Maurice Britt
United States Army Medal of Honor recipient
Maurice Lee "Footsie" Britt (June 29, 1919 – November 26, 1995) was an American military officer, businessman, and politician. He played professional football for the Detroit Lions in 1941 before entering active service with the U.S. Army during World War II, during which he was awarded the Medal of Honor.
Britt served as the 11th lieutenant governor of Arkansas during the administration of Governor Winthrop Rockefeller from 1967 to 1971. Rockefeller and Britt were the first Republicans to serve in the state of Arkansas's top two offices since Reconstruction.
Early life
He was born Maurice Britt in Carlise in Lonoke County in central Arkansas, the son of Maurice Lee and Virgie Britt. His family moved from Carlisle to nearby Lonoke when he was a boy. He received the nickname "Footsie" after winning a pair of shoes at a local fair as an adolescent; he had size-thirteen feet. He graduated as the valedictorian of Lonoke High School in 1937 and entered the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, where he was supported by an athletic scholarship in both football and basketball. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism and an Army Reserve commission as a Second Lieutenant of Infantry through Army Reserve Officers' Training Corps upon graduation in 1941. He was a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity.
“Maurice Britt” enters the record as united States Army Medal of Honor recipient. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Maurice, Britt and United can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maurice Britt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.