In May 1996, the Whitewater scandal threatening the Clinton presidency upended Arkansas politics. Arkansas’s Democratic governor Jim Guy Tucker was convicted of fraud as part of Ken Starr’s investigation into the Clintons, and announced he would resign effective July 15. My family at the time was living in Texarkana—a two-hour drive south of Little Rock, the state’s capital—but the Whitewater scandal upended our lives, too.
My dad had been a pastor and had run a small Christian communications business for most of my early life until he got involved in politics. In 1992, he resigned as the pastor of Beech Street Baptist Church, a traditional Southern Baptist church in Texarkana, to run against Democratic US senator Dale Bumpers. Senator Bumpers had been in office for decades and was widely popular, while my dad was virtually unknown in political circles.
Republicans in Arkansas had only won three statewide races since Reconstruction in the 1870s, and 1992 was definitely not the year to be a Republican on the ballot in my state. Arkansas governor Bill Clinton won the presidency, and my dad lost his Senate race. He got 40 percent of the vote, which was better than many expected a Republican could do, but nowhere near enough to win. My parents put everything, including mortgaging our home, on the line for that race. We had worked hard and campaigned all over the state. It was a devastating loss and a hard time for our family.
God closed the door on the US Senate but opened another. Bill Clinton’s rise from governor to president meant Democratic lieutenant governor Jim Guy Tucker became governor, and there was a special election held to fill the vacancy for lieutenant governor. My dad threw his hat in the ring against Nate Coulter, senator Bumpers’s campaign manager and an attorney for President Clinton. Despite an all-out effort run out of the Clinton White House to defeat him, my dad pulled off a huge upset and narrowly won the race, 51 to 49 percent. The Clinton White House and their Democratic allies back in Arkansas weren’t too happy about the result, to put it mildly.
As a way to welcome my dad to the capitol as the new lieutenant governor, the Clinton Democratic machine zeroed out his office budget and literally nailed his door shut. For fifty-nine days my dad wasn’t allowed to physically occupy his office in the capitol simply because he was a Republican. John Fund, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal at the time, didn’t believe this could actually happen in America and flew to Little Rock to see for himself. He was astonished to report that it was in fact true.
Three years later, in the summer of 1996, Arkansas Democrats’ worst nightmare was coming true: a small-town former pastor with no money or ties to the political establishment named Mike Huckabee (a “deplorable,” as Hillary Clinton might put it) was now going to be the Republican governor of President Bill Clinton’s home state, Arkansas.
Unfortunately, my worst nightmare—moving away from home at thirteen years old from the small town I loved to the state capital the summer before my freshman year of high school—was also coming true.
I was happy in Texarkana. I had gone to preschool and kindergarten there at the church where my dad was the pastor. We rode to school each morning together and I played in his office until it was time to go to class. I had my own “office” under the credenza of my dad’s desk where I kept paper, markers, tape, and a pair of scissors so I could work each morning alongside him. I loved being around my dad, and made many masterpieces and memories working under his desk at Beech Street.
My brothers and I enjoyed being the “pastor’s kids” and running wild around the church. We played hide-and-seek in the Sunday school classrooms, snuck into the fellowship hall for ice cream, and on more than one occasion may have taken a swim in the baptistry. When my dad had had enough of us, we’d ride our bikes around our neighborhood and make forts in the woods behind our house with the dozens of other kids who lived on our street. We even created a neighborhood newspaper, which we printed on the computer we got for Christmas when I was eight. I was responsible for a couple of sections of the newspaper each week and I am proud to report we never printed any fake news!
Life in Texarkana wasn’t grand, but it was good. So when it came time to move to the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, I said to my parents, “I’m thirteen and old enough to take care of myself. I’ll just stay here and live with some friends instead.” That didn’t go over too well, and soon I was packing up, saying good-bye, and taking every chance I got to let my parents know how much they were “ruining my life!”
Meanwhile, Governor Jim Guy Tucker spent his final days in office appointing hundreds of Democrats to state boards and commissions and spending the last of the entire year’s budget to make sure my dad knew he wasn’t welcome in the state capital.
