The Legacy of Daisy Bates

The Legacy of Daisy BatesAuthor(s): Linda ReedSource: The Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Spring, 2000), pp. 76-83Published by: Arkansas Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40027970 .

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The Legacy of Daisy Bates

LINDA REED

On November 4, 1999, Arkansas and America lost a freedom fighter when Daisy Bates died at the age of eighty-four.1 Fortunately, Daisy Bates' s efforts for justice and equality had received the recognition they deserved during her lifetime. She was praised by Eleanor Roosevelt, commended by the Arkansas General Assembly, and hon- ored at a conference in Little Rock in September 1997 marking the for- tieth anniversary of the integration of Central High School, an earthshaking event in which she had played a central role.2 In death, she received further recognition for her activism in the name of humanity. Her heroism was lauded by President Bill Clinton, by Arkansas Gover- nor Mike Huckabee, even by an old segregationist foe, Jim Johnson. Daisy Bates became the first woman and first African American to lie in state in Arkansas' s state capitol.3

But how will Mrs. Bates be remembered over time? What will we remember most about her? How did her actions (and the operative word here is actions) have a lasting impact on the way we live? Daisy Bates

'On Daisy Bates' s death, see Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, November 5, 1999, 1A, 3A, 14A-15A; on her funeral, see ibid., November 9, 1999, 1 A, 8A. The author thanks her friend and colleague at the University of Houston, Dr. Gretchen Wiggins, and Wiggins' s brother, Mr. Alonzo W. Flowers II of Little Rock, for securing the newspaper clippings cited here. They both are native Arkansans and come from a family rich in history. The William Harold Flowers Law Society of Arkansas is named in honor of their father, a key civil rights attorney in the state. The author also thanks Dr. Dunbar H. Ogden, associate professor and chairman of the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Ogden' s father, a white minister, came from the sidelines to assist Mrs. Bates in her efforts in 1957.

2New York Times, November 5, 1999, Bll; biographical sketch, Daisy Bates Papers, Special Collections Division, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville. The greater part of this essay comes from a luncheon address the author delivered at the Little Rock conference. A major publication resulted from the conference, Elizabeth Jacoway and C. Fred Williams, eds., Understanding the Little Rock Crisis: An Exercise in Remembrance and Reconciliation (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999).

^Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, November 5, 1999, 3A, November 9, 1999, 1A, 8A.

Linda Reed is Director of the African American Studies Program and Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston.

THE ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY VOL. LIX, NO. 1, SPRING 2000



Daisy Bates in 1958. Courtesy Special Collections Division, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville.



78 ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

will surely be remembered for her courage in withstanding verbal threats, verbal abuse, and physical danger in her efforts to make room for everyone within the framework of American democracy. If we say it once, we say it a thousand times in our history classes, African Amer- icans in general have been consistent in pushing America to live up to its promise of equality. Daisy Bates lived that experience in assisting nine youths (Melba Pattillo, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray, Carlotta Walls, Terrance Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, Minnijean Brown, and Thelma Mothershed) to attend the once all-white Central High in Little Rock. She played a leadership role within the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, serving as Presi- dent of the Arkansas Conference of NAACP branches between 1952 and 1961. With her husband, L. C. Bates, she ran the State Press, a weekly newspaper outspoken in its denunciation of prejudice and segregation. And though she suffered a stroke in 1965, she was subse- quently active in bringing community services and federal antipoverty aid to a small town in the Arkansas delta, Mitchellville. These activities surely touched the lives of people in Arkansas, but they were also of broader consequence, both reflecting and helping to accelerate a grow- ing national movement.4

The struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, often termed the Second Re- construction, had roots in other periods of America's past. The African- American experience in the United States has generally been one of resistance to oppression and exploitation. The Civil War ushered in the revolutionary change of freedom for four million people of African de- scent, but the incomplete promises of Reconstruction dictated that if black people were ever to exercise their constitutional rights, they had to continue to demand "freedom" and the federal government's en- forcement of the Constitution. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, white Americans found new ways to restrict African Americans' social, economic, and political lives. Black resistance and the struggle for equality, therefore, have had to be an ongoing effort. As Vincent Harding has suggested, the African- American struggle for freedom and justice, pushed forward by inflexible oppressors, evolved into a movement that is ever flowing like a river, one that yet flows in the twenty-first century.5

4Biographical sketch, Bates Papers. 5Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America

(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), esp. xi-xxvi.



