ARArkansas Famous People

Hope sits in Hempstead County, has fewer than 10,000 residents and is mostly celebrated for growing record-breaking watermelons. It has also produced two governors of Arkansas who both ran for president: Bill Clinton, born there in 1946, and Mike Huckabee, born there in 1955. No other town of that size in America has managed the same trick.

The only president born in the state

Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe III on August 19, 1946, three months after his father was killed in a car crash near Sikeston, Missouri. He took his stepfather's surname after the family moved to Hot Springs, was elected attorney general of Arkansas at 30, and became governor at 32. He lost the office in 1980, won it back in 1982 and held it until he resigned to take the presidency, which he held from 1993 to 2001. Huckabee, a Baptist pastor before he was lieutenant governor, ran the state from 1996 to 2007 and won the Iowa caucuses in 2008. Arkansas casts six electoral votes.

Careers that began here and finished in Washington

Hattie Caraway was appointed to her late husband's Senate seat in 1931 and then won the special election in January 1932, making her the first woman ever elected to the United States Senate. She held it until 1945. J. William Fulbright, raised in Fayetteville and made president of the University of Arkansas at 34, chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for fifteen years and wrote the 1946 act that created the international exchange programme bearing his name. Joycelyn Elders, born to a sharecropping family in Schaal in 1933, became the first Black surgeon general of the United States in 1993. Douglas MacArthur was born on January 26, 1880, in the arsenal building at the Little Rock Barracks, where his father was posted; the building now houses the state's military history museum.

Central High, September 1957

Daisy Bates, born in Huttig, ran the Arkansas NAACP and published the Arkansas State Press with her husband, and it was Bates who organised the nine students who tried to enter Little Rock Central High. Governor Orval Faubus, a hill country politician from Combs, called out the National Guard to keep them out, and Eisenhower answered by federalising the Guard and sending the 101st Airborne. Elizabeth Eckford, who missed the message about meeting the others, walked alone through the mob, and the photograph of that walk ran worldwide. Minnijean Brown was expelled during the year after tipping a bowl of chili onto a boy who had been tormenting her. Ernest Green became the first Black graduate of Central High in May 1958.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Delta

Rosetta Nubin was born in Cotton Plant in 1915 and was playing guitar in a travelling evangelical troupe by the age of six. The distorted single-note runs on records like "Strange Things Happening Every Day" in 1944 fed directly into rock and roll, though she was not inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame until 2018. Johnny Cash was born in Kingsland in 1932 and raised at Dyess, a New Deal resettlement colony where the federal government handed his family twenty acres and a five-room house. Levon Helm, from Elaine in Phillips County, was the only American in The Band and sang lead on "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down".

Louis Jordan of Brinkley led the Tympany Five through a decade of rhythm and blues number ones. Glen Campbell, one of twelve children of a sharecropper near Delight, played hundreds of Los Angeles studio sessions before recording "Wichita Lineman". Al Green was born in Forrest City in 1946 and Charlie Rich in Colt in 1932. Conway Twitty, born in Mississippi, built his stage name out of Conway, Arkansas and Twitty, Texas.

A coach Alabama borrowed, and a store in Bentonville

Paul Bryant was born in Moro Bottom in 1913 and picked up the name Bear at 13 by agreeing to wrestle a carnival bear in Fordyce for a dollar a minute, money he never collected. He coached Alabama from 1958 to 1982 and won six national championships. Scottie Pippen, the youngest of twelve children in Hamburg, arrived at the University of Central Arkansas as a walk-on helping manage equipment and left for six NBA titles in Chicago. Brooks Robinson of Little Rock won sixteen consecutive Gold Gloves at third base, Lou Brock was born in El Dorado, and Dizzy Dean came from Lucas.

Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis but sent at three to her grandmother's general store in Stamps, the years she wrote about in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Charles Portis of El Dorado wrote True Grit in 1968. Billy Bob Thornton of Hot Springs won the 1997 screenwriting Oscar for Sling Blade, and Mary Steenburgen of North Little Rock won hers for Melvin and Howard. Sam Walton was born in Oklahoma but opened his first Walmart in Rogers in 1962 and ran the company from Bentonville in a pickup truck.

Common questions about Arkansans

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