behind the scenes for racial integration, but finished a distant second with 83,856 votes (26.9%) Faubus went on to handily defeat Republican Roy Mitchell in the 1956 gubernatorial election for a second two-year term as governor. Being a staunch and lifelong segregationist, in 1955, in response to school integration occurring in Hoxie, Johnson proposed an amendment to the Arkansas constitution that would prohibit integration. Johnson also played a role in the Little Rock Nine crisis. He claimed to have hoaxed Governor Faubus into calling out the National Guard, supposedly to prevent a white mob from stopping the integration of Little Rock Central High School: "There wasn't any caravan. But we made Orval believe it. We said. 'They're lining up. They're coming in droves.' ... The only weapon we had was to leave the impression that the sky was going to fall." He later claimed that Faubus asked him to raise a mob to justify his actions. He was elected to the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1958 and served until 1966, when he resigned to run again for governor. Campaigns of 1966 and 1968 In 1966, Johnson entered the Democratic gubernatorial primary and led the six-candidate field with 105,607 votes (25.1%). He went into a runoff election with fellow former justice Frank Holt (1911–1983), who polled 92,711 votes (22.1%). liberal former U.S. Representative Brooks Hays of Little Rock, finished third with 64,814 (15.4%). Another former U.S. representative, Dale Alford, who had unseated Hays as a write-in candidate in 1958, ran fourth with 53,531 votes (12.7%). Prosecuting attorney Sam Boyce of Newport ran fifth with 49,744 (11.8%), and Raymond Rebasmen finished last with 35,607 votes (8.5%). In the runoff primary, Johnson prevailed with 210,543 ballots (51.9%) to Holt's 195,442 votes (48.1%). However, Johnson then lost the general election, 257,203 votes (45.6 percent) to the moderate Republican Winthrop Rockefeller, who polled 306,324 ballots (54.4%). Rockefeller was a younger brother of Nelson A. Rockefeller, who was then the Governor of New York and later Vice President of the United States under Gerald Ford. Jim Johnson won majorities in forty counties to Rockefeller's thirty-five counties. Every major population center, however, supported Winthrop Rockefeller, who prevailed in the northwestern counties, in Little Rock, and in many eastern counties with large African-American populations. Black voters provided Rockefeller's margin of victory. With this historic loss, Johnson became the first Southern Democrat since Reconstruction to be defeated by a