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.

“In addition to Little Rock and the surrounding areas, it is our pledge to serve the diverse population in the rural areas of Arkansas,” said Little Rock VA Regional Office Executive Director Sammie Quillin. “We are working to connect with these Veterans along with those unable to reach us by other means.”

The VA also wants veterans and their families to know about their Visitor Reporting Engagement Application (VERA), an online tool to help appointments. For those who don’t have a VA clinic accessible to them, it’s a great way to stay on top of healthcare needs.

You can find more details, provided by the VA, below.

WHAT: Monthly Virtual VA Claims Clinic for Arkansas Veterans

WHO: During the upcoming Virtual Claims Clinic, Veterans may speak one-on-one with staff at the Little Rock VA Regional Office who are ready to assist with specific questions regarding their claims for VA benefits.

WHEN: Thursday, January 25, 4 – 6 p.m.

HOW:  To reserve a time slot, Veterans are asked to call 501-370-3829 by COB, January 24.

MORE INFO:

Little Rock VA Regional Office is located at 2200 Fort Roots Drive in North Little Rock and open Monday – Friday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The Veteran Assist Phone Line, 501-370-3829, is staffed Monday – Friday, 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Two VA satellite offices are located at 1) the John L. McClellan VA Medical Center, Room 1C-151B, open Tuesdays, 8 a.m. – noon, and Thursdays, noon – 4 p.m, and 2) the Eugene J. Towbin VA Healthcare Center, Room 1C-149, Bldg. 170, 2200 Fort Roots Dr. in North Little Rock, open Wednesdays, 8 a.m. – noon.

VA Regional Offices provide financial and other forms of assistance to Veterans and their dependents. This includes disability compensation, survivor’s benefits, pension and fiduciary service, education and training, vocational rehabilitation and employment assistance, life insurance coverage, and home loan guaranties. VA disability compensation (pay) offers a monthly tax-free payment to Veterans who got sick or injured while serving in the military and to Veterans whose service made an existing condition worse. 

During the upcoming Virtual Claims Clinic, staff members of the Little Rock VA Regional Office will answer questions about PACT Act benefits, existing VA benefits claims, and assist with filing new claims.  

For more information about VA benefits, go to http://benefits.va.gov/benefits/ or call 800-827-1000. For information about PACT Act benefits, visit www.va.gov/resources/the-pact-act-and-your-va-benefits.

The post VA offers next Virtual Claims Clinic for Vets 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.

The University of Central Arkansas is testing out a solution it says will largely eliminate financial barrier to a bachelor’s degree for families earning less than $100,000 per year. That could be crucial in a state like Arkansas, which has the 10th highest poverty rate and the third lowest rate of bachelor’s degree attainment in the country.

Given that Arkansas’ median income is $55,432 and 76 percent of households bring in less than $100,000 per year, university president, Houston Davis, believes the program will be able to help many students who wouldn’t otherwise be able to pay for college cover tuition and fees.

“Instead of a family saying ‘I’ve got a plan for how to pay for that for one year,’ we’ve got a plan for how you can pay for it for four,” Davis said. “We think that is a game changer. That is a change in the conversation around breakfast tables and dinner tables. And we think it’s what Arkansas families need to hear right now.”

The program, called UCA Commitment, will be available to next year’s freshman class. To be eligible, students have to be Arkansas residents whose total family annual income falls below the $100,000 threshold. They also must apply for the merit-based Arkansas Academic Challenge Scholarship.

Once they have collected federal and state grants, the University of Central Arkansas will cover the rest with scholarships and work study assignments, Davis said.

Many states offer pathways to tuition-free community college, but such programs at the baccalaureate level are much less common, and typically provided at elite, deep-pocketed private universities, such as Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Duke. For instance, Colgate University launched a similar program in 2021, which offered free tuition for students from families making less than $80,000, and replaced federal student loans with institution grants for students from families making less than $175,000.

The University of Central Arkansas is a far less selective institution, accepting 90 percent of all applicants. More than 40 percent of the student body qualifies for federal Pell Grants, meaning they come from a low-income family. As a regional university, many students come directly from the surrounding area, which includes counties with poverty rates above 20 percent.

The hope is that this program will remove the financial barrier for students who need it the most including those who may not see college as an option, said Khadish Franklin, managing director and team lead for the research advisory services division at education consulting firm EAB.

“You really need that for schools across the country, but in a state like Arkansas, and in a region like Central Arkansas, it is absolutely transformative for students,” Franklin said. EAB worked with the university to help develop the program.

