a horse with him and put the colt in a stable at a farm south of town. He wrote that it had been a stupid thing to do because he rarely found time to ride the animal. He figured that he had done it because the last time he had seen his father alive was when the old man was astride a horse in the 1952 Ouachita County Fair parade.

As the spring semester was ending in 1954, Pryor got a note to call Gov. Francis Cherry, who had defeated his hero Sid McMath two years earlier. Cherry wanted him to be his driver while he was campaigning for re-election in the Democratic primaries against Faubus and two other men that summer. In his autobiography and two oral histories late in life Pryor gave poignant accounts of Cherry’s grace and caring and the agonizing dilemmas the governor had faced in the historic confrontation with Faubus in the runoff primary; Cherry had decided to question Faubus’s patriotism by making an issue of his attendance at a socialist self-help school at Mena, Commonwealth College, and subsequently lying about it. It was to be an evening television speech at the KARK studio, which Pryor called “the speech of Cherry’s political life.” Pryor said he waited in the car for Cherry to leave the mansion for the studio and the governor veered into the shrubs next to the car and vomited. After his stumbling and wooden speech, Cherry returned to the car solemnly and said, “How’d I do, kid?” Pryor said he congratulated Cherry but began to realize that the speech had been a terrible mistake.

It occurred while the country, including Arkansas, rebelled against “McCarthyism,” which had been exposed as a fraud the previous month in the Army-McCarthy hearings before a Senate committee, including Arkansas’s John McClellan. It ended with Army attorney Joseph Welch’s famous putdown of Joe McCarthy, whose bedroom slippers Pryor had fetched four years earlier, for relentlessly attacking a young lawyer at the hearing: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough! Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” Pryor concluded that the very decent Cherry had been a poor politician who did not sense the great shift in public attitudes and was unable to rally voters against a smart but unprincipled politician. An even bigger mistake had been the unfortunate campaign line “we’re going to get the deadheads off the welfare rolls.” Faubus made him look cruel. 

After Cherry’s humiliation, a bitter Pryor decided that politics was miserable business and changed his major from political science to business administration. He took courses in accounting, banking and statistics but found them tedious and boring. Then he became violently ill with a strange malady that required multiple surgeries—he withered to 130 pounds and partially lost his eyesight—that cost him a year of school. 

He returned to the university in 1955 as a government major again. From his arrival, he was active in student government, including serving as a senator. Led by Pryor, Ray Thornton and others who would later seek state executive, legislative and judicial offices, the students took a special interest in the conflagration over integration that was growing at Little Rock, which was under federal court orders to desegregate its schools in the fall. A number of punitive bills to head off the desegregation consumed the lawmakers in the January–March session—notably the creation of a state sovereignty commission, which was based on the long-repudiated theory of John C. Calhoun that states could interpose their sovereignty between the federal government and the people. Pryor and one of his many college roommates, Kenneth C. Danforth of El Dorado, the editor of the campus newspaper, The Traveler, and later a journalist for the Arkansas Gazette, Time magazine and The National Geographic, drove to Little Rock to carry the students’ message to the lawmakers and the state that the legislation trampled upon the human rights of American citizens, who would be criminalized for even expressing the view that Blacks and those who might sympathize with them were entitled to equality and free expression and assembly. Pryor was embittered by the experience that day but, according to his memoir, the stayover at the Marion Hotel and association with the legislators and lobbyists, sharpened his understanding that politics and government—in Ouachita County, Little Rock, or Washington, D.C.—did not follow the examples in civics textbooks.

He left Fayetteville with his degree but could not find a job. The Gazette would not hire him, even when he volunteered to work free for a few months to prove his worth. Later, as a lawmaker and law student, he would be the Gazette’s Fayetteville correspondent. He married Barbara Jean Lunsford of Fayetteville, a classmate, and in late 1957 started a weekly newspaper, the Ouachita Citizen, with a printing press acquired from a local businessman. His wife and mother wrote weekly columns and reported, and Pryor sold advertisements and wrote editorials, often criticizing local government officials but mainly Gov. Faubus and legislative houses that went along with everything Faubus sought to do. The city’s daily newspaper, like most others around Arkansas after the school crisis, rarely took issue with the governor and the legislature. Faubus took pleasure in taunting Pryor and his little paper. At a big rally at Camden in his 1958 race against the meatpacker Chris Finkbeiner, whom Pryor supported, Faubus held up copies of Life and Time magazines and Pryor’s little paper, all of which had made Faubus look bad. 

“Life is for people who can’t read,” Faubus said. “Time is for people who can’t see, and the Ouachita Citizen is for people who can’t think.” The crowd roared and Pryor crawled in his car and went home.

But in 1960 Pryor told the county’s representative, a family friend, that if he did not begin to oppose Faubus on legislation he was going to run against him. The representative demurred and Pryor ran against him. He was 26 years old. Pryor’s memoir said he got elected mainly owing to the relentless campaigning of Barbara, carrying their infant son, David, with her as she went door to door across the county asking people to please vote for her husband. The family briefly moved to Little Rock. They sold the newspaper in 1962. He was elected twice more, in 1962 and 1964, while attending law school at Fayetteville when the legislature was not in session. He finished law school in 1964.

Except for his votes, Pryor’s legislative record was unremarkable, which was not unusual for new legislators. A Civil War buff, Pryor read about battles in South Arkansas and at his first session in February 1961 he introduced and passed a bill creating Poison Springs Battlefield State Park about eight miles from his home. It was the site of one of the Confederates’ few big victories in Arkansas, a victory most notable for the slaughter of a Kansas infantry regiment that included former slaves. The Confederates took no prisoners and used wagons to crush the skulls of the captured Black men. 

Pryor became one of a handful of liberals who jousted with Faubus and the legislative “Old Guard” on a wide variety of reforms. Called “the Young Turks” in the media, Pryor, Virgil Butler, Sterling R. Cockrill Jr., Jim Brandon, Hardy W. Croxton, Ray S. Smith Jr. and Hayes C. McClerkin introduced legislation outlawing the poll tax, reforming election laws, overhauling county purchasing and spending (Pryor had been on a grand jury investigating government fraud in Ouachita County), convening a constitutional convention, and overhauling highway administration. They got nowhere with the legislation. In 1961, Pryor introduced a bill to require competitive bidding on county purchases of more than $300, but he could get only few votes for it each year. Faubus had another legislator, Harry Colay of Magnolia, put his name on a similar bill in 1965, it passed, and Faubus signed it.

Pryor opened a law practice in 1964 at Camden with his friend Harry Barnes. He liked to mention a case where he represented a man in a dispute over who owned a coon dog. It was finally resolved by bringing the disputed mutt into the courtroom, which wandered around until it spotted Pryor’s client and put a paw on his knee. The judge immediately awarded him custody. For a different reason, the Arkansas Gazette cartoonist George Fisher later always put a happy coon dog at Pryor’s side. But Pryor never got to practice a lot of law.

Faubus’s enmity toward Pryor took a bizarre turn in the summer of 1965. Late in life, Faubus and Pryor would cement a friendship, and he told Pryor that one of the joys of his life had been setting in motion the events that year which sealed Pryor’s long career. In law school at Fayetteville, Pryor had become a close friend of Faubus’s son, Farrell, a shy, portly and tormented young man who would take his own life in 1977 at the age of 36. Farrell had felt shunned and ridiculed by the other students and some of the faculty. The two students studied, played golf, drank beer and got their law degrees together.

