Robert “Say” McIntosh, the fiery Little Rock political activist and restaurateur whose provocations earned him local fame and notoriety in the ’80s and ’90s, died over the weekend at the age of 79.
McIntosh was known for his community-minded generosity and service: He founded a Christmas toy drive for poor children, handed out gifts in a Santa suit, served free Thanksgiving dinners to those in need, and, in his later years, mounted an anti-violence campaign to stem rising homicides in the Black community in Little Rock. In 1976, Gov. David Pryor proclaimed that year’s Christmas Eve to be “Say McIntosh Day.”
He was a self-made entrepreneur, founding a string of restaurants and becoming legendary for his homemade pies, somewhere along the line becoming known as “The Sweet Potato Pie King of Little Rock.” McIntosh’s culinary legacy lives on with McIntosh Pies and Grill on Wheels, operated by his grandson. His second food truck started rolling in April.
While the pies earned McIntosh some local fame, it was his erratic forays into politics that earned him broader attention. Refused a meeting with Gov. Frank White in 1981, McIntosh set up a wooden cross in front of the state Capitol and staged his own “crucifixion”; he had to be hospitalized after suffering from heat stroke. He attempted to cut down a tree on the Capitol grounds planted in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., apparently to protest a lack of Black representation in city government.
He papered the city with flyers attacking Bill Clinton, claiming the then-governor had fathered a Black son out of wedlock. In 1990, he punched a white supremacist political candidate on camera, only to endorse him for office afterwards.
All these and many more details from McIntosh’s long career as a political gadfly were documented in the Arkansas Times in a 2011 retrospective by David Koon. Among the passages worth reading at length:
Earnest Franklin was Say McIntosh’s best friend in his teen-age years and serves as the spokesman for McIntosh’s “Say Stop the Violence” campaign. He said that even the more flamboyant things McIntosh did were, at their core, always about bringing attention to problems in the black community. Franklin and McIntosh became friends around 1962, when both were working as waiters at Franke’s. McIntosh was always dressed to the nines when he wasn’t at work, Franklin remembers, sometimes changing clothes two or three times a day. He said McIntosh got the nickname “Say,” because of his tendency to get loud during arguments. “They’d say: ‘Say, say, say, say, hold it!’ ” Franklin said. “That’s really the only way you could calm him down because he’s always been a real hyper person who doesn’t mind fighting. If you push him in a corner, he’s coming out.”
In the early days of their friendship, Franklin said, he and McIntosh were only interested in the things all young men seem to be concerned with: girls, nightclubs, having a good time and looking sharp. Their work as waiters brought them in contact with Arkansas’s high rollers, helping McIntosh build some of the contacts he’d call on later in life. McIntosh’s philanthropic streak started early; he started collecting toys for the needy in the early 1970s. Franklin said that it was the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, however, that turned McIntosh’s eye toward trying to be a force for change.
“At that particular point, that’s when he started getting involved,” Franklin said. “He’d had a chance to meet executive people — lawyers like Bill Walker and Sonny Walker, and all those type of men — who would say ‘Hey man, don’t take no whatever.’ They endorsed him whenever he would get into it. People like Dr. [Jerry] Jewell and others that knew him would try to help him because of his kind heart.”
Franklin said that McIntosh often served as a voice to express the feelings of more well-connected men in the black community. “They couldn’t act out like him, but Say, somebody like him (would say): ‘I’ll go down there and say it! I’ll go down and stand on the chief’s desk!’ ” Franklin said. “We knew all those people, firsthand. As the old saying is always said: ‘Boy, if you’ll keep your feet out of the grave, I can keep you out of the pen!’ “
While hard proof of those relationships isn’t the kind of thing anybody would have written down, McIntosh did seem to have angels on his shoulder during all his long years as a political gadfly and activist, finding funding to re-open his famous restaurant time and again despite financial difficulties, and repeatedly dodging serious jail time and penalties for various incidents, both personal and political. A January 1984 story in the Arkansas Gazette marveled over the fact that he’d only been fined a total of $1 for his last seven arrests.
Franklin said that McIntosh told him in later years that at least some of his most colorful run-ins with politicians were actually paying gigs, with McIntosh compensated well to serve as a foil or “create a scene.”
“A lot of that stuff he was doing, most of the time, he was getting paid to do it,” Franklin said. “It wasn’t an act out of his own character or just being mean. It was just something for publicity … It was a political thing — just to show a racial [angle]. But none of that is within his heart anywhere. He’s kind to everybody.”