Daisy Bates, Architect of the Crisis
Near Little Rock, Arkansas
The Little Rock Nine did not walk into Central High School by accident. They were recruited, prepared, coached, and sustained through a year of harassment by a woman named Daisy Bates, who ran the Arkansas State Press newspaper with her husband Lucius Christopher Bates and served as the Arkansas president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Daisy Bates was born around nineteen fourteen in Huttig, Arkansas.
When she was a child, her mother was murdered, her father believed by white men, though no one was ever charged. Her father abandoned her, and she never saw him again. She was raised by family friends.
She grew up understanding, in the most personal possible way, that the justice system was not built to protect her. She and L.C.
Bates founded the Arkansas State Press in nineteen forty-one, and they used it relentlessly to expose police brutality, lynchings, and the daily mechanics of segregation in Arkansas. The paper lost advertisers. They kept publishing.
When the school board identified the students who would attempt integration at Central High, Bates became their primary liaison to the NAACP's national leadership, to the federal government, and to the press. She organized the safe escort of the Nine throughout the year, hosted NAACP officials and journalists in her home, and provided the students and their parents with somewhere to turn when the school administration and city government offered nothing. In retaliation, advertisers abandoned the Arkansas State Press and the paper folded in nineteen fifty-nine.
Bates and her husband were financially ruined by their advocacy. She published her memoir, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, in nineteen sixty-two. She eventually revived the paper in nineteen eighty-four.
She died in nineteen ninety-nine, and a Congressional Gold Medal was awarded to her posthumously that year with the Little Rock Nine. Her home on West Twenty-Eighth Street, where she sheltered students and met with civil rights leaders, has been designated a National Historic Landmark.