DAISY BATES 79

Daisy Bates was aware of that history of struggle and exemplified key elements of it.6 Blacks' twentieth-century struggle relied on a tra- dition (an evolving heritage) of inner strength, or what is generally re- ferred to as initiative and courage-qualities that even her critics granted that Daisy Bates possessed in abundance. More specifically, Bates serves as a leading example of the key role women have played in the civil rights movement, a role to which historians have only begun to ac- cord prominent recognition and systematic study (the role and participation of children is yet to be adequately addressed).7 In the nineteenth century and thereafter women aided in the struggle for freedom and sometimes proved more successful than males because their movements were less restricted or even because white males, the wielders of power, saw them as less threatening. This latter fact, for example, caused black men in rural Alabama to seek their help as mediators with white landowners during the 1930s and 1940s, as historian Robin Kelly has shown.8

Black women often engaged in the same resistance and protest activities as men, but in the case of Daisy Bates and her contemporary Rosa Parks, their roles were accentuated by the very fact of their wom- anhood. In the 1950s and 1960s, as protest became the vehicle for at- tracting attention to a movement seeking rights already guaranteed by the Constitution, black women symbolized the fundamental core of the movement precisely because they were the least powerful members of the community in economic and political terms. As accomplished a woman as her work with the NAACP and State Press demonstrated

6Daisy Bates' s knowledge of history is evident in various oral history interviews and in her book, The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986 [New York: D. McKay, 1962]). Other useful personal accounts of the Little Rock school desegregation crisis include Virgil T. Blossom, It Has Happened Here (New York: Harper & Row, 1959); Elizabeth Huckaby, Crisis at Central High: Lit- tle Rock, 1957-58 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1980); Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High (New York: Washington Square Press, 1994).

7In an essay published in The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 244-245, Darlene Clark Hine has written of the crying need for studies of women in the civil rights movement. To date no comparative study of particular women (black or white) has been written, but scholarly studies of key individuals are beginning to appear, including Kay Mills, This Lit- tle Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (New York: Dutton, 1993); Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom 's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); Joanne Grant, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998); Cynthia Griggs Fleming, Soon We Will Not Cry: The Liberation of Ruby Smith Robinson (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).

8Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).




Bates to be, she was intimately acquainted with the price of women's powerlessness. Not many years after Bates' s birth in the south Arkan- sas town of Huttig, her mother had been murdered while being sexually assaulted by three white men.9

Significantly, Daisy Bates and Rosa Parks-often called the mother of the modern civil rights movement-played pivotal roles almost si- multaneously in their respective states of Arkansas and Alabama. Women had been key players in freedom movements prior to 1955-including Mary McLeod Bethune (founder of a college and administrator in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's National Youth Administration), Mary Church Terrell (a leader in women's rights and civil rights almost all of her life), and Charlotte Hawkins Brown (founder of a school in North Carolina and leader in the Southern Conference Educational Fund and other civil rights organizations). But Parks' act-sitting down on a bus in Montgomery in order to stand up for equal rights-took on enormous practical and symbolic meaning. Her arrest inspired blacks to act in a sustained, concerted, collective effort. A working woman, Parks more easily assumed the role of the underdog than an activist from a more elite background might have-the poor, humble, often reli- gious heroine or hero who would serve as a rallying point for mass action during the 1950s and 1960s. During the Little Rock school desegregation crisis, less than two years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott sparked by Parks, it was the nine students-perhaps most strik- ingly Elizabeth Eckford-more than Daisy Bates herself who took on the public role of steadfast underdog. But it was Bates who had rallied the community, both in pressing integration upon Little Rock and Ar- kansas in her capacity as NAACP leader and in personally supporting and guiding the students and their parents throughout the crisis.