For the 2023-2024 school year, tuition and fees for Arkansas residents costs $10,118, according to the University of Central Arkansas website. The scholarship won’t cover other costs such as textbooks, housing, food and transportation, which can add up to thousands as well.

Still, as long as they keep their GPA above a 2.5 and log at least 10 hours of community service per semester, students will be able to keep the scholarship for four consecutive years.

Davis said the university estimates that between 40 to 45 percent of freshmen will be eligible, or about 750 students in the fall of 2024.

The program is years in the making. About five years ago, leaders at the University of Central Arkansas considered the threats facing their school: The region faced a looming demographic cliff of college-aged residents and administrators were uncertain about what kind of state and federal funding they could count on in the coming years.

They began to ask themselves, “What were we going to do to be proactive?” Davis said.

To answer the questions, leaders pored through the budget to make sure that every dollar was going toward meeting the needs of students.

Part of that process was determining whether they were doing the best they could with student financial aid packages, Davis said. They worried about “over-awarding” some students, while other students who needed the money more weren’t getting it. They began drafting budgets to see whether they could make something like the UCA Commitment program work. After moving around some scholarship money and raising more money, administrators think they can swing it.

The new program doesn’t come at great risk to the college, either. Just because students won’t have to pay tuition, doesn’t mean the college isn’t getting paid. The money coming in for each student will be the same, it will just come from scholarships and work study assignments instead of college loans and credit cards.

Davis said the university expects to see a small increase in enrollment, but expects the most significant impact will to be on the number of students who return year after year.

“The real power of UCA Commitment is going to be for those students who are in academic good standing, they’re making progress toward a degree, but money is the reason they stop out,” Davis said.

Olivia Sanchez wrote this article for The Hechinger Report.

Support for this reporting was provided by Lumina Foundation.

The post UCA offers ‘debt-free pathway’ to college graduation appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

So, why am I deconstructing? Despite the claims of wanting to be liked, rebelling against God’s authority, and letting my feelings deceive me, the answer is simple. I am deconstructing to arrive at a place of authentic faith. I am a Christian, I prayed the prayer and I still firmly believe in all of the key doctrines and confessions. It is arrogant to say otherwise. I’m deconstructing to save my faith from all of the garbage it has accumulated for the last twenty-five years. 

In my Introduction to Philosophy college course, I learned about a German theologian by the name of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher was confronted by higher criticism coming out of German theological schools and new ideas that put prior understandings of Christian truth in doubt. After thinking through these critiques, his new approach sought to make Christian faith more personal and up to the interpretation of the reader. To Schleiermacher, this approach encouraged a more authentic faith, even though he conceded it wasn’t a perfect one. Schleiermacher was not alone in his desire to keep the core of Christian faith while dispensing with what was not true.

Fundamentalist Evangelicalism put a lot of trappings on my faith that cannot be justified or proven. Most of the trappings revolve around assumptions based on dogmatic doctrines like: inerrancy, the idea that the original manuscripts of the Bible are curated by God and do not contain errors; textual infallibility, which is the claim that the writing of the text is completely authoritative; and scriptural sufficiency, the idea that the Bible is all you need and contains the answers to all life’s questions. Religion that is authentic, adaptable, and correctable cannot exist in concert with these doctrines. That’s why if the Bible says it, I don’t necessarily believe it, and it doesn’t settle the question. I want a faith that is intellectually honest and spiritually humble. Evangelicalism does not provide this because it embraces fundamentalism and dogma.

There’s much to unlearn from Evangelicalism. I’ve spent years trying to detach my mind from what fundamentalism preaches: dogma, reactionary theology, and prejudices. Often when interacting with others on social media I will catch myself saying something in a tone that is too certain. I realize that I’m not trying to get to the truth; I’m trying to be right. Doubt is an unpleasant but necessary bedfellow for one who takes on this faith overhaul. I’ve found myself angry at being lied to, depressed at the pain I’ve caused, and confused about how to move forward. There is always fear and shame lurking in the back of my mind whispering, “What if you’re wrong? God will be angry with you…” I don’t believe this is true, but the impulse is always submerged in my religiously abused subconscious.

Deconstruction is not triumphalism. We’re not throwing parties and hosting orgies. We don’t boast about how we’ve slain the dragon of fundamentalism in its lair – because you never do that, or at least I haven’t managed to do it. As someone who’s been homebound for most of the pandemic, I struggle with how I’m living out this new understanding of faith. I feel like an actor at times, maybe because I am one. I live with a deep frustration at how many years I wasted in Evangelicalism, lying to myself and not taking a stand against its abuses sooner. My Evangelical pastors and professors lied to me about other people to make themselves look holier and better. Do you realize what this does to trust? And they did it all in the name of Jesus. So much of my deconstruction journey has been angry, and that, too, has been strange and difficult coming from a place that told me, “do not let the sun go down on your anger.” 

