Daisy Bates

Hillary

In her memoir, Daisy Bates wrote about learning as a young child that her mother, Millie Riley, had been raped and murdered by three local white men in the small south Arkansas town where they lived. Daisy was only a few months old at the time. Knowing about both her mother’s murder and the failure of local police to pursue the killers fueled an anger inside Daisy, as well as a desire for vengeance that led her to identify and silently confront one of the men when she was just eight years old. He begged her to leave him alone, and later drank himself to death and was found in an alley.

After the murder of her mother, Daisy was raised by her father’s close friends Orlee and Susie Smith. Her father fled town to protect his own safety; Daisy never saw him again. But her adoptive father saw something in Daisy that worried him. According to Daisy, he gave her this advice on his deathbed when she was a teenager: “You’re filled with hatred. Hatred can destroy you, Daisy. 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 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—and then try to do something about it, or your hate won’t spell a thing.” Those words guided her in the years to come.

Daisy married Lucius Christopher Bates, known as L. C., in 1942, when she was twenty-seven; together, they moved to Little Rock and started the Arkansas State Press, a weekly statewide newspaper. The paper quickly became a voice for civil rights, and in 1952, Daisy was elected president of the Arkansas Conference of the NAACP, a position she used to advocate strongly for the desegregation of schools. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court decided in the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools were illegal under the Constitution, schools in Arkansas refused to enroll black children. Owing to her position with the NAACP and her newspaper’s strong stand for immediate desegregation, Daisy endured harassment and death threats, while the newspaper faced financial loss when white advertisers boycotted it.

During one of the racist assaults on her home, Daisy later recalled, “two flaming crosses were burned on our property. The first, a six-foot gasoline-soaked structure, was stuck into our front lawn just after dusk. At the base of the cross was scrawled: ‘GO BACK TO AFRICA! KKK.’ The second cross was placed against the front of our house, lit, and the flames began to catch. Fortunately, the fire was discovered by a neighbor and we extinguished it before any serious damage had been done.” Despite the dangers, when the time came for courageous leadership, she was ready.

In 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus defied a court order to desegregate Little Rock Central High School, and his defiance became the center of the nation’s attention in the struggle over integration. In response to Faubus’s actions, the Arkansas State Press printed a front-page editorial that read, “[I]t is the belief of this paper that since the Negro’s loyalty to America has forced him to shed blood on foreign battle fields against enemies, to safeguard constitutional rights, he is in no mood to sacrifice these rights for peace and harmony at home.”

Before the start of the school year in September, nine black students were selected to attend Central High School, and Daisy Bates became their guide and adviser. On September 2, Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to stop the Little Rock Nine, as the students were known, from attending their first day of school. Only white students were permitted entry, and the Little Rock Nine were told to go home. But one student, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, had been separated from the other eight. She walked right into the mob that was threatening to kill the black students. I remember, as a child, seeing the photos of her calmly walking past screaming white protesters, some of whom were spitting at her.

Daisy quickly recruited local ministers to escort each student to school. She reassured their worried parents every day. She served as a sounding board for the students and continued to advocate for enforcing the federal court order and respecting the Constitution. Her home became a center of activity and was later designated a National Historic Landmark. As the Park Service explains in its description of her landmarked house, “[T]he perseverance of Mrs. Bates and the Little Rock Nine during these turbulent years sent a strong message throughout the South that desegregation worked and the tradition of radical segregation under ‘Jim Crow’ would no longer be tolerated in the United States of America.”

The chaos at Central High School led President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in late September, to federalize the Arkansas National Guard, removing them from the governor’s control, and send in troops from the 101st Airborne Division to enforce the court’s order. Meanwhile, the Little Rock police arrested Daisy and other NAACP leaders and charged them with failing to provide information about other NAACP members, which they continued to refuse to do. They appealed the fines and arrests all the way to the Supreme Court, where they eventually won.

In a 1976 interview, Daisy said the most important contribution she made during the Little Rock crisis was the very fact that the kids got in, and remained at Central for the full year without being physically hurt. “That opened a lot of doors that had been closed to Negroes, because this was the first time that this kind of revolution had succeeded without a doubt,” she said. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., lauded her for adhering to nonviolence in pursuit of the goal of integrating schools. In a letter to Daisy, he wrote: “History is on your side.”

But Daisy and her husband paid a price for her activism. The loss of advertising led to the closing of the Arkansas State Press in 1959. Daisy moved to New York City, where she wrote her award-winning memoir, The Long Shadow of Little Rock. She later worked in Washington, D.C., on anti-poverty programs during the Lyndon Johnson administration.

Daisy moved back to Arkansas in 1965 and retired a few years later. After L. C.’s death, Daisy revived the newspaper in 1984, and died in Little Rock in 1999. I met with Daisy throughout my years in Arkansas and as first lady; she always kept fighting to make a difference for young people, especially in her home state. On September 25, 1997, both Bill and I were honored to speak at the fortieth anniversary of the desegregation of Little Rock Central High; that was the last time I saw Daisy.

It took guts for Daisy to do what she did—to choose to hate injustice while having enough faith in people to hope that they would ultimately do the right thing. It was a loss when she passed, but her legacy lives on. Just last year, new audiences were able to see the Little Rock Nine’s story in an off-Broadway play, Little Rock, that I went to with Bill and our friend Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine. In 2019, governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas signed a bill to replace a statue of a white supremacist in the U.S. capitol building with one of Daisy Bates, making her the second black American chosen by a state to join the collection, alongside fellow education trailblazer Mary McLeod Bethune. As we continue to confront racism and segregation in our public schools, we must remember Daisy’s example.