Former circuit judge Wendell Griffen came one step closer to becoming the first Black county judge in Pulaski County history when he soundly defeated Barry Hyde in the Democratic primary for the position.
Griffen, 73, bested the three-term incumbent judge by roughly 10,000 votes.
Griffen: 25,638
Hyde: 15,251
“We defeated him,” Griffen said during a victory news conference Wednesday afternoon at his Little Rock law office. “There’s another word for it that you would use in the locker room, but I won’t say that.”
With the win Griffen will now take on unopposed Republican candidate Michael Rushin in November.
In the news conference, Griffen thanked his “family and supporters for their presence and support last night as we waited, hoped, and yearned for the chance to celebrate a great upset victory.”
The former Pulaski County Circuit Court judge said his campaign defied “the doubts of political insiders, and achieving our sweeping victory over an incumbent who some considered unbeatable” and that 25,00 voters “rejected having their needs rejected by a callous administration.”
Attempts to reach Hyde for comment were unsuccessful.
As of 1 p.m. Wednesday, Griffen said he had not heard from Hyde.
Griffen said that his victory “is a resounding statement that Pulaski County is not for sale.”
Asked about the key to his victory, Griffen said that it was because “we went everywhere, talked to everybody who would listen and listened to everybody who talked. And we try to do it so that people understood that that is the approach to governance that has to happen if we’re going to be fair, accountable, inclusive, transparent and trustworthy.”
Griffen contrasted this with Hyde, who he said never attended any candidate forums to address voters.
“I don’t know anybody who applies for a job and never shows up to the interview,” Griffen said. “Barry Hyde formally applied to be the elected county judge, and he missed every single candidate forum. … I showed up, I asked you questions. Barry was hiding. Griffen was standing up, speaking up, showing up.”
At the Pulaski County Administration building, portraits of every person who has been the county judge line the walls of the Quorum Court’s meeting room. Should Griffen defeat Rushin in November, he’d become the first non-white judge to be included.
As someone born in 1952 who grew up in a world “with separate water fountains and often fountains that didn’t work,” this is not lost on Griffen.
“I will be the only county judge who lived and was not privileged by Jim Crow,” Griffen noted. “Every other county judge before me lived in the shadow and privilege of Jim Crow.”
Griffen added that him being the county judge can lead to “new, exciting opportunities made possible because of lessons that those of us who’ve lived through the oppression of Jim Crow have learned and have treated not as trophies, but as treasures to learn from and to show what we can do better.”