My M.Div. was obtained from Liberty Divinity School (yes, that Liberty) at the end of 2013. While there are aspects about the education I appreciate, like the exposure to translations of Patristic texts and learning about the Southern Baptist Resurgence, there’s a lot to dislike. I’ve since learned about liberal theology, liberation theology, neo-orthodox theology, Greek Orthodox theology, and other forms of Christian faith. I’ve learned how Judaism is misunderstood and slandered in our Christian circles, and it has been humbling and wrecking to discover how our own sacred text paints our Jewish neighbors in ahistorical, biased lights. Christianity has a history of embellishing facts to make itself look better than other religions and divert attention away from its own shortcomings. 

Christianity is the source of white supremacy and white European privilege. Christianity was the justification for the enslavement of an entire race of people and the genocide of another. Christianity has been the primary driver of terror and abuse toward those who are LGBTQ+. None of this is sexy; none of it is comfortable; none of this makes me feel good. When coupled with challenging my definition of spirituality and what is “good and honorable,” I’ve discovered that deconstruction has brought me hurt and unease. Spiritual devotions no longer have the same meaning; adjusting to corporate liturgy, social justice, and freedom of conscience/thought turns over all the tables. Evangelicalism wasn’t like this – it was certain, sure, organized, and easily backed up with “chapter and verse.” But it was a lie. The hurt and unease are worth it for truth.

At the first Episcopalian bible study I attended someone spoke about an interpretation of a passage that caused all of my bad instincts to rise. I sat in indignation, waiting for the priest to intervene and correct them like every Evangelical bible study I’d attended. 

But the priest didn’t, and neither did anyone else in the room. Instead, I was floored by how they began to discuss the merits and implications of what had been said, how that particular interpretation helped the listeners better understand their faith, even if they disagreed with it. When I left, I challenged myself to be more willing to listen than to teach. As a result, I’ve grown so much from being exposed to the ideas of others, whether I agree with them or not. Fundamentalism often tries to resurface during these moments of exposure to the new, but I always find it more rewarding to tell it to shut up and let myself learn. 

There are things I miss about Evangelicalism. I can’t look at the Bible the same way  anymore; it’s become just another book, even if it has an honored place. Music allows me to emotionally connect with God, but so much of the music I used to listen to has either a terrible message or is ruined by the messengers who abused others to make it, yet I still miss the music. I miss the focused drive of Evangelicalism that is all too often lacking in mainline denominational settings. 

But here’s what I don’t miss: I don’t miss false certainty and false confidence, and I wouldn’t trade them for what I have now: an authentic, human faith journey. 

Before each Holy Eucharist, our priest says, “Wherever you are in your journey of faith, you are welcome at this table.” There are days I don’t know where I am – but not all who wander are lost. We’re all on this sojourner journey together, even if our paths often diverge.

Deconstruction isn’t “sexy,” but it beats all of the fool’s gold currently being sold in Evangelicalism. It leads, when done thoroughly and humbly, to a faith that is real. I might be right, but I might be wrong – and I’m okay with that. There are far worse things in this world than being wrong. If I’m going to err, I’d rather err on the side of love and grace for all my fellow humans than on the side of judgment and disdain. 

I believe the Gospel saves us from ourselves and leads us into a better life. The seeds of the gospel are flourishing in most religions and in every culture. Loving God by loving others as you love yourself has the power to change the entire world if we embrace the fullness of what that truly means. Resurrection – the belief that life comes despite death – is foundational to understanding how God works through everyone to make all things new.

I don’t need to assent to creeds or commit to an exclusive religion or faith tradition. There are those who don’t consider themselves to be religious and yet they’re more like God in practice than many fundamentalist Evangelicals. These folks have embraced the ethos of loving others as they love themselves; they show this by seeking to free people from the systemic oppression that drapes our world. I am one with persons of color, LGBTQ+ people, and those who find themselves destitute and impoverished. I am with those in prison for crimes they did not commit, for those suffering physical or mental illness, and for the elderly left forgotten in deplorable conditions. I find common cause with the differently abled, the single mothers and childless career women, and all those shattered by the evil in our world. We are not free until we are all free. 

