Our Arklahoma Heritage: Long before there was a Little Rock Central crisis, there was unity at Whorton Creek Elementary
In the fall of 1946, in a one-room school on Lower Whorton Creek in Madison County, a group of white children got into shoving matches.
They were fighting over who would get to sit next to the new girl.
Her name was Laverne Cook.
She was the last Black child left in Madison County. Hiring a separate teacher for one student was not practical, so the county and the teacher, Blenda Mathis, quietly enrolled her in the all-white school.
It was illegal under Arkansas’s segregation laws, and the arrangement was kept quiet. Cook was bright, popular, and treated by her classmates as just another kid.
A school photo from around that period shows her standing with her arms around one of the other girls.
She stayed only one year. Her family then moved to Washington County. Public records and later reporting have not turned up a clear trail of what became of her after that.
Eleven years later, in September 1957, the governor of Arkansas ordered the National Guard to surround Central High School in Little Rock and keep nine Black teenagers from walking through the doors. Those teenagers became known as the Little Rock Nine.
The governor was Orval Eugene Faubus, born January 7, 1910, in a rented log cabin on Greasy Creek in southern Madison County, not far from the hills where Laverne Cook had gone to school.
Faubus grew up poor in the Ozarks. His father, Sam Faubus, was a self-educated socialist who named his son Eugene after Eugene V. Debs and who later wrote letters criticizing his son’s stand on integration. Young Orval finished only the eighth grade in the irregular country schools of Madison County, then passed a teaching exam.
In his late teens and twenties he taught in one-room schools across the same county—sometimes seventy-four pupils in eight grades in a single room—alternating the winters of teaching with summers of fruit-picking, farm work, and lumberjacking. He later became circuit clerk of Madison County, published the Madison County Record, and returned often to the place where he was born.
He is buried in Combs Cemetery in Madison County.
When the Little Rock crisis arrived, Faubus was a six-term Democratic governor who had previously been viewed as a racial moderate. Facing re-election pressure, he called out the Guard on the pretext of preventing violence. The soldiers turned away the nine students.
President Eisenhower federalized the Guard, sent the 101st Airborne, and the students eventually entered under federal protection. The following year, Faubus closed the Little Rock high schools rather than continue integration--the “Lost Year.”
The contrast is stark. In Faubus’s home county, a decade earlier, local officials and a teacher had quietly done the practical thing when only one Black child remained: they put her in the existing school, and the children themselves treated her as one of them.
In Little Rock, the man who had taught those rural classrooms used the power of the state to stop a group of high-school students from doing the same thing.
Laverne Cook’s later life remains largely undocumented in the public record; the available accounts stop with her family’s move to Washington County after that single year. The episode itself, rediscovered in local historical work (including research by Kevin Hatfield) and reported in 2019, stands as a small, almost private counterpoint to the national drama that followed.
In the hills where Orval Faubus was born and taught, kids had already shown, without fanfare, that they could sit next to one another.
He just chose not to apply the lesson.