July 15 finally came. A Republican hadn’t been governor of Arkansas in many years so hundreds of people traveled from all corners of the state to Little Rock. It was a big deal. My mom picked out outfits for each of us. Many years later I still have not forgiven her for the one she chose for me—a red, white, and blue one-piece suit complete with shorts and shoulder pads. Clearly she was trying to ruin my social life in Little Rock before we’d even unpacked!
We left our hotel room and went to the capitol, where we sat in my dad’s lieutenant governor’s office waiting to receive Tucker’s resignation letter making it official. Surrounded by a few staffers and friends my dad instead got a phone call. On the other end of the line was Tucker. I was right next to my dad’s side throughout the call. I distinctly remember telling the room to be quiet as my dad listened to the voice on the other end. At that moment, Governor Tucker had already announced his resignation effective July 15. Hundreds of my dad’s supporters filled the halls of the capitol awaiting the swearing-in and inauguration. Our family had sold our house and packed everything we owned in Texarkana onto moving trucks to be delivered to the Governor’s Mansion the next day. And I had sacrificed all of my dignity wearing that red, white, and blue monstrosity my mom forced me to put on for the big day.
We definitely weren’t prepared when Governor Tucker—five minutes prior to his scheduled resignation—informed my dad that he had changed his mind and would not officially step down after all. Governor Tucker said that the Arkansas law stating that a convicted felon could not serve as governor was vague, so he’d wait out a court ruling on his appeal.
My dad said, “This is unacceptable. The law is clear. I’ll be taking over as governor today.” He set the receiver down and an Arkansas constitutional crisis began. Two men were claiming to be governor of the same state at the same time.
My dad acted quickly. He first called on friends of Governor Tucker’s in the heavily Democratic state legislature and implored them to go to Tucker and tell him to do the right thing and resign. To our surprise, many agreed. Bobby Hogue, the Speaker of the house—a longtime Tucker ally—pressured the governor to step down. “We told him a lot of us who have been very trusting supporters of his and had stayed with him through the hard times could not stay with him any longer today. In the history of the state of Arkansas, we certainly hope we never see another day like today.”
The halls of the capitol were pure chaos—hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were crammed into every opening around the building cheering, yelling, pushing to try and figure out what was happening. Our family was escorted from my dad’s office through the halls of the capitol to the House Chamber for a joint session to address the members of the legislature and I got lost in the shuffle. It was so loud no one could hear me crying out for help. They went ahead and I fell back. Thankfully since my dad had been lieutenant governor for a few years I knew my way around and had made friends with some of the ladies who cleaned the building. Ann Baker was a young African American woman with two young kids who worked hard, didn’t take any nonsense from anyone, and loved to talk. Ann knew everyone and everything going on in the capitol. We would sit on the benches in the lobby area of the women’s restrooms, and visit, and I’d usually bring her treats from the office supply. If you ever wanted to know anything about anyone, Ann was your source.
I spotted Ann and she grabbed me and pulled me aside. “What are you doing out here in this mess by yourself?” I told her what happened and she wasn’t having it. She told me to follow her and dragged me right through the middle of the crowd to state trooper Joel Mullins, who had come back to find me. Ann told me to stay with the group from now on, but if I needed her, I knew where to find her. It wasn’t long before Ann had a new job at the Governor’s Mansion and I got to see her more often. I made it to the chamber just in time for my dad’s speech to the members. Shortly after, he addressed the entire state.
My dad, calm in the midst of the crisis, delivered an unscripted, statewide-televised address calling on Governor Tucker to resign or be impeached. “This is not a time to draw sides. This is a time for us to draw together. We will show the people of America that in this state we still believe in some old-fashioned values of doing what’s right.”
More Democratic leaders started to fall in line behind my dad. The Democratic attorney general—and friend of Tucker’s—Winston Bryant announced he was filing a lawsuit to have Tucker removed as governor. Within an hour of my dad’s live address to the state, Governor Tucker surrendered. He sent a letter to the Democratic secretary of state Sharon Priest stating, “This is to inform you that I hereby resign the office of governor effective at 6:00 p.m., July 15, 1996—Governor Jim Guy Tucker.”