These causes called by the Gospel sound exciting and romantic, especially for the cis het Christian white guys with savior complexes who believe leading others to deconstruction is now their life’s work. However, there have been many painful moments for me. I was going into ministry. That is lost to me now. For the last six years I’ve tried to re-establish my motivation, but it isn’t there. I didn’t realize how much my “calling” to teach was bound up in my Evangelical faith. It was the steam engine of my life, the guiding star, and it’s gone. At nearly forty, its absence causes me to wonder what will ultimately become of my life. I no longer know. And, strangely, I’m at peace with that, even if it’s painful. 

Christians believe God sees the heart. I hope that when or if God sees mine it will prove to be whole and at peace with who I am and how I’ve helped and loved others. I hope that I’ve tried to make the world a better place for everyone – the goal, I believe, of the kingdom of God.

The post Deconstructing Certainty appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

A song I haven’t heard in awhile wafts through my earbuds, “Free” by Rudimental.

See, whoa, c’est la vie

Maybe something’s wrong with me

But, whoa, at least I am free, oh, oh, I am free

It’s not that I don’t have any thoughts or experiences when it comes to moving on from fundamentalism.  I have plenty.  A veritable family heritage.  But it’s difficult to know where to start.  

I was raised in the Church of Christ.  My mother’s father was a Church of Christ minister and her mother’s grandfather was a frontier preacher in North Texas.  My father’s father was an elder and can trace our family’s roots in the Restoration Movement all the way back to Alexander Campbell (IYKYK).  His great grandfather founded the first Church of Christ in the state of Texas and was involved in the beginnings of what later became Texas Christian University.  My mother served as church secretary and my father was a deacon of various ministries while I was growing up.

I dutifully attended Harding University and married a youth minister.  We spent 12 years working in Churches of Christ in South Georgia and Northeast Arkansas.  I also worked as a librarian at a private Church of Christ school for eight years.  Those years were filled with spiritual and emotional abuse. Even five years post ministry I still struggle to articulate some of the things that happen to us and don’t fully understand how abusive some of our experiences were.

It wasn’t until we were unceremoniously let go from our last ministry position here in Arkansas and we subsequently decided to both take secular jobs that I was forced to reckon my faith with my reality.  I entered that scary world of “deconstruction.” Different people will define the word in different ways, but for me it means to essentially perform a closet clean out of your mind.  It’s often a rapid unlearning and unraveling of beliefs and customs given in a fundamental religion.  Of course the scary part is that these are tightly held beliefs, not just old jeans that haven’t fit in five years. 

But we can and should outgrow harmful theology and ideas.  

Anyone who has ever stepped out into the terrifying journey of deconstruction knows it isn’t easy.  And no two people will have the same journey.  Even my sweet husband and I have had different journeys.  Deconstructing different parts of our faith at different times and in different ways.    

Early on into this process, my therapist gave me some good advice.  He told me to do my best to accept where the journey may lead.  Deconstructing doesn’t mean you are leaving your faith.  How you chose to engage your faith may look different, but that’s ok.  He told me to be ready because it could look like standing on a boulder on the edge of Mount Magazine to greet the sunrise or going through the process of becoming an ordained Episcopalian priest.  Or anything in between.  Or none of those things.  

See, whoa, c’est la vie

Maybe something’s wrong with me

But, whoa, at least I am free, oh, oh, I am free

After five years, I still consider myself to be a Christian.  That doesn’t mean I haven’t had moments of doubt, agony, or fear of discovering a new way of faith that’s different from my upbringing.  I have felt all of that and more.  There have been many Sundays I weeped through parts of worship, not sure if I wanted to keep doing this.  And there have been other days of the week that the Spirit has led me and spoken tenderly to me.  

But the beauty is that I’m free.  

I’m not a marionette, strings attached and ready to perform at a moment’s notice.  To be honest, that’s how I’d felt for a long time.  As a child I wanted to please my family.  As a minister’s wife I didn’t want to do anything to cause trouble.  I knew how to walk that line to keep church ladies happy and not get myself or my husband reprimanded by the elders.  I was so tired.

But the beauty is that I’m free.

I’ve preached and I lead communion from time to time.  I help my daughter practice for the Advent scripture reading.  I commune with friends while drinking a margarita or two.  I’ve gotten a tattoo, dyed the ends of my hair pink, and this past week booked an appointment to finally get my nostril pierced.  I’ve helped plan a rally at the state capitol, gotten tied up in public education advocacy, even stuck my toe into the world of Arkansas politics.  I bounce my little girl on my knee while we recite the Lord’s Prayer at the end of services together.  I adore her bedtime prayers. I adore the questions she asks about Jesus.

The beauty is that I’m free.

