Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas

Abstract

Stockley uses a number of sources, including oral history interviews, archival and census records, and state and local newspapers to illuminate the story of this often overlooked "Civil Rights Crusader" and her activism.

Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas. By Grif Stockley. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Pp. x, 340. $30.00, ISBN 1-57806-801-0.)

Grif Stockley has provided a carefully researched and densely written narrative of Daisy Bates, a civil rights activist who is largely unknown outside of Arkansas. Born an orphan in the mill town of Huttig, Arkansas, Bates never knew her father. It was rumored around town that her mother had been raped and killed by three white men. Bates is best known as the mentor to the Little Rock Nine when they integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Stockley follows Bates's life before, during, and after this event as she experienced the trauma of challenging the status quo and facing white resistance in doing so.

Bates's activism did not start with the Little Rock Nine, however. She had long been an activist, served as the president of the Arkansas branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People since 1952, and traveled the country giving lectures on political issues. It was not until 1956 that she became front-page news in Arkansas during Aaron v. Cooper, the precursor to the 1957 crisis in Little Rock. Her activism angered many blacks and whites in Little Rock, but she nonetheless charted a path to improve educational and political opportunities for blacks in Arkansas that lasted until her final days. In 1962 she published The Long Shadow of Little Rock (New York), which Stockley characterizes as "an uplifting reprise of Bates's struggles against great odds, just what the American public had always enjoyed" (p. 248).

But Stockley's analysis goes beyond Bates's life as an activist. He aptly deals with her marriage to L. C. Bates and the complexity of their relationship. She met L. C. when she was a teenager. He was twelve years her senior and married to another woman. The two had a long-running affair but did not marry until 1942, after having started their own newspaper, the State Press. Their marriage was often tumultuous as Bates's stature as an activist grew. The couple divorced in 1963 but soon remarried.

As the State Press grew, it became the sounding board for what L. C. saw as the failings of whites and the complacency and activism of blacks in Arkansas. But it also served as an educational experience for Daisy as well. It was where she learned about the successes and failures of black activists. And it was also from this foundation that she was catapulted into the public arena of black activism. Bates assumed this role with a mixture of grace and assertiveness, both of which she comfortably employed in her dealings with blacks and whites alike.

Stockley uses a number of sources, including oral history interviews, archival and census records, and state and local newspapers to illuminate the story of this often overlooked "Civil Rights Crusader" and her activism. Despite its digressions in a few spots, it is a necessary read for scholars of civil rights, African American, and gender history.