At approximately 7 that evening, much later than planned, my dad was officially sworn in as the 44th governor of Arkansas. After a day of uncertainty and chaos, my dad and the rule of law had prevailed. Our family would be moving into the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock after all, and our lives would never be the same.
The Arkansas Governor’s Mansion is a Georgian colonial home set on nine acres in the heart of the Quapaw Quarter historic district of downtown Little Rock. The neighborhood includes more than two hundred properties on the National Register of Historic Places. Although most of these homes were built in the mid-1800s, the Governor’s Mansion wasn’t completed until 1950. If you ever watched the sitcom Designing Women, you might recognize the mansion as one of the homes in the opening shot of the show. The Governor’s Mansion is beautiful and welcoming, but for any tenant, most of the home is part of the “public space,” meaning there are always people there. On more than one occasion I came downstairs to a group of strangers on a tour or there for an event in my PJs!
When you walk in the front door to the mansion, you are met by a grand staircase that winds through all three floors. To the right is the formal dining room and the residential kitchen and to the left is the formal living room and East Conference Room (not to be confused with the West Conference Room, because there isn’t one—never figured that one out). Upstairs on the third floor is the private quarters for Arkansas’s First Family and straight out of the back door is the Janet Huckabee Grand Hall. The hall was named after my mom because she tirelessly raised all of the funds and managed the addition of the Grand Hall in 2003. The seven-thousand-plus-square-foot hall is the star of the home and not just because my mom made it happen. The hall can comfortably seat two hundred people and host receptions for closer to four hundred. There is a commercial-grade kitchen and multiple offices for the mansion staff. Each side of the hall has a huge fireplace and right in the center is my favorite part—the fifteen-foot Arkansas State Seal inlaid in the hardwood floor and carved from fifteen native woods from the state of Arkansas. Directly above the seal hangs the “Arkansas Chandelier,” which has twenty-five lights and twenty-five stars to signify Arkansas becoming the twenty-fifth state. The runner on the staircase into the hall has the name of every governor to live in the mansion in ascending order (my kids thought it was pretty cool to take a picture on the step with “Papa’s” name on it).
In total the house has just over thirty thousand square feet. The grounds are impeccable and the trustees do an amazing job maintaining them. P. Allen Smith, a world-renowned gardener from Arkansas, helped design the garden outside the Grand Hall. There is also a vegetable garden and an herb garden started by Betty Bumpers that the National Herb Society maintains. The Governor’s Mansion was doing farm-to-table long before it was the in thing to do!
I remember the first day I walked into the Governor’s Mansion, which would be our family’s home for the next decade (to this day, it’s the home I lived in longer than any other). It was overwhelming. Everything seemed bigger, grander, and more intimidating than any place I’d ever visited, much less called home.
When we first walked through the huge front door all the mansion staff, state police, and trustees had gathered in the formal dining room to greet us. The dining room was covered in gold, blue, and white hand-painted silk wallpaper and a table that seated twenty-four. On one wall was a large china cabinet that contained more than sixty pieces of silver service that was used on the USS Arkansas in both World War I and World War II. My favorite piece and one that was used often was a large silver punch bowl made from three thousand silver dollars donated from kids around the state. It had the Arkansas State Seal on the front of it. Over the table was an odd-looking chandelier that had a large teardrop-shaped hollow bowl in the middle of it. I later learned the story of that chandelier that I would tell on hundreds of tours I led through the mansion over the course of the next ten and a half years. The legend has it that former US senator Mark Pryor (whose dad was governor when he was a boy) and his brother were filling one of the upstairs bathtubs up as high as they could to float a toy boat. The bathroom happened to be above the dining room and when it flooded, the water seeped down into the dining room causing the chandelier bowl to fill up and eventually come crashing down.
But on my first day in the Governor’s Mansion I didn’t know any of these stories or the people standing in the room who would later share them with me. I was nervous and felt totally out of place.
My first week at school was rough. It was awkward enough being the new kid dropped off by an unmarked state trooper car. And it didn’t make it any less embarrassing that my mom rode along each morning in the front passenger seat to keep me company. But things eventually changed. Kids got to know me as Sarah instead of the governor’s daughter and I started making friends. Once we settled in life got better, if never quite normal.