In addition to Bates being a crucial example of the importance of women leaders in the civil rights movement, her participation in school desegregation exemplified an important focus of that movement, and especially of the NAACP, through the 1950s. All parties to the civil rights debates recognized how crucial education was. Both races saw education as a stepping stone to better economic opportunities for black people. Civil rights leaders recognized that an education was the most important among the interlocking characteristics that formed a person- ality equipped for success in twentieth-century life. The quality of their education made a decided difference in people's life chances-in terms of the range and quality of employment options, the salaries they might

9 Arkansas Democrat Gazette, November 5, 1999, 3A; New York Times, November 5, 1999, Bll.



DAISY BATES 81

command, their upward mobility, their ability eventually to provide for their families, and, overall, their satisfaction with themselves and their role in society. A recognition of education's role in advancement seems also to have motivated white opposition to integration, in Little Rock and elsewhere. Some whites hoped to continue to deny black people a chance for an education that would help them obtain better jobs. Rac- ism and economics intertwined. These whites were ahead economically and intended to see that the situation remained that way.

The Supreme Court, it turned out, understood what was at stake as well. Chief Justice Earl Warren pointedly stated: "Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments . . . . It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsi- bilities ... It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in pre- paring him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education."10 Accordingly, the Court decided in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) that separate schools for black and white children denied African Americans equal opportunity and, thus, the equal protection guaranteed them by the Fourteenth Amend- ment. For the first time since 1896 segregationists were placed on the defensive. But the end of one struggle for black people necessitated the beginning of another, because numerous white segregationists were determined that black and white children would not go to school together.

In Arkansas, it was Daisy Bates and the NAACP who took a leading role in efforts to force authorities to make good on the promise of Brown. As the Little Rock school board, under the prodding of the NAACP (including a law suit), moved in 1957 toward the limited desegregation of the previously all-white Central High School, white extremists determined to stop the process in its tracks. Governor Orval Faubus prevented nine black students' admission by calling out the Na- tional Guard, precipitating a nationally and internationally observed drama. President D wight D. Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne Di- vision to guarantee the youths' safe attendance. Amidst the turmoil, a number of the community's black leaders backed away from the con- troversy, but Daisy Bates came to the fore once again, becoming a spokesperson for and adviser to the students and personally taking re-

10Jack Greenberg, Race Relations and American Law (New York: Columbia Univer- sity Press, 1959), 208-09.




sponsibility for their physical safety.11 She helped Little Rock's black community to make desegregation an eventual success despite numerous obstacles. And, in making integration an issue Little Rock could not avoid and in keeping the students and their families steadfast during the crisis, Daisy Bates played an important role in forcing the federal government to once again act as the guarantor of rights the Fourteenth Amendment had committed it to defending some ninety years before. The Little Rock crisis marked the first deployment of federal power in the post-Reconstruction South to enforce equal citizenship.

Extremists had warned Daisy Bates in 1957 of the damage that would come to her and her husband if she continued agitating the school desegregation issue. The couple had invested their savings in their weekly newspaper and over the years they had begun to prosper. By 1959, however, business firms and advertising agencies were can- celing or not renewing their contracts with the paper and the Bateses watched over sixteen years of their life's work dwindle away. Mrs. Bates agonized over the thought of destroying her husband's invest- ment. She could endure whatever sacrifice she needed to make, but she questioned the justice of forcing Mr. Bates to suffer too. But L. C. Bates believed firmly in the work that his wife had undertaken, and he constantly reassured her. The Bateses had paid a heavy price for their role in desegregating that single school in Little Rock. Not only did the State Press close up shop, physical damage had been done to their home and car. The emotional and psychological turmoil must have also taken a heavy toll. Yet Daisy Bates did not shrink from public life. She moved to Washington, DC in the early 1960s to work for the Demo- cratic National Committee and, later, for Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty." She returned to Arkansas after her stroke and headed a fed- erally backed community development project in Desha County that secured a community center and water and sewer systems for Mitch- ellville and paved its streets. In 1984, she revived the State Press.12

We know from studying history that freedom exacts a price. We are commonly prone to declare that anything worth having may call for a substantial sacrifice. Daisy Bates was one who was willing to pay that price. She remained optimistic even as others tried to shatter her and her supporters' bright hope for a different tomorrow, a better future. Mrs. Bates is a key figure in the modern-day civil rights movement. We professors teach about her when we teach that subject on campuses

11 See, for example, John A. Kirk, "The Little Rock Crisis and Postwar Black Activ- ism in Arkansas," Arkansas Historical Quarterly 56 (Autumn 1997): 290-292.

12Biographical sketch, Bates Papers.



DAISY BATES 83

across this country. In years to come, her name will be spoken in the same breath as those of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman as one who fought to build a better world.



The Legacy of Daisy Bates

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