In July 1965, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Congressman Oren Harris to a federal judgeship, creating a congressional vacancy that Faubus was supposed to fill for the last 16 months of Harris’s term by calling a special election. It was Pryor’s dream, but there was no time to put together a campaign organization throughout the large Fourth District. State Auditor Jimmie “Red” Jones, who was known to every voter in the state, would be the automatic winner. Pryor mentioned his dilemma to his friend Farrell. He would learn later that Farrell told his dad that Pryor had helped him get his law degree, was the only person at the university who befriended him and about the only true friend he ever had.

Faubus dawdled about calling the special election for weeks and finally announced that the district did not really need a voting representative for the next year and a half, so he called the special election for the same day as the general election in November 1966. Voters would simultaneously fill the seat for the last two months of the year but also the following two years—two elections for the same seat on the same day. It gave Pryor more than a year to build a campaign organization. Red Jones then chose not to run because he would have to give up his safe lifetime job at the Capitol for a risky congressional election. Pryor won the special election and the general election handily. He defeated Richard S. Arnold of Texarkana, a future federal district and appellate judge, and three other prominent politicians from around the district, John Harris Jones of Pine Bluff, Charles L. “Chuck” Honey of Prescott and Dean Murphy of Hope. 

Pryor’s three terms in the seniority-driven House of Representatives were hardly notable, except for a controversy that he engineered—a crusade over the mistreatment of the elderly and disabled in nursing homes—and his personal dilemma over the Vietnam War, which he eventually came to oppose. 

His mother told him that after visiting friends in nursing homes over the years she had concluded that the warehousing of people in the profit-driven industry had to be a national scandal rather than a local one. Now that her son was a congressman, he ought to do something about it. Having little else to do as a freshman, Pryor started volunteering on weekends as an orderly in nursing homes in the District of Columbia and suburban Maryland and Virginia, and recording the lack of staffing and lapses in medical care that he saw. His mother was right. Nursing homes often were just profitable warehouses for those waiting for the grave. Government inspectors often gave owners notice of their inspections, which rarely found lapses and, when they did, nothing was done about them. The industry had lobbyists who kept Pryor’s congressional colleagues and other government monitors at bay. 

Pryor made a speech on the House floor revealing his secret work. He said he had encountered only two nursing homes where he would put his mother, but he couldn’t have afforded either one on his $42,500 salary. He was attacked by Maryland’s state mental-health director and people in the industry. Pryor called for the House to create a select committee on nursing homes and homes for the aged. A majority of the House voted for his resolution, but it was non-binding and Congress did nothing. The House, led by the 80-year-old Mississippian who headed the Rules Committee, would not provide space or staffing for the committee. Pryor decided to do the work himself, after finding a vacant lot beside a gasoline station near the Capitol. The station’s owner found two house trailers that became the site for Pryor’s investigations and hearings. Pryor tried and failed to set up a permanent Committee on Aging, as the Senate had done in 1959. President Richard M. Nixon joined Pryor’s cause in 1971, deploring conditions in nursing homes and proposing to end payments to substandard homes.

In 1974, two years after Pryor left, the House joined the cause and established the Select Committee on Aging. For the next 50 years, Congress, federal and state administrators and the industry would wage a continuous battle over standards of care for the aged and the degree of regulation that government should provide.

When Pryor went to Washington, the Vietnam War had engaged the United States for ten years. (President Eisenhower sent the first US troops in 1955 and Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson had raised the commitment.) After the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Congress gave Johnson new authority to dramatically expand America’s commitment, still without a declaration of war. By 1968, congressional and public opposition to the war had grown. Vice President Hubert Humphrey asked Pryor to make a short speech to the riotous Democratic National Convention in Chicago—Humphrey was the presidential nominee—in support of the Vietnam plank, an oblique statement that neither endorsed nor opposed the war effort. Pryor went to the convention as an Arkansas delegate and had already alienated other Southern congressmen, especially Mississippians, by voting as a member of the Credentials Committee to seat Mississippi’s Freedom Democrats—Blacks and liberals—instead of the white delegation picked by the party in Mississippi. In his two-minute speech, he urged an end to the war but called for unity and wisdom. Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright had already decided America’s war policies were improvident and conducted hearings that began to turn public sentiment against the war.

President Johnson, who had had misgivings about the war from the first, had then made himself the champion of the war against communism after the Gulf of Tonkin incident. He became more and more sorrowful and morose as tens of thousands of Americans a year died, but he could not become the first president to lose a war. In 1967, Johnson asked Pryor to fly to Texas with him for rallies to pump up flagging support in his home state. Pryor would write that Johnson seemed glum and introspective the whole trip. Pryor understood why. As they were flying back to Washington at night in Air Force One, Pryor looked out the window and figured that the lights below were his hometown of Camden. 

“Mr. President,” he said, “it looks like we might be flying directly over Camden, Arkansas. That’s my hometown. If you look straight down at the ground, you might see Jim’s Café on Washington Street.”

The president leaned across him and looked out the window. He slumped back in his seat and shook his head.

“God a’mighty!” he sighed. “I wish I was at Jim’s Café right now.” He was silent the rest of the trip.

For Pryor, the climax to the moral struggle over the war was more personal, as he would recall in A Pryor Commitment and oral histories. On an airline trip from Washington to Arkansas he fell into conversation with a young serviceman from his district who was headed to Vietnam. Many months later, he got on a plane for the same flight back home and recognized the young man, in uniform. He asked the soldier about his tour of duty. The soldier pulled back a blanket across his lap, which showed that he had lost a leg in combat.

 “Congressman Pryor,” the young man said, “I would not have minded losing my leg, if only someone had told me why we were there in the first place.”

Pryor sent constituents a newsletter announcing that he would thereafter oppose any further funding of the war and calling for troops to be brought home. It was not an altogether popular step. At a fishfry at the Carlisle High School stadium soon afterward, a man ran out of the crowd, jumped on Pryor’s back and began hitting him and calling him a traitor. Mayor Bobby Glover, later a state representative and then a senator, pulled the man off Pryor. Two decades later Pryor would write a letter to his son Scott, explaining his dilemma over the war and the consequences. He likened it to the contemporary dilemma over the American invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. 

In 1972, McClellan, by then chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, which had funded the development of the navigation dams on the Arkansas River in Arkansas and Oklahoma, announced he was running for a sixth term. His hearings on labor racketeering had made enemies of organized labor. Unions representing wood, paper, oil, chemical and electrical workers in South Arkansas had supplied much of Pryor’s political strength. He announced that he was running for the seat, too, along with Ted Boswell, a liberal trial lawyer, and Foster Johnson, a book salesman who for the third straight Senate election went around towns wearing clanging metal campaign signs over his shoulders. 

Pryor survived a rough campaign in which he was accused of being a friend of draft dodgers and a supporter of gun control. (As a freshman legislator, he had sponsored a bill making it illegal to carry a loaded weapon in a vehicle inside city limits—a reaction to a neighboring boy accidentally killing himself with a loaded shotgun on a Safeway parking lot.) But Pryor was a close second in the preferential primary and entered the runoff as a heavy favorite, certain to get all the votes that had been cast for the more liberal Boswell. W. R. “Witt” Stephens, the gas baron and investment banker, summoned a meeting of the state’s banking and business leaders with McClellan in the board room of the Union National Bank at Little Rock where everyone ponied up tens of thousands of dollars for McClellan or pledged to collect it.

