Bates, the president of the Arkansas State Conference of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), was an advisor to nine African-American high school students who attempted to enroll in Little Rock Central High School and were initially prevented by Governor Faubus who called on the National Guard to stop the school’s integration. She worked on anti-poverty programs in D.C., community revitalization in Arkansas, and even authored a book, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, detailing her struggle to integrate her home state’s schools.Īmerican Civil Rights leader & journalist Daisy Bates (1914 – 1999) (standing) talks with some of the Little Rock Nine at her home, Little Rock, Arkansas October 1957. Though Bates’s legacy was forever cemented in history for her work on school desegregation, she continued her thoughtful activism for years after that September day in 1957. President Eisenhower sent federal troops to ensure they made it past the sea of angry agitators and into their classroom seats.
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There they learned defense mechanisms, such as how to respond to intimidation tactics in a hostile school environment. And on September 25, 1957, after two prior failed attempts, Daisy Gaston Bates led those nine children from her home, into a school where teachers, students, and parents made it clear they were not wanted. Weeks before the fateful day, she prepared the students for the battle ahead by providing counseling sessions. Bates, along with other members of the Arkansas NAACP, vetted the group of nine students and resolved that they had the power, both in mind and strength, to face the opposition they would encounter at the doors of Little Rock High.
McAvoy/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images)īates, through her work as a writer and editor, had been focusing her attention on the integration of schools since the Brown decision, but when the opportunity to integrate Arkansas arrived on her front steps, she became the chief strategizer in a plan to dismantle the segregationist vision of the Jim Crow south. Bates, the president of the Arkansas State Conference of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), was an advisor to nine African-American high school students who attempted to enroll in Little Rock Central High School and were initially prevented by Governor Orval Faubus who called on the National Guard to stop the school’s integration. Board of Education determined school segregation was unconstitutional, and almost a decade before Jim Crow laws saw their legal demise with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.Īmerican Civil Rights leader & journalist Daisy Bates (1914 – 1999) (center) stands with four African-American students in front of her home, Little Rock, Arkansas, September 1957. Ferguson, a little over three years after Brown v. This was roughly 91 years after the Supreme Court defined “separate but equal” in Plessy v. But Daisy Gaston Bates should never be forgotten for her bravery, tenacity, and her vision for civil rights.Īt the time Bates was the president of the Arkansas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP), having assumed the position in 1952. It often neglects to celebrate our efforts, and our struggles to make America what it is today. History has never been particularly kind to Black women.
The most enduring of her actions involves assembling a troop of nine school children: Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls, and registering them to become the first African Americans to ever attend Little Rock, Arkansas’s Central High School. The woman who, with her husband Lucious Christopher “L.C.” Bates, ran the Arkansas State Press and confronted injustice both through words and actions. Her father is said to have left her to be raised by friends of the family. But it is this childhood trauma that spurred her to become the author and activist she is remembered to have been. At just three years old her mother was sexually assaulted, then murdered by three white men. (Photo by New York Times Co./Getty Images)īates, born Daisy Lee Gaston in Huttig, Arkansas, on November 11, 1914, is said to have grown up in the shadows of tragedy.
American Civil Rights leader and journalist Daisy Bates (1914 – 1999) sits with a notepad as she looks out through the broken and taped front window of her home, Little Rock, Arkansas, 1958.
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