The post The Beauty of Being Free appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

In his heartbreakingly simple song “Speed Trap Town,” contemporary southern sage and roots rock troubadour Jason Isbell sings of the small-town high school football effect: “It’s a boy’s last dream and man’s first loss.” To be young and perpetually hopeful only to eventually come face to face with defeat — this is the coming of age sports story we embrace here in Arkansas.

But what is a Friday autumn night without the bright lights of a football field beckoning us to remember those last dreams and first losses?

Early this spring, Chris Goering asked this very question on a social media post:

I started on the defensive line for three years at little Medicine Lodge, Kansas, and we improved each year, from 3-6 to 7-2 to an undefeated regular season my senior year, 9-0, before running into the private school bullies from Wichita: Wichita Collegiate. (Although they played in the same class as us, they could recruit from the huge city of Wichita and had at least 5 seniors on that team play major Division One football.) We played only with the players living in our small town and public school district. Though it was 27 years ago, this story still stings and it currently reverberates on the high school football field and education landscape of Arkansas.

Medicine Lodge is 100 miles from Anywhere, USA, that most Americans could point to on map. It’s a small agriculture-centered town that has largely stayed in the game all these years because there happened to be a large gypsum deposit nearby, which enables the town’s industry to make and ship wallboard all over the region from there. I love my hometown, and I feel just as connected to it when I return to visit my parents. The people of that town still have my back all these years later. Like most towns in Arkansas, it is a small town a long ways away from any bigger towns.

While I’d love to recount more stories from high school football, what I owe my hometown is to make sure that your kids will continue to be able to form productive identities in small town sports and extracurricular activities, to feel an entire community’s support at their backs in basketball gyms, at the softball diamond, and on the football field. Your kids deserve a chance to host a state playoff game where they cannot see past the people standing around the field and filling both sets of bleachers.

As a former high school (and college) football player turned teacher I believe that Governor Sanders’ new education plan poses a deep threat to all rural schools across the state. I want to preserve important opportunities for our kids and protect the small towns of America.

What the Governor is up to is pretty simple. She deeply wants to open school choice up to the state by adding vouchers for private schools now and create a free-for-all of charter schools later. The problem, as most of you who live in rural areas know, your towns don’t have access to private schools or charter schools, and losing even a few members of your schools to this competition could have disastrous effects.

Charters and private schools don’t outperform public schools, and they don’t often offer comprehensive extracurriculars or sports like football (typically), pathways for young people to be as connected to and as proud as I am of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, all these years later. These schools are not an improvement; they are a means of destroying your towns by taking the schools out at the knees, just as Wichita Collegiate did to us those years ago. They open up public school tax dollars that you and I pay to be wasted, as incidents around the country prove over and over.

With the LEARNS act, Governor Sanders is a 5-star athlete playing quarterback for Wichita Collegiate in 1995. She has all the power and all the advantages in the world on the football field, and she’s coming to your town to not only dash your dreams of holding your communities together but to beat you 42-7. The problem is that with the LEARNS act, not only will the things you love about your town be different, the foundation that the public school provides will be significantly compromised or reduced to rubble.

-Chris Goering, #73

The post a boys last dream and a man’s first loss: saving high school football appeared first on Arkansas Strong.

That’s a short list. Perhaps shorter now even than it was then. But the exercise of starting with what you know and then working outward from there is clarifying.

I was invited to speak to a group in Bentonville recently about the work I do with Arkansas Strong. There were a lot of questions about different things our government in Arkansas is doing and how it may affect people’s lives. These were good people of all ages, willing to work together across party lines, because of values we all share.

I told them about being at the Capitol one day from 7 am till 9 pm listening to teachers. The last one, who was from Bentonville, walked out of the House Ed Committee meeting with me at 9:15 pm. She had a 4-hour drive ahead of her and would get up early and teach the next day. She was there, not really because she stands to lose a lot personally from the implementation of LEARNS. She serves an affluent school district and already makes a decent wage. But she was there because she believes in the value of public education for everyone. She knows it is not just about her and her school, but all of us. So she was there to speak alongside others from all over the state.

I have a lot of questions about what I see happening in Arkansas right now: unnecessary pain inflicted on the vulnerable by the powerful in our state. The amount of difficulty ahead is something I cannot know.

But here is what I do know: what that little group was doing by meeting and planning action, what this teacher did— what so many teachers did as we stood together for ourselves and each other, because of the values we believe in that sustain a better Arkansas for all of us — is the way to overcome it. One issue, one day, one moment at a time.

The post This is what I know 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.