The two-week runoff ended with the famous televised debate. McClellan, wearing a white suit, taunted Pryor for his support by unions, particularly “labor bosses” from outside the state. Pryor responded that the money reported on his campaign finance forms came from the cookie jars and overall pockets of hardworking men. McClellan responded that Pryor had gotten $79,000 from “bosses” from outside the state. 

“David, David,” he taunted, shaking a finger, “this is no cookie-jar nickels and dimes!”

Pryor’s campaign gifts paled alongside the money from businessmen and bankers in McClellan’s campaign, but McClellan’s commanding performance showed him as anything but a doddering 76-year-old man. But his victory in the election the next week depended more on the massive get-out-the-vote effort by political leaders commanded by Witt Stephens. Pryor got only 20,000 more votes than in the first primary, McClellan 22,000 more. On election night, Pryor faced the TV cameras early, conceded and said the voters had elected the right man, a typical Pryor reflection on his opponents.

Witt Stephens was watching television that night and was struck by the Pryor’s magnanimity. Two years later, when Gov. Dale Bumpers announced he was not running for a third term as governor but instead for the Senate—against Fulbright—Stephens picked up the phone and called Pryor, suggesting that he run for governor. Pryor said he was about to call Stephens and urge him to run (they had served in the House of Representatives together as freshmen in 1961). Stephens said no, he was serious, and promised his full organizational support if Pryor announced. He did, and so did former governor Faubus and Lt. Gov. Bob Riley. Faubus, making his second comeback attempt since retiring in 1966, was shocked to discover that nearly his entire political machine marshaled by Stephens had been diverted to Pryor. Pryor won without a runoff. For the rest of his life, Faubus remained bitter about his old friend and supporter’s betrayal while also warming to the young man whom his son Farrell had asked him to help. 

Providence seemed always to shine on Pryor at election time—but with actual governance, not so much. Bumpers had raised income and motor-fuel taxes and closed tax loopholes. Furious economic growth filled the state treasury so that Bumpers could enhance public schools and higher education, build many state parks, improve highways, expand medical care and build hospitals and college classrooms. Bumpers called a special legislative session to spend the big surplus that had accumulated in the treasury. The moment that Pryor moved into the Governor’s Mansion the nation was hit with a long recession complicated by inflation, and the treasury was depleted. Pryor had to slash budgets and freeze hiring even for filling job vacancies. In his four years, Bumpers had carried out all the reforms prescribed by the liberal group Democrats for Arkansas during the late 1960s—nearly everything but a new state constitution, which became Pryor’s biggest goal. It was never fulfilled.

Pryor proposed a dramatic refashioning of state spending—a 25 percent reduction in state income tax rates and empowerment of local governments to implement the income tax themselves to address all the problems of cities, counties and schools. The Arkansas Plan, as it was called, consumed a legislative session. Pryor traveled the state promoting the plan, explaining to a group at Jonesboro that he was cutting state taxes and allowing people locally to use it in whatever way pleased them—jokingly suggesting that if they didn’t want to levy taxes to build roads and streets they could spend the money on “a new coon dog.” Gazette cartoonist George Fisher labeled it the “Coon Dog Plan” and thereafter always put a grinning mutt at Pryor’s side. The Arkansas Plan failed.

Another passion was litter. Pryor hated the trash along the state’s streets and roads. He started a “Pick Up Arkansas” campaign and proposed a bill levying a small tax on soft drinks, pet foods, newspapers and plastic wrappers to discourage littering; the money would be used for highway and street cleanup. Local governments were encouraged to dispose of solid waste like abandoned cars and refrigerators. The bill passed, but a letter from the state Revenue Department to businesses on how to collect the tax warned that they might go to prison for failing to remit the litter tax. Legislators who had voted for the bill heard from merchants and demanded that Pryor call them back into session to repeal the bill before it took effect on July 1. He did but always regretted it when he saw sandwich wrappers and soft-drink containers strewn along streets and on the roadsides.

Constitutional revision, an obsession with an aging legislator who had been the leader of the Young Turks, was Pryor’s biggest failure. Voters had defeated a liberalized constitution drafted by a popularly elected convention in 1970. Pryor decided to try again after taking office in 1975. The solution had to be to avoid the pitched battles over a few issues such as the state’s antiunion law (the Right to Work Amendment), usury, judicial elections and county-government reform. He offered a bill calling for the appointment, by the legislature and the governor, of 35 delegates who would write a new constitution but leave those and a few other features of the 1874 constitution untouched and then submit the document to the voters in September. On the day the delegates convened, the state Supreme Court voted four to three to abolish the convention because the delegates were prohibited from changing some parts of the constitution. It had to be all or nothing. In 1977, Pryor tried again with a bill that called for the election of 100 delegates in 1978 and a vote on the document in 1980. But voters defeated that new constitution decisively. 

McClellan died in November 1977 and Pryor appointed Kaneaster Hodges of Newport, a lawyer and minister, to finish his term, which ended Jan. 1, 1979. Pryor soon announced that he would run for the seat. So did US Rep. Jim Guy Tucker of Little Rock and Rep. Ray H. Thornton Jr. of Sheridan. It would be a race between three friends and philosophical triplets. A. C. Grigson, a Texarkana accountant, joined the race claiming to be McClellan’s philosophical successor. Pryor barely led in the first primary and Tucker edged Thornton for the second spot. The runoff would also be amiable until its final days when Tucker accused Pryor’s campaign manager of trying to persuade a friend on the state Public Service Commission to approve a rate increase for Witt Stephens’s western Arkansas gas company in exchange for the Stephens family’s support in the runoff. Pryor won by a safe margin. Tucker later shrugged off his defeat. No one, he said, was going to believe that David Pryor did anything even slightly deceitful, and wouldn’t blame him if he had.

The Senate years were Pryor’s most pleasurable. His Arkansas colleague, Dale Bumpers, was a close friend and an ally on most but not all issues. After their retirements, they became a popular team for television and political events, taunting and telling tall tales about each other.

During the eight-year administration of President Ronald Reagan, both senators opposed much of the Reagan program, including the tax cuts for the wealthy in 1981 and later the big binge of military spending. Bumpers, a deficit hawk, publicly opposed the tax cuts, and Pryor finally joined him by voting “present” on the roll call, the same as a no vote. The month after the tax cuts passed the nation fell into a deep 14-month recession with double-digit unemployment, the deepest since the 1930s, although the charming Reagan was never blamed for the longest and deepest recession in modern times or the staggering budget deficits and debt that he ran up for eight years or for the repeated tax increases that the Reagan administration described as “revenue enhancements” instead of taxes.

But Pryor also became a leading critic of Pentagon spending, calling attention to such excesses as the orders for thousands of ball-peen hammers and toilet seats at hugely inflated prices. He also veered from Bumpers and the state’s four congressmen in his opposition to the development of binary chemical weapons. He opposed developing and storing the chemical weapons at the Pine Bluff Arsenal. Vice President George H. W. Bush, a friend who went to Congress the same time as Pryor, went to the Senate to cast the tie-breaking vote for the arsenal.