I found that the state troopers were a lot of fun to be around. The guardhouse is where all of my dad’s security detail worked and I would often go over and see them and other staff working there. I perfected my spades game and learned to play a decent hand of blackjack hanging out in the guardhouse. The troopers even taught me how to drive (I don’t blame them for my lack of reversing skills, Lord knows they tried). Most importantly, they always made my family feel safe. They were good people and we spent so much time together they all became like an extension of our family. The troopers spent holidays and vacations with us as well as accompanying us on trips to the ER and everything in between.
The mansion staff took care of everything, from the grounds and meals, to scheduling and organizing hundreds of events each year. The chefs taught me how to cook and let me sit in the kitchen and taste the amazing dishes they prepared for guests.
The trustees were inmates in the state prison system, most of whom were serving life sentences. Arkansas has a program like a few other states that allows inmates to earn work opportunities for demonstrating good behavior. The most highly coveted jobs for trustees were at the Governor’s Mansion. The dozen or so trustees assigned to the mansion maintained the gardens, worked events, and helped me perfect my free throw. My mom was a high school basketball star and although I would never be a star, I loved to play. In the afternoons as they wrapped up their work and waited on the vans to take them back to “The Hill” they called home, we would play basketball together in the driveway.
I suspect most parents wouldn’t like the idea of their teenage daughter playing basketball with convicted murderers. But the men selected for this program had already served decades of their life sentences and consistently demonstrated good behavior and remorse for their crimes. Sadly, the best most of them could hope for in this life was to earn the right each day to continue in the trustee program. No trustee ever wanted to risk the alternative—returning to “normal” life in a maximum-security prison. Besides, there were always plenty of troopers around.
It would have been much easier for my parents to tell me to play it safe and stay away from the trustees, but I’m glad they didn’t. They wanted us to understand that God unconditionally loves and forgives us and that nobody is unworthy of our compassion or beyond the redemptive power of God’s grace.
It’s been said that God’s grace “is getting what we don’t deserve, and not getting what we do deserve.” Growing up around the trustees taught me a life-changing lesson about grace. I have since made it a point to focus on people’s good qualities, and not dwell too much on their flaws—we all have them.
My dad had a long list of his best moments and proudest achievements as governor, but the list of the worst parts of the job was short and never changed.
I still vividly remember the first death-row execution involving my dad when he was lieutenant governor. I was sitting in Miss Lowe’s seventh-grade biology class at North Heights Junior High in Texarkana, Arkansas, on April 19, 1995, when I was unexpectedly called to the office. I was happy for the excuse to get out of class, but when I got to the door the office assistant told me to go back and grab my backpack because I was being checked out for the day. At this I became concerned something bad must have happened to someone in my family. I quickly grabbed my things and returned to the office where a state trooper I didn’t recognize was waiting for me. When my brother David, two years older than me and in ninth grade at the same junior high, walked into the office my heart sank. I was sure someone in my family had been hurt. The trooper told us there was something going on and we needed to leave. I was about to walk out with him when David stepped in. Since we were kids David has always been a protective older brother. He may have teased me relentlessly, super-glued my hands together, and coaxed me to jump from our roof to see if I could fly as little kids, but if anyone else dared mess with me, he was the first to step in and stand up for me. No way was he getting into a car with someone we didn’t know or letting me do so either.
David told the trooper we weren’t leaving until we talked to our parents. About that time the chief of the Texarkana police department, who we knew and went to our church, came in and told us it was okay and that he would take us home.
When we pulled up to our house there were a few cars we didn’t recognize. I stayed next to David, holding on to him tight as we opened the door and walked inside. We found our parents and they apologized for scaring us and told us to get our things together because we needed to leave the house immediately. They weren’t sure how long but told us to pack for a week.
As we gathered our things, my dad explained that someone had bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City—168 people had been killed, including 19 children.
On that exact same day in Arkansas a man named Richard Wayne Snell, a white supremacist convicted of killing an African American state trooper as well as a gas station worker he assumed to be Jewish, was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection. Snell had attempted to bomb the same Federal Building in Oklahoma City in the 1980s, so authorities were now investigating whether the attack was linked to Snell’s execution.
