DAISY BATES’S STEELY RESOLVE

They were harrowing times for a nation at a racial crossroads. Daisy Bates was at the center of it.

She was as tough and strategic as she was refined. And she would dedicate her life to civil rights advocacy that helped define and change America. Bates, pictured here in 1957, led the fight that year to admit nine black students to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. As the chairman of the Arkansas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, she was central to the litigation that led nine black students to integrate Central High, under the protection of federal troops. The case followed the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared school segregation unconstitutional.

Bates and her family paid a heavy price for taking up the cause of desegregation, but she kept her focus steadfast on the students throughout those trying times. Indeed she maintained her steely resolve even when rocks were thrown through her window, when a burning cross was placed on the roof of her family’s home and when local officials had her arrested. She was charged with violating a recently enacted city ordinance giving local officials the authority to review records of certain organizations. The ordinance was enacted specifically to seize N.A.A.C.P. records.

The officials ordered the arrest of all officers of the local organization after they refused to comply with an order to turn over the organization’s membership and financial records. The only officers were Bates and the Reverend J. C. Crenshaw, the group’s president. The city said the N.A.A.C.P. was an extremist group and that thus it needed to know who the members were. Bates and the organization’s lawyers argued unsuccessfully that providing the records would hamper the group’s ability to raise money and recruit new members because the membership information would be made public.

One of Bates’s lawyers was Thurgood Marshall, then special counsel for the N.A.A.C.P. He released a statement shortly after she was jailed and posted a $300 bond, saying, “The action by the city counsel is another instance of efforts of the state of Arkansas to use judicial process to thwart the Constitution of the United States of America.”

In these two photographs, taken by George Tames of The New York Times, Bates confers in her living room with other members of the N.A.A.C.P. team to plan strategy before turning herself in to the authorities, and with attorney George Howard awaiting the start of her hearing in a Little Rock courtroom. Neither appeared in The Times. Instead, the paper published a wire photo of her being fingerprinted. Bates ultimately paid a $25 fine. She never released the N.A.A.C.P. documents.

In her foreword to Bates’s 1962 book, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “I have paid her homage in my thoughts many times and I want to tell her again how remarkable I think she was through these horrible years.”

SHE WAS AS TOUGH AND STRATEGIC AS SHE WAS REFINED

When Daisy Bates died in 1999 at the age of eighty-four, President Clinton called her a heroine whose death “will leave a vacuum in the civil rights community, the State of Arkansas and our country.”

—DANA CANEDY