Even before Reagan’s election, the Pentagon already suspected that Pryor was not a votary, especially after he called attention to the perils of the Titan II missile system after a series of dangerous failures around the country and two catastrophes in Arkansas. When the Defense Department developed the Titan II system—54 underground intercontinental missiles with nuclear warheads—US Rep. Wilbur D. Mills agreed to vote for President Kennedy’s tax cuts if he agreed to put a ring of 18 of the new missiles in Arkansas. A fire in a silo with a nuclear warhead near Searcy in 1965 killed 53 workers who were retrofitting the missile’s fuel system. In January 1978, a fuel transporter at a missile silo at Damascus overheated and sent thousands of gallons of deadly nitrogen tetroxide vapor over the countryside. In 1979, after more such leaks in the Arkansas and Kansas missile networks, Pryor and Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas were regretting having Titan sites in their states and talked about whether they should be anywhere near American citizens. 

After rumors of incidents at the silos, Pryor in the summer of 1980 did his own secret investigation and found nine major incidents in the previous 14 months that could have endangered Arkansas lives around the silos. Clearly, the Air Force had been lying about the safety at the Titan sites in Arkansas, Kansas and New Mexico. Pryor gave the detailed results of investigation of the eight incidents to two Arkansas Gazette reporters, who described the incidents and Pryor’s conclusions. Surrounding residents were never informed about any of them, despite an Air Force vow that residents would always be informed.

Pryor and Dole went to Congress to push an amendment to the Defense Department appropriation that called for an early-warning system around all the silos. The amendment passed. Three days later, on Sept. 18, 1980, the missile in a silo at Damascus exploded, blowing the nuclear warhead and two technicians into the air. One of the men died almost instantly and the other’s health was permanently impaired. Two years later, the Pentagon decided to abandon the Titans for more advanced, and perhaps safer, missile systems. But Pryor’s negativity about defense weaponry and spending took a political toll, at least nationally.

The payoff came in 1984, when the White House and the party leadership persuaded Congressman Ed Bethune of Searcy—the Pryors and Bethunes were social friends—to run against Pryor with the promise of financial backing. More than 20 Reagan administration officials and Republican senators came to Arkansas for fund-raising events for Bethune. Rev. Jerry Falwell, the right-wing leader, came to Arkansas to call for Pryor’s defeat. Pryor eschewed the same strategy, feeling that Democrats from out of the state would hurt rather than help him. Bethune’s ads said Pryor had voted against the popular former movie star, Ronnie Reagan, on 77 percent of the issues in the Senate. The Saturday before the election Reagan, who was approaching a landslide win of his own, made a speech at the packed Excelsior Hotel ballroom. 

“Don’t send me back to Washington alone,” Reagan said with the smiling Bethune beside him. Reagan carried Arkansas with 60 percent of the vote. Pryor got 57 percent.

In 1994, Pryor ran for re-election and no Democrat or Republican opposed him—a rarity in any state. Betty White, a homeless woman, ran as a write-in and got 832 votes. (Pryor’s son Mark also had no opposition, except for a Green Party candidate, in his second race for the same seat in 2008.)

Pryor spent much of his second term fighting for a taxpayer’s bill of rights, to curb abuses by the Internal Revenue Service. Reagan signed Pryor’s bill into law in 1988.

Pryor’s last crusade was against the pharmaceutical industry. In 1990, he introduced the Pharmaceutical Access and Prudent Purchasing Act, which sought to end the spiral of drug prices; it would have allowed Medicare and Medicaid to negotiate with drug makers on prices that would be charged to Medicare and Medicaid patients. The industry fought back. 

Pryor had a massive heart attack on April 15, 1991. The illness hobbled him for the rest of his career. Majority Leader George Mitchell and Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas took up the cause of drug pricing but they never were able to pass a bill. President Joe Biden finally took up Pryor’s cause in 2023.

Another passionate reform effort was to end the electoral college so that the winner of the popular vote would always be the next president. The most important job in the whole democracy was president, but it also was the only political job in the country, from members of the county quorum court to the top, that might go to the loser. In 1992, sensing that the third-party candidacy of Ross Perot could tilt the election of George H. W. Bush over Bill Clinton regardless of the size of Clinton’s election victory, Pryor again introduced a Senate resolution for a constitutional amendment to end the electoral college and assure that election winners always took office. The Senate never sent the amendment to the states for ratification. Only one election loser had ever failed to become president—Rutherford B. Hayes in 1878 —but two subsequent losers, George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald J. Trump in 2016, became president. Trump lost the actual balloting to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes.

Like Bumpers, Pryor found the relationships in Congress profoundly different after radio provocateur Rush Limbaugh and Republican House leader Newt Gingrich turned American politics into a war of saintly Republicans vs. evil Democrats. Friendly Republicans departed and were replaced by politicians who called Democrats socialists and radicals who were out to destroy the country. Pryor did not run again in 1996; Bumpers made the same choice in 1998. The Capitol, they said, was no longer an enjoyable place to be.

Pryor’s retirement did not end his engagement with politics and government. In 2000, he was director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He taught courses at the University of Arkansas and gave his unexpended campaign funds to form the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Oral and Visual History at the university. He was the inaugural dean of the Clinton School of Public Service at Little Rock, serving for two years. After the murder of Bill Gwatney in 2008, he was chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party for a spell. In 2009, Gov. Mike Beebe appointed him to a 10-year term on the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees, where he did not enhance his popularity by protesting the lavish spending on athletics and stadium additions. A massive stroke in 2016 curtailed his activities for good.

Survivors include his widow, Barbara; his sons and their wives, David Jr. (Judith), Mark (Joi) and Scott (Diane); his grandchildren, Hampton, Adams, Porter and Devin; and his great-grandson, Raven. 

The post In Memoriam appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

Among the little heads are my two, Rosie and Beau. They are four and five years old, respectively, and they wear their disabilities on their bodies and voices. Beau, with his almond-shaped eyes, short stature, and precious few intelligible words and phrases and Rosie, with eyes that match her brother’s and a wheelchair that offers a kind of independence that only families like ours can understand.

It was the lack of wheelchair accessibility in most public spaces that first gave me a wave of now familiar grief in a very public place. It was a stormy day, so we had to do an indoor activity after preschool. We decided to walk around the mall as a family, trying to get Beau’s energy out before we grabbed dinner at a restaurant in the building. When the time came, we rounded a corner toward the fast-casual place we planned to eat.

I instantly noticed the layout of the restaurant was not accessible. All tables on the lower floor, where we’d entered, were taken. To order our meal, we would have to scale four-or-so steps before being in the queue. The restaurant had two entrances: one from the inside of the mall, which is where we approached, and another from the sidewalk outside of the mall. In order to access the restaurant and eat when we arrived we would have to walk outside, where rain was pouring buckets, and enter from the other door.

Inaccessible space making often goes unnoticed until it impacts your family directly. My father was also a wheelchair user, so as a child I experienced my fair share of disappointment due to his absence simply because a space lacks a ramp or a clear path to move through. I learned implicitly that the world did not want people like my dad to join abled people in spaces where we congregate. The world was not created for my dad.

Based on my unique parenting experience, the world was not created for my children either. This brings a familiar grief that you can only imagine until you experience it.

Grief disappears at storytime. We enter with everyone else using a visible ramp at the main entrance. Space is made for Rosie’s wheelchair, and Beau can spin and stim until he’s regulated enough to sit for the story.

We are with the world, among new friends.

The faith of my youth taught me that the world is broken, in need of redemption. A new heaven and a new Earth are an end goal for believers, and in this new heaven and Earth all will be at peace, and the grief and tears of today will be no more.

The closest thing I have experienced to this peace of the Scriptures is storytime with my kids. Heaven is a library— a public library. And we never want to leave. 