My dad sat us down and said, “Sometimes in my job I have to make tough decisions, and sometimes the only decision is to do nothing, whether people like it or not.”
In Arkansas, the lieutenant governor fills in for the governor and carries out his duties when the governor is out of the state, which meant there were times my dad could have stayed Richard Wayne Snell’s execution, but didn’t.
Governor Tucker didn’t either, and Snell’s final words before his execution that day were a threat against Governor Tucker. “Look over your shoulder; justice is coming. I wouldn’t trade places with you or any of your cronies. Hell has victories. I am at peace.”
This execution would be the first our family experienced, but sadly not the last. My dad went on to oversee seventeen executions over the course of his governorship, more than any governor in the state’s history, mainly because the Supreme Court had lifted the prohibition of capital punishment and many of those backed-up cases fell on his desk. When I think back to those dark, painful days, I remember how each decision weighed so heavily on my dad. I was just a kid, and our home—the Governor’s Mansion—was put on lockdown as each death-row inmate was administered a lethal injection. My dad often said that executions were the hardest decisions he made as governor because it’s the one thing you do that you can never undo.
In January 1999, my mom was in Oklahoma doing an event with her close friend and Oklahoma first lady Cathy Keating. My dad was at a reception down the street from the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion. I remained in the main house alone and members of my dad’s state police detail were in their office next door. Earlier in the day I’d seen reports for bad weather, but didn’t really think much of it. My dad told me to keep an eye on it and he would be back in a few hours. My brothers were off to college so it was just me. A couple hours later Derek Flowers, a state trooper assigned to my dad, called me and said I needed to immediately go down to the basement and wait there until I heard back from him. I didn’t really want to but figured I could watch TV for a bit there and then go over to the guardhouse and see what the guys were up to.
As I sat in the basement, the lights flickered and then went out. The generator was getting ready to kick in, but it was scary sitting there all by myself in the dark, so I decided I’d walk over to the guardhouse. As I got to the top of the double-wide grand staircase that opens to the foyer and main entrance of the mansion, all the lights went off and alarms started blaring. The massive, oversized front door to the house ripped open, sending a huge round entry table with a vase and flowers crashing to the floor. A horrific banging noise echoed through the house and I could feel the wind on my face. I froze in fear. I was terrified. I knew I wasn’t safe in the entryway, so I started to run toward the door that led to the guardhouse. Instead I ran into Derek, who was on his way to me. He scooped me up in his arms and ran me into the guardhouse and dumped me in the bathtub, and then used his body as a shield over mine, as a giant tornado roared through our neighborhood.
The crashing started to fade away and Derek stood up and helped me to my feet. Only after checking that I was okay did he then start to lecture me about listening when told to stay put somewhere. We came out of the guardhouse and the sky was eerily quiet except for a steady but light rainfall. The sky appeared as if nothing had just happened. Everything else around us told a different story. More than fifty huge trees were down all over the mansion grounds, completely uprooted, leaving deep holes in the earth where they once stood. One tree that was torn down had held the tree house that I occasionally played in, which had been built for Chelsea Clinton when her dad was governor. Several state police vehicles were destroyed, and one of our neighbors’ roofs was in our backyard.
I knew my dad was at an event just a few blocks away. I was so worried. I kept trying to call his cell phone but all the lines were down. Derek was trying to keep me calm and get in touch with the troopers who accompanied my dad. They were having some success with police radios but it was too hard to get a clear signal. I told Derek I was going to walk down there. He told me that I was not. Derek was a big guy, probably six-foot-six, and no way was I going to be able to force myself past him. I was scared and I wanted my dad. A few minutes later his large black Suburban came barreling up to the gate.
The generator was working but for some reason the electric gate was not. My dad and the trooper with him got out and I ran to the gate. My dad climbed over the gate and I fell into his arms. He told me it was going to be a long night as there was a lot of damage across the state and the storm wasn’t over.
It turned out that my cell phone was one of the few that worked and so I started helping track calls and requests for my dad. Because our own neighborhood had been hit so hard he wanted to go out now and check on people and see how he could help. He traded his suit jacket for a rain jacket and I asked if I could come with him. He said I could and off we went, house to house, helping pull tree branches off people’s cars and mostly making sure folks were okay.
