Winthrop Rockefeller on White Supremacy

Fifty years ago this November [2016], Winthrop Rockefeller was elected Arkansas’s first Republican governor in almost a century by beating Arkansas’s leading segregationist Jim Johnson. Rockefeller later explained: “The reckless course of white supremacy at any cost was running out of appeal; it was losing its credibility with the people. That racism could become a political liability in Arkansas, less than ten years after the tragedy that was “Little Rock Central High School,” proposes a fascinating study….And you could sense that major change—historic change—was at hand. In November of 1966 Arkansas made it official. Our people went to the polls and elected, not a Republican, not a Rockefeller, not a millionaire—but a man who stood up and implored them to get involved in shaping the future of their state.”