Daisy Bates House: Command Post of the Little Rock Nine
Near Little Rock, Arkansas
The house at twelve oh seven West Twenty-Eighth Street in Little Rock looks like any modest home in this residential neighborhood. But in the fall of nineteen fifty-seven, it was the most important address in American civil rights.
Daisy Bates was the president of the Arkansas NAACP and, with her husband L.C., co-publisher of the Arkansas State Press, one of the most influential Black newspapers in the South. When the NAACP began pushing for the integration of Little Rock Central High School following the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the organization turned to Bates to coordinate the effort. She planned the strategy, selected the students who would attempt to enroll, and prepared them for what was coming.
The nine students, who became known as the Little Rock Nine, gathered at the Bates house each morning before school. Bates and other adults escorted them to Central High, then brought them back each afternoon. The home became the de facto command center for the entire desegregation effort, a place where Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights leaders passed through in person.
The response from segregationists was violent and sustained. Shots were fired through the windows of the Bates home. Crosses were burned in the yard on at least two occasions. Death threats arrived by mail and phone. L.C. and Daisy kept the house going anyway, serving as protectors, counselors, and strategists for nine teenagers trying to attend high school.
President Eisenhower eventually deployed the United States Army's One Hundred and First Airborne Division to escort the students inside Central High, one of the most extraordinary uses of federal military force for a civil rights cause in American history.
The Bates house was designated a National Historic Landmark. It has been restored and is administered by the National Park Service as part of the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site. Daisy Bates was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in nineteen ninety-nine, the year she died.
