Daisy Lee Gatson Bates

BATES, DAISY LEE GATSON

Daisy Lee Gatson Bates, a CIVIL RIGHTS activist
and newspaper publisher, was a key figure in the
INTEGRATION of public schools in Little Rock,
Arkansas, in the late 1950s. When a storm of
violent public protest swept Little Rock, Bates
orchestrated the strategies that would reverse
200 years of state-sanctioned SEGREGATION.
Bates was born in 1920 in Huttig, in the
lumbering region of southeast Arkansas. When
she was a baby, her mother was raped and murdered.
No one was prosecuted for the crime, but
suspicion in the town centered on three white
men. After her mother’s death, her father fled,
leaving Bates with his best friends, Orlee Smith
and Susie Smith, who adopted her and raised
her as their only child. They were kind and
indulgent parents and Bates grew to be a strongwilled
and determined child. When she was
eight, she learned of the circumstances of her
birth and ADOPTION. The painful knowledge of
her parents’ suffering and the harsh realities of
life in the rural south became driving forces in
Bates’s life.
Although she grew up during difficult economic
times, Bates’s childhood was relatively
comfortable. Her relationship with her adoptive
parents was warm and loving, and she was
especially close to her father. Nevertheless,
Bates’s childhood was not easy. Like other black
children, she experienced the sting of RACIAL
DISCRIMINATION from an early age. She attended
a segregated public school, using worn textbooks
handed down from the white children’s
school. Her school was little more than a room
with a potbellied stove that gave so little heat
she and her classmates often kept their coats on
all day.
In 1941 Orlee Smith became gravely ill.
When he knew he was going to die, he called his
daughter to his side. He was aware of the anger
and pain she carried because of her mother’s
death and her father’s disappearance and
because of the bigotry that was a part of their
everyday life. He counseled her not to let hatred
and hostility control her but rather to use her
strong feelings as a catalyst to work for change.
He said:
Don’t hate white people just because they’re
white. If you hate, make it count for something.
Hate the humiliations we are living
under in the South. Hate the discrimination
that eats away at the soul of every black man
and woman. Hate the insults hurled at us by
white scum—then try to do something about
it, or your hate won’t spell a thing.
Smith’s death became a kind of rebirth for
Bates. She did not know it then, but his words
would strengthen and sustain her resolve during
the difficult struggles she was to face.
In 1942 Bates married Lucius Christopher
Bates, an insurance agent and friend of her late
father, and settled in Little Rock. Her husband
had majored in journalism at Wilberforce College,
in Ohio, and the young couple pooled their
savings and began publishing the Arkansas State
Press.While writing and publishing the fledgling
paper, Bates also enrolled in business administration
and public relations courses at Shorter
College, in Rome, Georgia. The State Press
quickly became the largest and most influential
black paper in Arkansas.
With the entry of the United States into
WORLD WAR II, Camp Robinson, near Little
Rock, was reopened. The influx of soldiers,
many of whom were black men from northern
cities, caused racial tensions to rise in the city.
The State Press had gained a reputation as an
independent “voice of the people” and regularly
attacked police brutality, segregation, and
inequities in the criminal justice system. When
the paper reported a particularly gruesome incident
in which a black soldier was killed by a
white policeman, many advertisers who were
wary of antagonizing their white patrons withdrew
their support, and circulation of the paper
dropped. However, the Bateses were able to stay
afloat and eventually regain their advertisers and
rebuild the paper’s circulation. Their tenacity
paid off in changes in working and living conditions
for blacks in Arkansas. For example, as a
result of their reporting on police brutality in
black neighborhoods, black police officers were
hired to patrol those areas.
From their earliest days in Little Rock, Bates
and her husband were active in the local branch
of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP). In 1952, Bates
was elected president of the Arkansas State Conference of NAACP branches. In 1954 when the
Supreme Court handed down its historic decision
in BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION 347
U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954),
declaring that segregated schools are “inherently
unequal,” she and her colleagues began pressing
for implementation of the Court’s mandate to
desegregate the schools “with all deliberate
speed” (Brown v. Board of Education, 349 U.S.
294 at 301, 75 S. Ct. 753 at 756, 99 L. Ed. 1083
[1955]). Because of her prominent position with
the NAACP, Bates found herself a central character
in the integration battle that soon erupted
in Little Rock.
The Little Rock School Board chose nine
black students to be the first to integrate Little
Rock Central High School. Planning and coordination
of the activities of the group, which
came to be known as the Little Rock Nine, fell to
Bates. By September 1, 1957, angry crowds had
begun milling around Central High to protest
and try to prevent the enrollment of the black
students. On September 2, the day before school
was to open, Governor Orval Faubus dispatched
the Arkansas National Guard and ordered it to
surround Central. Claiming that he was protecting
Little Rock’s citizens from possible mob violence,
he declared that no black students would
be allowed to enter the school and that “blood
[would] run in the streets” if any attempted to
do so.
NAACP lawyers Wiley Branton and THURGOOD
MARSHALL (later a U.S. Supreme Court
justice) promptly obtained an INJUNCTION