My dad gave everyone we met the number to his office to call if they needed anything. The neighborhood grocery store had been hit hard. We drove toward the store and you could see dozens of people gathered trying to figure out what was going on. The troopers with us connected with law enforcement running the rescue efforts. The store was completely demolished and several people were trapped inside. First responders were working hard trying to get everyone out. They worked while we waited and my dad fielded calls from his staff and reporters from my phone. The last person to be retrieved from the rubble was the sixty-seven-year-old pharmacist at the grocery store, who had serious injuries. He was rushed to the hospital and died the next day.
The tornado that nearly made a direct hit on the Governor’s Mansion was an F3, and in addition to the pharmacist, killed two more Arkansans. A total of nine people were killed in the wake of that tornado.
My dad spent the next couple of hours mobilizing people on his staff to start doing damage assessments and working through how to get the thousands of people without electricity back up and running as quickly as possible. He was always compassionate and focused on taking care of people. It was in moments like this when he showed why he was a great leader. He often told me that being a leader is not about handling all the things you know are coming, like healthcare or tax policy, but about stepping up in a crisis you can never plan for.
There were unsettling days and difficult decisions, but also proud ones that inspired me and helped me understand what leadership really means.
A five-minute drive from the Governor’s Mansion is Little Rock Central High School. On September 23, 1957, nine African American students—who later became known as the Little Rock Nine—attempted to enter the halls of Central High, following the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954 ruling against segregation in public schools.
The Little Rock Nine—Elizabeth Eckford, Melba Pattillo Beals, Minnijean Brown, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Thelma Mothershed, Terrence Roberts, and the late Jefferson Thomas—faced a mob of thousands of angry white students and parents screaming at them. Governor Orval Faubus—a Democrat segregationist—called in Arkansas’s National Guard and stood in the doorway of the school alongside the Guard to prevent the students from entering. The nine brave students didn’t make it through the first day.
Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, later said, “They moved closer and closer.… Somebody started yelling.… I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the crowd—someone who maybe could help. I looked into the face of an old woman and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me.”
The nine courageous students were violently assaulted—one girl even had acid thrown into her eyes. The hatred on display was pure evil and a horrific moment in our nation’s and state’s history.
The fallout made national headlines, and President Eisenhower told Governor Faubus to stand down. Governor Faubus ignored the president’s request, so President Eisenhower ordered more than one thousand troops from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to intervene, and federalized the entire Arkansas National Guard (about ten thousand troops), thereby stripping Governor Faubus of his power to keep the school segregated.
America was in the midst of a defining struggle for civil rights and Little Rock’s Central High was at the center of it all.
Of the nine students only Ernest Green graduated from Central—he was the first African American to graduate from a white high school in Arkansas. His perseverance that year earned him the attention of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who attended his graduation with his family.
Forty years later as a tenth-grade student at Central High, I stood on the front steps and cheered alongside thousands of students, parents, and dignitaries from around the world as President Bill Clinton and my dad, Governor Mike Huckabee, held open the doors of Central High for the Little Rock Nine—the same doors that had been previously closed to them because they were black.
My dad addressed the crowd and said, “What happened here forty years ago was simply wrong. It was evil and we renounce it.… We come to confront the pain of the past, to celebrate the perseverance of some very courageous people.”
Our student body president, Fatima Makendra, an African American girl, also spoke. I was blown away to watch her stand in front of the world and speak out for civil rights. It was a reminder to all of us there that day and to the millions watching on television how far America and Arkansas had come.
The Little Rock Nine bravely advanced racial equality in America, and today Central High is one of the most racially diverse and high-achieving schools in the state. I loved my experience there. My time at Central exposed me to people with all different backgrounds, lifestyles, and viewpoints. While there were some difficult times (it was high school) and some very dark times in our school’s past, I am very proud to have graduated from Little Rock Central High.