The post Heaven is a Library appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

The American Library Association says there were almost 700 attempts to censor library materials nationwide from January to August, and more than 1,900 challenges of specific book titles.

In Saline County, Patty Hector said she was removed from her position as library director for not banning books.

She said a county judge and Quorum Court wrote a resolution advising her to pick out “harmful” books and move them so children couldn’t access them. Hector said her response led to her being fired.

“There’s no place in the library that people can’t get to. So I said no, and then that was what got me in trouble,” she said. “I said no to them. And you don’t say ‘no’ to a bunch of men. And the books they picked out are LGBTQ and race – two-thirds of them are.”

As Hector described it, a resolution accusing her of fraud “was written by the Saline County Republican Committee.” She added that after the committee reported her for “violating the Freedom of Information Act 90 times,” she had to spend many months answering questions about her job and library expenses.

Hector said the committee also put up a billboard on Interstate 30 that said “Stop X-Rated library books, SalineLibrary.com.”

She said some Arkansas lawmakers worked to pass a bill that would criminalize librarians – but that law was blocked by a federal judge this year.

“Act 372 was going to make it a felony for a librarian to give anybody a book that’s ‘obscene,’ which they couldn’t define,” she said, “and that has been determined by a judge to be unconstitutional.”

Hector noted that several books with topics on sex education and homosexuality were under scrutiny. And a book entitled “The Talk”, about conversations that Black parents have with their children, was another title the committee objected to.

This story is brought to you by the Public News Service, an independent, member-supported news organization.  

The post Banned Books, Bold Librarians: The fight for inclusive libraries in Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

Conversations about how to make our state and country better have become a constant tit-for-tat exercise in futility — or worse, loved ones lose contact altogether.

Through all of this grief, I can’t help but think “Arkansas, we are better than this.”

We do not have to accept the division and vitriol we’re fed these days. Arkansans are capable of coming together like no one else I know. 

That fact has been on glorious display lately as we’ve watched conservative farmers and liberal lawyers lock arms around an issue dear to every single one of us: transparency in government.

Arkansans have had a uniquely substantial right to know how our government is using its time and resources — that is to say, our tax dollars — since the first Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1967. Then-Governor Winthrop Rockefeller considered it one of the greatest achievements of his administration. The law faced legal challenges, but the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of a broad interpretation that favored transparency. That ruling has guided our state’s focus on transparency for years.

“It is vital in a democratic society that public business be performed in an open and public manner. We have no hesitation in asserting our conviction that the Freedom of Information Act was passed wholly in the public interest and is to be liberally interpreted to the end that its praiseworthy purposes may be achieved.” Associate Justice George Rose Smith

But you don’t need a history lesson to understand the main idea here: Do we want the government to be able to keep secrets from its people, or do we believe that the government should be open and accountable to the people who created it?

Arkansans have made our answer clear, and we did it by coming together in ways we haven’t seen in years.

It’s hard to know where we go from here, and we know that the fight against government secrecy isn’t over. But for once, the fight won’t be among neighbors and family members. The fight for government transparency will be between us, the people of Arkansas, and a select few of the powerful.

When the people of Arkansas stand together, we’ve already won.

The post Together, We’ve Already Won appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

The Shiny Happy People docuseries has taken Arkansas by storm, with details of abuse, oppression, and cult tactics having happened right in our backyard.

The series focuses on the Duggar family’s 19 Kids and Counting show on TLC. It details the family’s involvement with the Institute for Basic Life Principles (IBLP), a fundamentalist ideology that spread through Southern Baptist churches. IBLP was founded by Bill Gothard in the early 1960s, and participants were encouraged to homeschool their children and administer strict authoritarian discipline.

Watching this show has sparked conversations among my college friends about the way we found ourselves in fundamentalist circles in our teens and early twenties. Many of my friends were born and raised IBLP-adjacent, with the same principles of male headship and authority, female submission, and harsh discipline that includes corporal punishment. Figureheads like Dr. James Dobson, Billy Graham, and Jerry Falwell were revered for their willingness to “stand for [their version of] biblical truth.” Often the homes that follow the teachings of these men are indistinguishable from those following Gothard in Shiny Happy People, but for (sometimes) the lack of long skirts and Wisdom Booklets.

As for my friends and I, after leaving our Southern Baptist university, having hard conversations with family and mentors, and sometimes starting families of our own, many have realized that we want a faith that is different from what fundamentalism gave us.

Finding faith after fundamentalism is not easy. Those who were raised from birth in authoritarian religiosity often have complex trauma to untangle, abusive family members to confront or avoid, and many life lessons to unlearn for the sake of their own children.

I, personally, was not raised in a fundamentalist home, but my childhood was traumatic. I was raised by a mom who worked 60+ hour weeks to keep me from knowing her own childhood reality of poverty and dependence on a deeply flawed man of the house. In my search for safety, certainty, and belonging, I found fundamentalism in my teenage years. I remember sitting in the pew alone, but near the families of my friends. We would hear sermons geared toward raising godly sons and daughters, and it was apparent to me that I was an outcast among my friends who were lucky enough to be given a faith script from birth. (At least that’s how I felt at the time.)

Fundamentalism gave me all the answers I needed to the questions my childhood trauma left me with. Fundamentalism always had an answer, and when the answers didn’t make sense or the questions were out of the agreed-upon social boundaries, they could be conveniently shut down, dismissed, or used to question the salvation of the person asking.

The result of this was a feeling of safety that I had never experienced. In order to keep that feeling of safety, I had to squash my questions, pain, and genuine curiosity, and return to the predetermined conclusions I had been given. I learned quickly that my new safe place was only safe if I learned those social boundaries and complied with them quickly. 

When questions came up, I would repeat some version of the refrain (that I now know came from the Heritage Singers), “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” I would assume my unwillingness to take my pastors at their word was a symptom of my own sinfulness, that there was something I had not yet repented of. My upbringing had not occurred under the headship of a Godly male leader, so it was incumbent upon me to train myself in the ways of the Lord now that I was saved. I had to make up for what my upbringing lacked.

Today, even typing these sentences leaves me with a knot in my stomach.

A lot has changed since my framework of belief revolved around fundamentalism. It took time, healing, and lots of grace. I had to come to a place where I want to rebuild my faith without the parts that hurt me and my loved ones. The “how?” of that rebuilding is what I’m trying to figure out now.

Like many of my peers, I’m sorting through the faith I was given and decided what should be kept and what I need to leave behind. To be sure, I’m keeping a lot of good things I was given in the context of faith.

• I’m keeping friends becoming family.
• I’m keeping casserole deliveries to families who are grieving, just had a baby, or are under a lot of stress.
• I’m keeping intergenerational community, and the feeling of privilege when I gain wisdom from someone who was in my season of life four decades ago.
• I’m keeping gathering, breaking bread, and talking about things that matter most in life.
• I’m keeping prayer, because when I am truly at the end of myself, I need connection to God— not certainty of what will happen or a reason for everything, just connection.
• I’m keeping my training in New Testament Greek.
• I’m keeping the seeking of social justice, because before it became an “enemy of the Gospel” to fundamentalists, it was a core value of my faith.
• I’m keeping Sabbath—or at least I’m trying to.

As I type this, I am hearing the voices of male pastors telling me “you can’t pick and choose which parts of the Bible to believe and follow.”

I have many answers to that admonition, many of them biblical retorts. But I left squabbling about the bible in the past a long time ago. It’s not worth it—I have nothing to prove to them anymore. I am free.

