Benjamin Bogard was born in Kentucky in 1868. Ordained a Baptist minister in 1887, he moved to Arkansas twelve years later, preaching in Searcy and Argenta before becoming pastor of Antioch Missionary Baptist Church in Little Rock, where he remained until 1947.
A Ku Klux Klan member, he opposed teaching evolution and when an anti-evolution bill was tabled in 1927, he led a drive to put it on the ballot as an initiated act the following year. He fought evolution from the pulpit, giving a 1928 sermon titled “Man or Monkey, Which?” The anti-evolution act passed by a two-to-one margin and remained on the books until overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court forty years later.
He also opposed the presidential run of Alfred E. Smith, a Catholic he said would make the U.S. subject to the pope and impose racial equality on the segregated South. Ripley’s Believe It or Not featured him as preaching “every Sunday for 61 years without missing a single Sunday.” He died in 1951.
To learn more, visit encyclopediaofarkansas.net.
You can read the entire Encyclopedia entry Bogard, Benjamin Marcus - Encyclopedia of Arkansas
