The Orval Faubus Anthem:
From the Central High Crisis to the Negro Boys Industrial School Fire
In 1957, during the Little Rock Central High School Crisis, the Warner family recorded a song titled We Like Faubus in open support of Governor Orval Faubus. It was a piece of music made to reassure Arkansans that the Governor’s choices during school integration were the right ones. Listening to it today offers a window into the political mood of the state at the time.
That public mood mattered. It shaped policy, shaped attitudes, and shaped the systems that operated far from the view of most Arkansans. One of those systems was the Negro Boys Industrial School outside Little Rock…out of sight and out of mind.
Eighteen months after the crisis at Central High, twenty-one boys died behind locked doors in a fire. The same environment that produced a pro-Faubus anthem also produced a state institution where Black children lived in unsafe conditions without oversight, protection, or accountability.
The song has become a reminder of the gap between what leaders said about the future of Arkansas and the daily reality for the children in their care. Understanding both events together helps us see the broader pattern. The same politics that resisted integration also left the boys at Wrightsville vulnerable and unseen.
Below is the 1957 recording. It sits not only in a particular moment of Arkansas history but also in the long shadow of the fire that followed.
Credit: The Warners, We Like Faubus/Arkansas, My Arkansas, Song Recording. Orval Eugene Faubus Papers (MS F27 301 FAUBUS), Box: 802, Disc: 13. Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville.
