Jeannette Katherine Rockefeller

Jeannette Edris Rockefeller was a lifelong volunteer and philanthropist and a former First Lady of Arkansas.

A native of Seattle, Rockefeller studied at the University of Washington and Finch College in New York, majoring in psychology. She met Winthrop Rockefeller while working with teen-age drug addicts and mentally ill children in New York, and they married in 1956. Rockefeller took part in a wide variety of public causes while her husband, Winthrop Rockefeller, was in office, transforming the role of First Lady in Arkansas into a public partnership. She was the second wife of Mr. Rockefeller, the first Republican Governor of Arkansas since Reconstruction, who served two terms, from 1967 to 1970. They divorced a year later.

She was an important backer of a Martin Luther King Memorial Service on the State Capitol steps after Dr. King was assassinated in 1968. The rally, attended by thousands of people, helped defuse what might have been a tense situation in the state.