Bates & Cash at the Capitol (Editorial)

The U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. (Shutterstock)

It’s August. It’s hot. So perhaps readers will indulge us, allowing us to editorialize on a development that we think is wholly positive: the scheduled unveiling of a statue of Arkansas legend Johnny Cash at the U.S. Capitol.

Congress recently approved a Sept. 24 ceremony to dedicate the statue in the National Statuary Hall, which displays statues honoring two residents from each state. The Cash statue will join one of civil rights leader Daisy Bates, whose statue was installed in May.

The two statues replace those of Little Rock lawyer Uriah Rose, a founder of the American Bar Association, and James P. Clarke, a former Arkansas governor and senator. The state contributed the Rose statue in 1917 and the Clarke statue in 1921.

In 2019, state Sen. Dave Wallace, R-Leachville, introduced a bill to replace the Rose and Clarke statues with Bates and Cash. “What I wanted to do was find two individuals who represented the common man [or] the common person in the state of Arkansas,” Wallace said. “The common man or common woman who made a generational difference in how we look at things in Arkansas.”

He succeeded, and it’s good to know that Bates and Cash will now be representing Arkansas.