Amis Guthridge

Amis Guthridge was a Pulaski County lawyer and co-founder of the lower-middle class Capital Citizens' Council (CCC) during the Little Rock Crisis.

Guthridge attended Fort Smith High School where he served as class president. He campaigned for Dixiecrat Party candidates in the elections of 1948, and failed in a run for U.S. Congress against Brooks Hays in 1952. Around June 1955 he joined White America Inc. and offered his legal services to the campaign to prevent race mixing under the Brown v. Board of Education decision. He attended the Hoxie, Arkansas, anti-integration rally in August 1955 and spoke of the lack of political will for integration apparent inside the state. The Hoxie Citizens Committee retained the lawyer for an anticipated lawsuit against the Hoxie School Board.

Guthridge supported Orval Faubus in his re-election campaign of 1956, and vowed the resist integration even if it meant closing all the public schools of the state and replacing them with private schools. Guthridge argued forcefully in the press and at school board meetings that the Little Rock school district had acted improperly by integrating Central High School but not Hall High School, effectively trapping lower-middle income whites in the only integrated high school in the city.

References

• Elizabeth Jacoway, Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis that Shocked the Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 66-83.