Daisy Bates; Civil Rights Activist Advised Students in 1957 Little Rock Showdown

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. —  Daisy Bates, a black journalist and civil rights activist who helped nine black students break the color barrier at Little Rock Central High School in 1957, died Thursday at 84.

Bates became a symbol of black hope and a target of segregationist hate for her role as advisor and protector of the first black students to integrate all-white Central High.

But she also was a witness and advocate in a larger context. With her husband, L.C. Bates, she published, edited and wrote for the Arkansas State Press, a newspaper that regularly published accounts of police brutality against blacks in the 1940s, before the civil rights movement was nationally recognized.

She also wrote a memoir called “The Long Shadow of Little Rock,” considered a major primary text about the Little Rock conflict.

Ernest Green, a Washington investment banker who was Central High’s first black graduate, compared Bates to the icons of blacks’ struggle for equality, such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass.

“She will be sorely missed, and she should rank up with the leadership of the greatest, quietest revolution of social change to occur in the world: the civil rights revolution in this country,” Green said.

Born Daisy Lee Gatson in tiny Huttig, Ark., she had a happy childhood until she discovered a dark secret about her past. The couple she knew as her parents were in reality friends of her real parents. Her mother had been murdered while resisting rape by three white men, who were never brought to justice; Daisy’s real father left town. Swearing to herself that she would “find the men who had done this horrible thing to my mother,” Bates was instilled with a rage that would carry her through decades of struggle.

When she was 15, she met her future husband, an insurance salesman who had worked on newspapers in the South and West. After several years of courtship, they were married in 1942. But even before they were married, they were partners in realizing his longtime dream: running a newspaper. The Bateses leased a printing plant that belonged to a church and published the first issue of the Arkansas State Press on May 9, 1941.

Daisy Bates pursued controversial stories. A 1946 article about a labor dispute that criticized a local judge and sympathized with the striking workers led to the Bateses’ arrest and conviction on contempt of court charges. The Arkansas Supreme Court overturned the conviction.

She and her husband were early members of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

In 1957, whites rioted outside Central High and national guardsmen, on orders from Gov. Orval E. Faubus, turned away the nine black students. In response, President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent in Army troops to escort the students to class.

Inside the Bateses’ small home, Daisy Bates advised the black students on how to face the taunting and urged them to feel pride in what they were accomplishing.

In her memoir, Bates wrote, “hysteria in all of its madness enveloped the city.” She grew accustomed to seeing revolvers lying on tables inside her home “and shotguns, loaded with buckshot, standing ready near the doors.” She was hanged in effigy by segregationists, and bombs were thrown at her house.

Central High ultimately was integrated, though the Bateses paid a stiff price. A boycott by advertisers led them to close the Arkansas State Press in 1959.

Bates later described the Little Rock experience as a watershed event that “had a lot to do with removing fear that people have for getting involved.”

When her memoir was reprinted in 1988, it won an American Book Award. Over her lifetime, she was the recipient of more than 200 citations and awards.

In an interview in 1986, she said: “I’m 75 and a half. But I’m not too tired to stand and do what I can for the cause I believe in. I would like to see before I die that blacks and whites and Christians can all get together.”

She experienced financial difficulties in her last years. In 1998, the Greater Little Rock Ministerial Alliance raised $68,000 to pay off her mortgage and turn her home into a museum.

In 1995, when she turned 80, she was feted by 1,400 people at a Little Rock celebration. In 1996 the wheelchair-bound Bates carried the Olympic torch in Atlanta.

She returned to Central High in 1997 with President Clinton to commemorate the 40th anniversary of integration there.

“I’m happy about what’s happened,” she said during the ceremony, “not just because of school integration but because of the total system.”

Her body will lie in state at the state Capitol on Monday.