One of our great Central High traditions is for incoming seniors to do a citywide caravan to cement their place as the new senior class, while the outgoing seniors are taking their final exams. For our big day, we dressed in black and gold—as a rite of passage all the new senior girls wore gold lamé skirts (still not sure why that was the fabric of choice to show we were better than the underclassmen)—and decorated our cars in black and gold paint and streamers. From the War Memorial Stadium parking lot in midtown Little Rock, we launched our caravan, hundreds of cars deep, blaring music and driving past all of our rival high schools. Students from other schools launched water balloons at us as we passed by, hanging out of the windows or in our case the side of my best friend Jordan Jones Rhodes’s Jeep Wrangler. The caravan is supposed to wrap with one pass by Central, which is risky because you’re skipping school to participate in the parade. As you do a loop someone stops and puts a chain around the fence of the senior parking lot to lock the seniors in so they can’t get out. It rarely takes long for the seniors to break the chain and leave the lot, so we decided to do something to make it a little more challenging. A couple of my friends and I pooled money together and bought a broken-down station wagon for $250 from somebody in a neighborhood none of our parents would have approved of us being in, and had it towed to the home of our friend Nathaniel Wills, who also happened to be our class president. We then took a chainsaw to the roof and sawed it off to make it a station wagon convertible, and painted it black and gold. The hood was a solid shiny gold with big black lettering that read “LRCH Class of 2000.” We then towed the car to the meet-up parking lot and all of the class of 2000 signed the hood in black Sharpie, towed it along our caravan route, and finally parked it at the gate of the senior lot exit. They were furious and we were victorious. It was a strong start for the class of 2000!
We had a great class—there were around six hundred of us, but it felt small. Our class was poised at the start of a new century and we wanted to show how far we had come. For the first day of school, classes ahead of us had held many different small senior breakfast events to kick off the school year. The class of 2000 decided we didn’t like all the cliques kicking off the year apart and so we held one massive breakfast and invited every member of the class of 2000. We worked it out that each student would pay a minimal amount to cover the cost of the food and opened up the Governor’s Mansion to our entire senior class wearing black and gold. We wanted our class to feel united as we faced our senior year. Only forty-two years earlier, the man who occupied the Governor’s Mansion had stood in the door at Central to prevent black students from entering, and now here we were—a majority of our classmates black—gathered in the place he used to call home, singing our alma mater. It was a moment I was proud to help make happen.
The first test every incoming student takes at Central is to recite the alma mater, and I still remember it to this day. (Sadly my kids are not impressed when I sing it for them!)
Hail To The Old Gold,
Hail To The Black,
Hail Alma Mater,
Naught Does She Lack
We Love No Other,
So Let Our Motto Be,
Victory, Little Rock Central High!!!!
The Governor’s Mansion would later be the location for our senior homecoming dinner as well, and one of my friends there was Sarah Tucker, former governor Jim Guy Tucker’s daughter, whose room was now mine and who had become a friend and my running mate at Arkansas Girls State. Despite the bruising battles between our dads, who had once claimed to be governor at the same time, we had become friends in a sea of hundreds of students and didn’t let the politics get in the way. Something we could probably use a lot more of in America.
That same room that both Sarah Tucker and I called ours was also the childhood bedroom of Chelsea Clinton. It’s wild to think that I got ready for prom in the same place Chelsea got ready for her dad’s announcement for the presidency at the Old State House just down the street!
Leigh Scanlon Keener and Jordan Jones Rhodes, two of my oldest and closest friends I love and have always been able to count on, I met at Central. Now our kids are friends and are growing up together. I feel pride every time I drive by the school, see a kid wearing Central High clothing, or notice a post about the historic school on social media. Central High helped me to grow as a person, accept the differences of the people around me, and celebrate the fact we lived in a country where we could all succeed no matter how or where we started. There is still much work to do to close the racial divide in America. My faith teaches me that God created every human being to have dignity and purpose and to be loved. We need to be a country that values every human life and never tolerates racism or senseless violence. That starts by teaching our kids to love one another as God loves us, and remind them about the courage and the strength shown by those who have come before us, like the Little Rock Nine.
