Retired judge set for Kolb Lecture
Pulaski Heights Baptist Church has tapped retired Arkansas Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert L. Brown to speak at its second annual Kolb Lecture on Faith and Public Life.
The event is named for Dr. Payton Kolb and his wife, Margaret, who joined the congregation upon moving to Little Rock in 1947 and remained a faithful member until her death in January 2009.
Kolb helped form the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools, which was launched in September 1958 after then-Gov. Orval Faubus shut Little Rock’s public high schools in an effort to prevent desegregation.
After what’s become known as the “Lost Year,” the organization helped lead a recall campaign, which removed three Faubus-backed segregationists from the School Board in May 1959. The classrooms reopened in the fall.
Named Greater Little Rock’s 1964 Woman of the Year by readers of the Arkansas Democrat’s Sunday magazine, Kolb later joined Democrats for Rockefeller, serving as its state coordinator for women’s activities in 1966.
In that role, she helped Republican Winthrop Rockefeller defeat Democrat James D. “Justice Jim” Johnson, a segregationist state Supreme Court associate justice who had resigned that year in order to seek the governor’s mansion.
Brown, the son of Episcopal Bishop Robert Raymond Brown, arrived in town shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down segregated schools.
His father led the Episcopal Diocese of Arkansas from October 1956 until 1970 and helped organize an interfaith day of prayer at the height of the conflict that was endorsed not only by Faubus and the School Board but also by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Robert L. Brown was a high school student during the Little Rock crisis and spent the Lost Year at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Austin, Texas, the first integrated boarding school in the South.
Brown will share memories from his childhood during Sunday’s lecture.
“I think what I’ll do is just see how the Spirit moves me,” he said.
He remembers many of the women who fought so hard to get classrooms open again. He remembers the courage of the Little Rock Nine. And he recalls his father’s 1958 trip to England for the Lambeth Conference, a meeting of Anglican bishops from around the world.
With the Little Rock crisis unresolved, even the residents of Buckingham Palace were monitoring the developments.
“The bishops [were] introduced to the Queen, the monarch, and he was introduced as the ‘Lord High Bishop of Our-Kansas.’ And the queen looked down at him and said, ‘Arkan-saw.’”
“She was au courant on that one for sure,” he said.
After finishing his senior year at St. Stephen’s, Brown went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from the University of the South (Sewanee) in Tennessee in 1963, a master of arts degree in English and comparative literature from Columbia University in 1965 and a juris doctorate from the University of Virginia in 1968.
Last year, he published a memoir, titled “All Rise: How Race, Religion and Politics Shaped My Career on the Arkansas Supreme Court.”
Last year’s lecture was delivered by Angela Gorrell, former assistant professor of practical theology at Baylor University and the author of “The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found.”
Pulaski Heights Baptist Church has been at the corner of Kavanaugh Boulevard and Cedar Street for 110 years, according to Marilou Brodie, a longtime member and one of the lecture’s organizers.
It severed ties a few years ago with the Southern Baptist Convention.
“Our church is affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Arkansas, which is now [known as] Great Rivers Fellowship, and Margaret [Kolb] was actually one of the charter members for that,” she said.
If you go: Former Arkansas Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert L. Brown will deliver the Kolb Lecture on Faith and Public Life at 4 p.m. Sunday at Pulaski Heights Baptist Church, 2200 Kavanaugh Blvd. The event is free. Copies of Brown’s book will be sold at the event or can be bought from WordsWorth Books in Little Rock and amazon.com