Faith after fundamentalism is not easy, but it is worth it. Many of us left high-control religiosity with nothing to anchor us any longer. We were unlearning fundamentalism while grieving former relationships and family, and it was the hardest thing we have ever done.

We don’t have to be Shiny Happy People. We can be authentic, kind humans, living out a faith we are proud of.

There is life after fundamentalism. There is faith after fundamentalism, if you want it.

And life after fundamentalism is abundant and sweet. 

The post Faith After Fundamentalism appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

Head down Razorback Road on a late spring weekend in Fayetteville and you’ll see Canopy city — red and white fabric roofs, boxes of beer, a throw rug or two and maybe an old La-Z-Boy recliner. Under the canopies we find unlikely bedfellows, canopy fellows if you will. The pre-family reunion known as the hog pen. 

Canopy city is where we grab a donut from someone you know well even if you don’t know their name. Or a slice of Domino’s Pizza, a random chicken wing. Under the canopies we take shelter from the rain, from the scorching June sun or the unseasonably cold April wind — whatever the weather sees fit to be that day cause it’s always fickle like that. 

We’re here because we’re queued up to get into the hog pen, the Razorback baseball section that’s essentially a big lawn out behind left field. Sometimes folks line their chairs and pop up canopies days, maybe weeks, in advance of a series. We chat and crack jokes and get rowdy. Swap stories, talk sports. Shoot the shit like good Arkansans do. 

About 90 minutes before first pitch, the pen gates open like the parting of the Red Sea. Only in this moment the tribe of pen family, brothers from another mother, transform into enemies as soon as the gates open. When the Red Sea parts, it’s every man, woman, and child for themselves. All friendship and kinship is suspended for a few minutes of total chaos: Grown men of a well-seasoned age haul ass down the lawn, beer bellies bouncing while wagons of Yeti coolers and Fireball whiskey trail behind. Women sprint like division 1 athletes, steamrolling over anyone or thing in their pathway. Children zoom past the old folk straight to the fence and slide face first into their family’s preferred spot, sacrificing their tiny bodies for a shot at premier baseball viewing. It’s a few glorious, unforgettable minutes of sports fandom. It’s utter insanity. 

Just as quickly as the first 50 people pour into the pen, we’re set up and back to being one another’s chosen family. The Fireball comes right out, the unofficial libation of the hog pen. It’s the most widely used and respected of liquors out here. No, not for its taste, but because it travels well, warms you up when it’s cold, gives gumption, and consoles broken baseball hearts. 

Assigned seating isn’t a thing, as you’ve already gathered. It’s first come, first served but we do have an acknowledgement of everyone’s preferences. There are the berm folks, the ones who set up on the little ledge of a hill ten or so yards back from the fence. Team Berm likes the unobstructed view of the game no matter how dense the front of the pen gets. Our crew sets up at the fence, known as the rail. The rail is coveted; truly the only right and holy view if you care about seeing balls and strikes. It’s the best place to sit if you’re gonna ask me, but nobody did ask me and that’s fine.

The allure of the hog pen is different for each person; it offers an experience that those who sit in chair backs or fancy boxes wouldn’t understand. Bring your kids and shoo them off to play catch. Grill out and have picnics. Make friends with frat bros and county sheriffs and people who drive 7 hours one way in their campers to watch some baseball. Heckle the hell out of the visiting team. Drink your own beer. Pass out homemade cookies. Act a fool. The pen is where life moves a little slower and a little easier. 

We met a guy named Sherman under contentious terms during one of the rail seating conquest moments. On this particular day, we didn’t make the rail and sat behind Sherman on the second row. Feathers got ruffled over chair placement and some biting words were exchanged.

But eventually things settled and Sherman became a beloved baseball brother. He and his wife live out in the boonies, somewhere past Lamar, about a hundred or so miles from Fayetteville. He’s retired and has a tattoo of a body-building Razorback on his right calf. Often he has twin granddaughters in tow who sit in swinging camp chairs made for 8 year-old bodies.

Sherman is of a certain generation and demographic you see a lot of in the pen — country boys in their sunset years watching ball, harkening back to a time when they too could run and throw and hit like those young men out there, in the prime of their youth, playing America’s game. 

There’s Jimmy, pen patriarch, who is always on the rail no matter what. It’s a respect-your-elders type of thing with Jimmy; we all just know he deserves to be in the front. He’s kind and generous, always ready in his straw hat to toss tootsie pops to kids. Jimmy is the easy-going, Tommy-Bahama-wearing, “no bad days” grandpa of the pen who makes everyone feel at home. 

Ten yards behind Jimmy and Co. are the berm regulars —Lancey. Forest. Cam. Brenden, et al. Cam’s been sick but is fighting hard. He shows up to Canopy city with his buttons that say “Cam Kicks Cancer!” and homemade I♡Hogs keychains and bracelets he sells to help pay down medical bills.

The first time I saw Cam was three years ago at a super regional at Baum Stadium. The team was soaring that year and greedy ticket holders were scalping hog pen spots for hundreds of dollars. The hog pen, you should know, is the great equalizer. The Shakespearan theater pit of baseball, where anyone can and should be able to afford a ticket to watch a game. Cam had an empty, torn up Eureka Pizza box he had scribbled “QUIT OVERCHARGING FOR HOG PEN TICKETS” on that he proudly held up all weekend from the berm. 

West of Cam and down at the rail sits Amanda, our official yell leader. Nearby are the trio of nurses, Belinda, Ashley and Z. Kendall with the unmistakable cyclops-looking sunglasses is also at hand. And so is Lance, who always makes his way down the rail during every 7th inning stretch, just so he can shout “allrightyousonsofbitches!” while snapping group selfies with front-rowers every few feet. It’s a beloved tradition and an honor to be in a Lance selfie that is posted the subsequent day on his Facebook page for all the world to see. There’s also Greg, gentle-giant Army vet, and his badass but easygoing wife Jill. Greg’s part of the yellow-hat crew, the ones who sport canary Arkansas ball caps with red As, easily identifiable in a sea of red and white headware faithfuls.

I’d be remiss, of course, if I didn’t mention Rick. The Rick of Razorback fandom royalty. If you know the hogs, you know Rick, who is the ultimate hog lover and a favorite fan often seen on televised Razorback games. Rick dons a visor with fake furry red hair attached, which he calls the Razorback wig, and he’s on a quest to attend 100 Razorback games this year. I think maybe he already did it. He doesn’t just love baseball, he loves supporting every kind of hog team and often bounces from one game to the next if different sports overlap in a season. He wears fake tusks in his mouth, Razorback sneakers and socks that have his wife’s face on them. He rides a beefy motorcycle. Knows everyone’s name. He brings perspective, a good time for all, and a doormat he throws on the hog pen ground to keep his shoes clean when it rains. 

Our home base is in left-center, over by the university’s camera guy who films the outfield action. It’s excellent home run territory and prime real estate to snag a ball or three during batting practice. One season, my partner Ben took a go-ahead home run to the jaw standing in the pen out in left-center. It left a bruise but it was a game-winning hit, so worth it.

We sit by Marc and Cali of Siloam Springs, both of whom work for a Christian card company. Marc runs ultramarathons for fun, and Cali (wo)mans his aid stations. Sometimes their blended family of grown kids cycle through the games with them. Marc wears a tired red bucket hat adorned with Razorback enamel pins and buttons. He’s a Midwestern guy who’s made his home with the hogs. Marc and Cali are happy, down to earth people we love. If things are going well, they both start to dance. Dancing Marc is a special treat; the world wishes it could be so lucky to see him break out his ole’ midwestern white dude moves, overflowing with joy as his body glides along to the stadium sounds of Rhianna or Red Dirt country. 