against Faubus for his interference, but Faubus
refused to withdraw the troops. Bates decided to
have the students enter the school in a group.
She contacted eight of them and told them to
assemble at a designated intersection the morning
of September 4 and travel to school
together. The ninth student, Elizabeth Eckford,
did not receive word of the plan.Unaware of the
maelstrom awaiting her, Eckford arrived at
Central High alone and was taunted, jeered, and
accosted by hundreds of white people as
reporters and photographers from around the
world observed and recorded the scene. The
National Guard did not attempt to help Eckford
but instead blocked her entrance to the school.
Neither she nor any of the other members of
the Little Rock Nine—who arrived later in a
group, as arranged—were allowed to pass through the line of Guard members surrounding
the school.
The attempt by Bates and the nine students
to enter Central set off a series of violent incidents
that continued for 17 days. On September
20, attorneys Branton and Marshall obtained an
injunction barring the use of the National
Guard to interfere with integration at Central
High. By this time, the Bateses’ home had
become the unofficial center of activity and
communication for the integration effort.
Reporters from all over the United States came
and went, some staying days or weeks.
On September 23 all the Little Rock Nine
met at the Bates home to try again to exercise
their right to enter Central High. Traveling in
two cars they drove to a side entrance of the
building, away from the persistent throng, and
were escorted into the school by police officers.
Again mob violence spread through the city.
Later in the day the students were secretly
removed from the school through a delivery
entrance, and the chief of police declared that
Little Rock was under a reign of terror.
The next day the black students remained at
home. The mayor and the chief of police
appealed to the U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
for assistance. In response, President DWIGHT D.
EISENHOWER federalized the Arkansas National
Guard and ordered Secretary of Defense Charles
E. Wilson to enforce the integration order. Wilson
ordered 1,000 paratroopers from the 101st
Airborne (“Screaming Eagles”) Division of the
327th Infantry Regiment into Little Rock to
restore order.
On September 25 the Little Rock Nine
assembled again at the Bates home. Under the
protection of the paratroopers they were taken
to Central High, where they entered under the
watchful eyes of hundreds of reporters, photographers,
and news camera operators. The paratroopers
remained at Central until September
30, when they withdrew to Camp Robinson, 12
miles away. The federalized Arkansas National
Guard remained on patrol at Central until the
end of the school year. Although it was not necessary
to recall the paratroopers, and the number
of minority students in Little Rock’s
formerly white schools steadily increased, violence,
hatred, and acrimony continued to plague
the city for many years.
Bates endured many attempts to harass and
intimidate her, including rocks thrown through
her window, gunshots fired at her house, dynamite
exploded near her house, and crosses
burned on her lawn. In late October 1957 she
was arrested under a newly enacted ordinance
that required officials of organizations to supply
information regarding membership, donors,
amounts of contributions, and expenditures.
Although she was found guilty under the ordinance,
the conviction was later overturned by
the Supreme Court on grounds that the ordinance
requirement interfered with the members’
FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION (Bates v. City of
Little Rock, 361 U.S. 516, 80 S. Ct. 412, 4 L. Ed.
480 [1960]). In 1959 Bates and her husband
were forced to close the State Press for financial
reasons.
Through all the harassment Bates remained
determined to keep the wheels of the integration
movement going forward. After closing the
newspaper she traveled throughout the United
States working on behalf of the Democratic
National Committee and the Johnson administration’s
antipoverty programs. In 1965 she suffered
a stroke and returned to Little Rock, but
she continued to be active in the NAACP and in
1967 was elected to its national board. In 1968
she moved to Mitchellville, Arkansas, to organize
the Mitchellville Office of Economic Opportunity
Self-Help Project. The project was
responsible for new water and sewer systems,
paved streets, a community center, and a swimming
pool.
In 1984 Bates revived the State Press and was
awarded honorary degrees by the University of
Arkansas and Washington University. In 1986
the University of Arkansas Press published a
reprint edition of her autobiography, The Long
Shadow of Little Rock, and in 1988 the book
received the American Book Award, the first
reprint edition to be given that honor.
In 1987 Bates sold the State Press but she
remained a consultant for the paper. In the same
year Little Rock named a new facility the “Daisy
Bates Elementary School”. Bates continued her
involvement in community activities until
shortly before her death on November 4, 1999,
in Little Rock. President BILL CLINTON honored
her by allowing her body to lie in state at the
Capitol.

FURTHER READINGS
Bates, Daisy. 1962. The Long Shadow of Little Rock. New York:
McKay.
Branch, Taylor. 1989. Parting the Waters: America in the King
Years, 1954-1963. New York: Touchstone Books.
Hine, Darlene C., ed. 1993. Black Women in America: An Historical
Encyclopedia. Brooklyn: Carlson.
Jacoway, Elizabeth, ed. 1999. Understanding the Little Rock
Crisis: An Exercise in Remembrance and Reconciliation.
Little Rock: Univ. of Arkansas.
Smith, Jessie C., ed. 1992. Notable Black American Women.
Detroit: Gale Research.
CROSS-REFERENCES
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas; Civil Rights
Movement; NAACP; School Desegregation.