Later in my senior year of high school I enrolled at the University of Arkansas, but at the last moment instead chose to go to my dad’s alma mater—Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia. At Ouachita Baptist I met Lauren Brown, who quickly became one of my best friends and college roommates. Lauren and I were both political science majors who cared more about the boys than the classes. She is a planner, type A and a perfectionist, and I’m spontaneous and rarely organized. It was a perfect balance. After Lauren and I finished our sophomore year at OBU, we moved to Little Rock for the summer to work on my dad’s reelection campaign for governor. We were field staffers responsible for traveling the state, recruiting volunteers, and advancing and staffing my dad at campaign events. We spent most of the summer crisscrossing the state together, attending every parade and festival Arkansas has to offer. In Arkansas, we celebrate everything from watermelons to pink tomatoes—even bricks—at festivals. We race chuck wagons, toads, turtles, and cardboard boats, to name just a few. And we hunt most everything, including raccoon—which you can and must eat in order to not offend your hosts at the Gillette Coon Supper.
I spent most of my childhood on the Arkansas festival circuit campaigning with my dad and I loved it. It gave me a chance to see every part of the state, meet interesting people, and spend quality time with my family. Arkansas has a beautiful landscape of mountains, lakes, and rivers, and is an outdoorsman’s paradise. The Mississippi Delta in the eastern part of the state is the duck hunting capital of the world, and the Ozark and Ouachita mountains in the northwest offer world-class fly-fishing, kayaking, hiking, and mountain biking.
Back then as a college student and seasoned campaign volunteer, my role had slightly progressed from envelope stuffing, and Lauren and I were organizing and executing a statewide RV tour for my dad. It was early one morning, several days into the multiweek tour, and we had just finished with the first event of the day in Mountain View, a small town nestled in the Ozark Mountains, famous for being the folk music capital of the world. Every weekend you can still find folk musicians gathered all around the town square playing live music for anybody who wants to hang out and listen. I was driving Lauren’s maroon 1998 Toyota Camry because we had discovered she was a better navigator than driver.
It had been raining that morning and the curvy mountain roads were wet. Just as we came around the bend of one of the sharper turns the car started to hydroplane. I tightly gripped the wheel and nervously turned it to keep us on the road but overcorrected and sent us into a tailspin right off the side of the cliff. We flipped multiple times and crashed sideways into a tree jutting out the mountainside, crushing the roof of the car and shattering all the windows. It happened so fast. I hung sideways from my seatbelt and Lauren was pinned on the floor.
We were stuck against a tree on the side of the cliff. We asked each other a dozen times if the other was okay, if we were hurt or bleeding. We were in shock, and had no idea what to do. We searched for our cell phones but naturally there was no service in our location deep in the Ozarks.
We could not see the road, only rock and sky and valley below us. The realization was beginning to set in that no one might ever find us here. At that moment we began to hear voices. At first I believed it must be angels who had come to take us to heaven because there was simply no way we had just survived that crash. But neither of us appeared to be injured. We again heard voices—not the voices of heavenly angels—but two good ol’ boys in a pickup truck. The driver of the truck had happened to look in his rearview mirror at the moment we’d gone off the edge, and had turned his truck around to search for any survivors of the crash.
The men shouted down to us and in desperation we shouted back for help. They climbed down onto our sideways car and peered in at us through the shattered window. Hanging sideways by my seatbelt off the side of the cliff I can safely say I’d never been so happy to see a stranger in all my life. They pulled Lauren out first. I waited for a few minutes but for what felt like hours until they came back to rescue me.
The men pulled me out of the wreckage and back onto the road, where I was reunited with Lauren. We were banged up, but miraculously we had survived.
The Highway Patrol arrived not long after and radioed the state troopers with my dad not far away. They made it there quickly and the moment I saw my dad I fell apart.
We found out later that another car had gone off the cliff at nearly the exact location as we did and all the passengers had been killed. The tree on the side of the mountain had saved us, but we were also told that if our car had hit that tree six inches in the other direction we would have been killed on impact.
A few years later my friend, college roommate, and fellow survivor Lauren married my brother David. Our kids are now in the same grade at the same school in Little Rock and they’re best friends. None of us would be here if we hadn’t survived that wreck thanks to God and two angels in a pickup truck. I often look back on that day in the Ozarks. For me it is a reaffirmation of God’s grace, and a reminder to try harder every day to live a life worthy of having been saved.