This season didn’t end how we wanted it to. The hogs were absolutely slaughtered by TCU during our home-hosted regional. The weather was crappy and games were delayed. We didn’t make it to supers or to Omaha.

But it’s okay. We won our conference and we spent hours with our hog family enduring some exceptionally frigid and windy games in one of America’s best collegiate ballparks.

Baum Walker Stadium really is special, and the hog pen is a big part of that. It’s flanked by people who exemplify decades of statewide Razorback fandom — folks who have longed for a national championship and have woo’d pig sooie for longer than I’ve been on this earth. They know the stories and the voices and the ghosts of this game. 

I remember a time before the hog pen existed when baseball wasn’t such a thing in the Natural State. I never thought there’d be enough room for Arkansas to love baseball the way I do, that it would never be able to quit its first love of football. That we’d never find a devotion beyond it.

But by some mysterious, even magical force, baseball has blossomed here. I’ve seen it catch like a fever, spreading its allure with elementary aged kids and pave the way for the explosion of travel ball clubs and city rec leagues. I can see the reverence for what Dave Van Horn has built here these last twenty years or so in Fayetteville through commitment, passion, and perseverance.

We celebrate our pro hogs. We pack out Baum Stadium. We clear a lawn in left field so people can cram in with their coolers and families and friends. A championship looms large, yes it is so close that we can taste it. But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here for the hogs and our chosen family. It’s the trash talk, the delivery pizza, the peanut shells and dusty tracks along the rail that draw us in and keep us coming back. We tolerate the downpours and the spider bites, the tipsy frat guys and the left-sided sunburns because of the joy we feel when we’re together in this place. 

We are the hog pen, and we’re here because we’re home. 

The post Finding home in the hog pen appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

I am often asked what drives me to fight so hard for public schools. The people who ask me this are usually introspective types who read books like Finding Your Why by Simon Sinek, or perhaps Pastor Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life. I recommend both of those books as well as a fair amount of introspection. And I love people who ask me honest questions. But I am never asked that question by public school teachers; they already know. Because every public school teacher knows a James.

James grew up in an old clapboard house his father inherited from his father, on land they did not own but were allowed to farm. He was the oldest of 4 children. His mother was a homemaker and his father a driller for the gas company. His few clothes were patched and his hair was often greasy. He slept with his siblings in a cold, drafty room with a high ceiling under a pile of quilts.

For a child in poverty, James was pretty well-fed. His father grew a huge garden, and they raised their own beef and hogs. They gathered eggs from hardworking hens. James had a BB gun by the time he was 4 and hunted squirrels with his uncle. His mother fried them up just like chicken to eat with mashed potatoes and gravy.

James also scoured the Ozark Mountains for rabbits and quail that the family ate. He fished in the Arkansas River for their supper. A few years later he would hunt deer and learn to dress it himself.

On his first day of school, James wore a shirt his mother made him. She dropped him off at the Cecil schoolhouse, which had 2 classrooms. James was with grades 1 though 4, and the class next door had 5th-7th. Between the 2 classes there were 97 students. 97 for 2 teachers.

James cried all day. He didn’t know anyone. He didn’t even know how to tie his shoes. He did know the alphabet because his mother taught him.

James says his 1st grade teacher was nice, but it’s the teacher next door, Mrs. Lyla Crawford, who made a bigger difference in his life. I guess she had bus duty because when the last bell rang, Mrs. Crawford noticed how sad and scared he was while waiting for the bus. So she took his little hand in hers and walked onto that bus with him and sat down. She patted the seat for him to sit beside her. And as mile after country mile passed James snuggled up next to Mrs. Crawford. He even laughed a little bit while they talked. And when he got off the bus, James told his mother he loved school.

James went on to County Line for high school, and then to Arkansas Tech, the only one in his family ever to go to college. After that he earned his master’s degree at the University of Arkansas. The world opened up to him and he became a history teacher, bus driver, junior high principal, then an assistant superintendent. I guess he really did love school because he gave 40 years of his life to educating children in public schools in Arkansas.

But that’s not all he did.

James is my dad. I am living proof of how public school — and specifically the teachers a child encounters there — can change the trajectory of a person’s life. And it is never just that one person. In our case, my dad’s education changed what my brother’s and my life would have been and is still changing the lives of his seven grandchildren.

Every public school teacher has taught a James. And I say public school teacher because public schools are the ones who serve the children in poverty all over this state. At the end of the day, James is why we fight for teacher raises to recruit and retain people fleeing our profession. He is why we fought the LEARNS Act. We know that vouchers won’t fix education because vouchers don’t fix poverty — they just exacerbate it. And when public schools are hurt, James gets hurt. James, and all of the children like him, as well as all of the other lives their lives touch for better or worse in the future. 

I fight for public schools because it is personal to me. Our state government holds in its hands the power to change the lives of children like James every day, which in turn changes the lives of their families for generations. It is a sacred privilege and responsibility. But instead of addressing the poverty that plagues our schools and communities, our lawmakers deliberately choose to leave children like James behind, for their own personal gain.

This is not okay.

We are the ones who stand between a corrupted government and our children. We are the Lyla Crawfords, the ones who see them and refuse to leave them behind. And we are not going away.

Elections are in 2024. And actions have consequences. Just like when we give out report cards and a student has failed to do what we asked—they fail the class. Arkansas Strong is keeping track of the legislators who ignore their teachers. They are failing our state.

There are 30,000 teachers in this state and every one of us has a sphere of influence. Families, students, and parents who support us; communities that depend on us to lead. If we stick together and vote, we can decide who represents us, ousting the ones who have failed Arkansas.

This is a long game. And we are in it to win it — for the sake of our kids, and for generations to come.

The post On What Drives Me appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

One of the Star City teachers who spoke directly to lawmakers gave a beautiful and moving speech. I couldn’t help but think of this teacher as a patriot for sharing his truth with our elected officials.

During the meeting Senator Breanne Davis, the sponsor of SB 294, became angry as people raised concerns about LEARNS and its negative impact on children and communities. She said there were people spreading disinformation about the bill and declared “superintendents are misleading the public at best, and at worst, they are lying.”

Allison, a parent of two children with disabilities, was also there to speak against the bill. Her primary problem with LEARNS is that private schools don’t have to accept special needs kids like hers. She is worried about the students with disabilities who are already underserved because of lack of funding in their public schools, and how that problem will worsen as public tax dollars flow to other sources. She met the teachers from Star City and it inspired her to find out their superintendent supported their attendance and involvement in the legislative process. Later that evening, she tweeted something to this effect.

Senator Breanne Davis saw Allison’s tweet and used it to attack Star City. She tweeted an accusation that Mr. Frizzell violated policy in allowing teachers to miss school to attend the legislative meeting. Her tweet even went so far as to suggest the situation be investigated. Senator Davis’ reaction was not patriotism.

A school law attorney then jumped on Twitter to sort things out. She pointed out the Senator’s interpretation of policy was bogus, and corrected her mistake in judgment. She then outlined the paper trail that proved Frizzell nor the teachers did anything wrong. Thank God this woman spoke up when she saw this intimidating unfolding on social media.

