Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas

The Arkansas Gazette’s executive editor Harry Ashmore and the Gazette vehemently answered Governor Orval Faubus’s calling out of an armed detachment of the Arkansas National Guard to surround Central High School, ostensibly to quell mob violence, with the front-page editorial, “The Crisis Mr. Faubus Made,” taking the argument beyond segregation-versus-integration to the supremacy of the federal government in all matters of law. Under Faubus’s orders, the guardsmen had turned away the Little Rock Nine as they tried to enter the school. As the days and weeks wore on, the Gazette covered all the developments of the ongoing crisis.