# Orval Faubus Orval Eugene Faubus (1910–1994) was the six-term Democratic Governor of Arkansas (1955–1967), and the figure whose September 1957 decision to deploy the **Arkansas [[National Guard]] to prevent nine Black students from entering Little Rock Central High School** produced the first post-*Brown v. Board* federal-versus-state confrontation, the first deployment of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division to enforce school desegregation, and the iconic photograph of Elizabeth Eckford walking through a hostile white crowd that fixed the visual grammar of the civil rights era. Faubus is the Southern segregationist governor whose story most cleanly inverts the Wallace and Barnett trajectories — he began his political career as an **Ozark [[New Deal]] liberal** with strong labor ties and at one point belonged to a left-wing populist faction; the Little Rock confrontation, by his own later account, was a calculated political turn rather than a deeply held racial conviction. He was reelected four more times after Little Rock with overwhelming majorities — proof, like Thurmond's 1964 switch, that the segregationist vote was electorally available to any Southern Democrat willing to take it. ## Role in the civil-rights-backlash ecosystem Faubus is the **opportunist archetype** in the segregationist governor cluster. Where [[Strom Thurmond]] and [[Harry F. Byrd Sr.]] were ideologically committed white-supremacist politicians, and where [[George Wallace]] performed his racial conversion as a strategic posture that hardened into worldview, Faubus was a Southern New Dealer whose 1957 turn was, by the historical record, a deliberate calculation that "the Negro question" was the issue on which Arkansas politics had to be fought. He learned the lesson that the rest of the segregationist Southern Democratic establishment learned: **opposing federal civil-rights enforcement was electorally profitable**. He was reelected to four more terms after Little Rock by margins that suggested his constituents agreed. The Little Rock confrontation is also the structural precedent every later governor reached for: Wallace's 1963 Stand in the Schoolhouse Door, Barnett's Ole Miss confrontation in 1962, Maddox's Georgia governorship — all are in continuous historical descent from Faubus's September 1957 decision to use a state National Guard to obstruct a federal court order. ## Key episodes - **1954 election.** Won the Arkansas governorship as a relatively moderate Democrat, defeating segregationist Francis Cherry in a Democratic primary that turned partly on labor issues, not race. - **1955–1957.** Quietly compliant on early integration steps; Hoxie School District integrated peacefully under Faubus's hands-off approach in 1955. - **September 2, 1957 — Arkansas National Guard deployed.** Faubus called out the Guard on the eve of the school year to "preserve order" — operationally, to prevent the nine Black students from entering Central High School. - **September 4, 1957.** The "Little Rock Nine" attempted to enter; Guard troops physically blocked them. Elizabeth Eckford, separated from the group, walked alone through a screaming white crowd — the resulting Will Counts photograph became one of the defining images of the civil rights era. - **September 23–24, 1957 — riots.** Federal courts ordered the Guard withdrawn; mob violence at the school; Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and deployed the 101st Airborne Division. Black students entered the school under federal escort. - **1958–59 — closing the schools.** Rather than continue integration, Faubus closed all four Little Rock public high schools for the entire 1958-59 academic year. The closure was upheld by Arkansas courts and reversed only by federal court order. - **1958, 1960, 1962, 1964 — reelection.** Won four more terms; in 1964 with no major Republican opposition. - **1986 — failed comeback.** Ran for governor again at age 75, losing the Democratic primary to [[Bill Clinton]]. ## Connections - [[Strom Thurmond]] — Senatorial archetype of the same generation; Faubus was a gubernatorial peer who took the same political instinct. - [[George Wallace]] — Direct heir; Wallace's 1963 Stand in the Schoolhouse Door is a deliberate recapitulation of Faubus's 1957 stand. - [[Ross Barnett]] — Same governor-defying-federal-court template, executed in Mississippi in 1962. - [[Harry F. Byrd Sr.]] — The "[[Massive Resistance]]" doctrine Byrd articulated in 1956 is the framework Faubus operationalized. ## See also - [[Civil Rights Era Backlash Ecosystem]] — Faubus is the original gubernatorial-resistance model; everything later in the ecosystem is downstream of September 1957.