On the same day Judd Deere, deputy chief of staff for Governor Sarah Sanders, referenced Allison’s tweet with one of his own, chiming in, “Nothing says I care about students like skipping out on those students for political advocacy.”

Teachers have already been labeled as far-left indoctrinators and lazy. This happened throughout the governor’s campaign and it continues today. Such blatant and direct attacks on public educators as these tweets are a further abuse of power and are the opposite of patriotism.

And these tweets come on the heels of our conversation with Senator Bart Hester, in which he told a group of teachers “Superintendents are my enemy.” This happened on “Take Your Teacher to the Legislature Day” and was said to a large group of us who stood out in the hall after being kicked out of the Senate Ed Committee Meeting for lack of space. Members of our coalition who were not asked to leave later told us that Senator Breanne Davis derided superintendents in that meeting as well. It is a narrative voucher peddlers push in order to divide us.

As public outcry against LEARNS has intensified, however, so has the viciousness of the narrative, especially the propaganda that paints educators as leftist enemies of that state. Nothing could be further from the truth. Members of our coalition are fiercely committed to defending their public schools and motivated by protecting the future of their students. These educators are patriots. Not political pawns.

We have heard from several admin and teachers who are being intimidated both directly and indirectly. One wrote this week—confidentially of course—that “the targeting teachers and administrators are receiving from the AG, Governor’s office, and distance are barriers for us [to be able to come to the Capitol Tuesday].”

This is not okay. Our leaders, the people that work for us who have sworn oaths to uphold the Constitution and to do right by Arkansans, are attacking the free speech of public employees. This is not patriotism. Instead, standing up for public schools in the face of political attacks from the highest levels of state government is patriotism.

The abuse of power is unacceptable and it is wrong. If this is happening to you, we want know so we can help support you. If you have shared concerns about The LEARNS Act but have been silenced or bullied by elected leaders, please message on Twitter or Facebook. Or email us at info@arstrong.org.

The post Abuse of Power is not Patriotism appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

In Matthew 10, Jesus warns his disciples of the hostility that lies ahead of their commissioned work. In verse 16, Jesus says,

“I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves; therefore be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves.”

Wolves are ferocious, violent creatures that prey on sheep. Jesus knew his disciples needed galvanizing and specific instruction to be on guard — sharp and clever like snakes. But He also knew to instruct His twelve to remain steadfast in their purity of heart. What seems like a contradiction, snakes vs doves, is Jesus guiding His followers to be savvy of the traps laid before them but exhorting them to never forget their true purpose.

Like many of Arkansas Strong’s followers, I’m an educator. That fierce love for Arkansas kids is our purpose, and we must be awake and attentive to the traps laid before us as public school advocates. Vouchers are wolves in sheep’s clothing; proponents of voucher programs masquerade their snake oil as the savior of education. But we know it’s a scheme, a trap set for hundreds of thousands of rural students to be harmed by a policy that’s not made for them. Instead, these voucher programs undeniably funnel public tax money to families that can already afford a choice for their kids. We do not need this rip-off here in Arkansas.

It’s time for patriotic Arkansans, we who believe in the American Dream, to stand together and stand strong for Arkansas children. We will be shrewd like serpents and innocent like doves. We will stand up and fight for our public schools, and we will do this because we are rooted in faith, hope, and love for all Arkansas kids.

Arkansas Strong in Education is a resource for public school advocates to become shrewd like serpents in public education policy. Please use these materials to educate and equip yourself and others who believe in standing up for public schools.

Arkansas Strong also has several pieces on first-person experiences from public educators. We recommend taking time to read through these poignant stories and hope you will find empathy and shared community with these authors. May we suggest beginning with “My turn to speak: a rural teacher lends her voice to the voucher debate.“

The post The wolf in sheep’s clothing appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

I remember crossing the street to my grandpa’s house, my little sisters trailing behind me as I walked the familiar route. Pretending that the paved road matched the scene around me, morphing it into a huge river that the trees bent to in my mind. The sway of the leaves dared me forward. Glancing around and holding out my hand to stop my sisters, our adventure began. Jumping and running, before finally, the final pass materialized ahead. The biggest part of the river, shimmering black with mystery, with two looks to my left and to my right, to check for the zooming alligators who could strike, we darted across. Now safe and satisfied with our journey, we skipped past the remaining trees and threw our wishes into the pond we passed, arriving to, at last, our destination. These memories, among others, solidify our state’s alias. Arkansas is the natural state, and natural indeed. As forests flourish and mountains tower, our beautiful state is no doubt bursting with the lovely scenes of the untouched world. Looking closer, however, one would find there is something deeper. Arkansas is also naturally inclined to other aspects: that being a natural strength within its geography as well as its community.

Naturally Strong

The strength of Arkansas cannot be defined in concise and definitive natures. In fact, the strength presented in the state is quiet and subtle. The strength can be hard to notice when it becomes routine. This is precisely the case in Arkansas. Looking around the state, diversity is everywhere. Not just in its flora and fauna, but within its communities. People who have suffered great loss walk each day like they always have. Leaving their scars to heal and buds to blossom. The beauty in this routine is that it’s found everywhere here. People get up, go to work, and come home. Maybe they are trying to make a living, or achieve their dreams, or maybe provide a better life for the ones they love. Regardless, one thing remains true, here in our state, everyday we grow. That is our strength, despite the failure, despite the pain, we continue to grow. The soil does not bend around the roots, they have to pave their way. Arkansans know this, the people here are not defined by their soil. They push past the dirt, and even move rocks. They start in one environment, but they do not end there. A mother working hard for her children, learning and fighting, becoming the sturdy cornerstone which builds her family. A child maturing around the broken parts of society becoming a trailblazer and blunting the blade of blame in our world. This comes so naturally because it is all around us. It is built into our homes, families, and people. Here in our state, we become: we grow. 

Not only is growth important for each of us, but each of us is important for growth. Our communities build our structure. The leaf and the stem may seem nothing alike, but they are connected through their plant, they need each other. We grow together, and we are strong together. Arkansas may not be for everyone, but it is for anyone. We may seem different but we are connected through the way we live. Our clothes or habits may separate us on the outside, but everyone tries their hardest to make tomorrow better than yesterday. And while our identities in our hearts do not always agree, Arkansas is a place to listen to the different rhythms of pulse. Here the landscape drips with scenery envied by the sunsets themselves; effortlessly splendid; but it is no match for the inhabitants. Walking downtown where I live, everyone is so warm to each other. Even on the worst days, an individual can still summon the strength to smile at a stranger. This simple strength shows again. We build one another up, and if they fall we lend a hand. When tornadoes destroy homes, neighbors and friends help rebuild. When a pandemic strikes and panic threatens to invade, our families of all kinds hold together. All of this exists as naturally as breathing. Our kindness is not plastic and our love is genuine. Even as times get difficult, as they have the past few years, we have never lost our sense of what matters and never given up on the fellowship within our borders. 

Strength is deeper than utility, it is perseverance brimming on stubbornness. More than natural diamonds are made in Arkansas. Our future leaders, mothers, fathers, and models may be pressurized at times, but coal was meant to grow into something stronger. And, diamonds are used to refine those around them. Here in Arkansas, our strength is drawn from our past, used in our present, and determines our future. I believe Arkansas will continue to grow and exemplify strength to all who visit through its people. After all, Arkansas inspires and kindles the flames of the future: naturally, of course. 

The post Naturally Arkansas appeared first on Arkansas Strong.