Daisy Bates This page intentionally left blank DAISY BATES Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas Grif Stockley UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI • JACKSON Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies www.upress.state.ms.us The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Copyright © 2005 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First edition 2005 ϱ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stockley, Grif. Daisy Bates : civil rights crusader from Arkansas / Grif Stockley.—1st ed. p. cm. (Margaret Walker Alexander series in African American studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57806-801-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Bates, Daisy. 2. African American women civil rights workers— Arkansas—Little Rock—Biography. 3. African Americans—Arkansas— Little Rock—Biography. 4. Civil rights workers—Arkansas—Little Rock—Biography. 5. Little Rock (Ark.)—Biography. 6. Civil rights movements—Arkansas—Little Rock—History. 7. School integration— Arkansas—Little Rock—History. 8. Central High School (Little Rock, Ark.) 9. Little Rock (Ark.)—Race relations. 10. Arkansas—Race relations. I. Title. F419.L7S76 2005 323'.092—dc22 2005009959 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available To my granddaughter, Rachel Susan Tulk This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 1. A Little Girl from Huttig 13 2. A Much Older Man 22 3. A Newspaper All Their Own 32 4. Two for the Price of One 43 5. An Unwavering Commitment 53 6. The Bombshell of Brown v. Board of Education 65 7. A Foot in the Schoolhouse Door 83 8. Two Steps Back 93 9. Front and Center 112 10. Who Is That Woman in Little Rock? 131 11. A Battle Every Day 148 12. Woman of the Year 160 13. Holding the Line 173 14. Coping with Defeat 191 15. The New York Years 210 16. Going in Different Directions 233 17. The Long Shadow of Little Rock 247 18. Mitchellville—Self-Help or Monument? 259 19. Fighting Over a Legend 280 Notes 298 Index 335 - vii - This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS uring the research phase of this project, Roy Reed commented Dthat his biography of Orval Faubus would have been a different book if he had written it after Faubus’s death. I have no doubt his point applies here as well. Daisy Bates died in 1999. Most of my inter- views were conducted in 2002. Yet no biography, no matter how can- did the interviewees, can reduce a human life to the contents of a book. At the end, our lives remain a mystery, and perhaps that is why history fascinates: it is always a work in progress, always subject to revision as our perspective changes. For the biographer or historian, one of the primary pleasures is the encounter with all the people who make your book possible. Though some will tell you that they are only doing their job in assisting you, for many it is their passion, their life’s work. The only possible response is gratitude and humility. From the very beginning, Johanna Miller Lewis at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock provided crucial assistance in ways too numerous to mention, including a close reading of the manuscript. I would also be remiss in not thanking her research assistant, Jessica Hayes. Tom Dillard and Jeannie Whayne (both now at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville) read the manuscript and gave critical sup- port. Cary Cox of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies volunteered to read an early version and caught numerous errors. Elizabeth Jacoway, who has devoted decades to researching the era and events of the 1957 crisis, generously provided assistance in a number of areas. Her interview with Daisy Bates is indispensable to admirers and crit- ics alike. Nor can I fail to mention the work and assistance of John A. Kirk, whose book and thesis on black leadership in Little Rock between 1940 and 1970 were invaluable, as evidenced by the number - ix - Acknowledgments of references to them. To be fair to Kirk, I should note that we have some honest disagreements about Daisy Bates. I would also be remiss in not thanking those people who were will- ing to be interviewed. In particular, I mention the assistance of Annie Abrams, a longtime community activist in Little Rock and friend of both L. C. and Daisy Bates. Unlike some, she wanted their story to be told and generously gave of her time and support. There are some people who assist writers out of the sheer pleasure of finding information that seems otherwise unobtainable. The years Daisy Bates spent in New York writing her memoir, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, are still a bit of a mystery but less so because of the assistance of Barrie Olson, a delightful New Yorker who helped research this period. Helping to fill in the gaps of Bates’s New York interlude, Audre Hanneman went far beyond the call of duty in pro- viding both memories and perspective. I must also thank Lynn Pence for her endless help, support, and understanding. Thanks also to Linda Pine and her staff at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Ottenheimer Library, Archives and Special Collections; Ethel Simpson and the staff at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, Mullins Library, Special Collections; Russell Baker and the staff at the Arkansas History Commission, particularly Carolyn Hervey; the Library of Congress; Tim Nutt and the staff at the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies in Little Rock; Harry Miller, archivist at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin; Ernie Dumas; Roy Reed; and Story Matkin-Rawn. I gratefully acknowledge the editorial assis- tance of Anne Stascavage and copy editor Robert Burchfield. Alas, any errors are mine. Finally, I wish to express my appreciation to the University Press of Mississippi and Seetha Srinivasan. - x - Daisy Bates This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION he richness and complexity of the men, both black and white, who Tmarched in opposing camps during the critical period of the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s are only now being fully appreciated as scholars gain distance from that era.1 One can almost hear the dead sighing in relief from their graves. Yet whatever their motives and the influences that shaped them, these men participated in a revolution such as the United States has never seen, before or since. In retrospect, their accomplishments were astonishing. In a matter of years, customs and laws that had endured for centuries simply van- ished into history. Surely as important, the civil rights movement helped to spawn revolutions in the treatment of women, people with disabilities, juveniles, gays and lesbians, the environment, and a host of other concerns (such as the rights of criminal defendants) that are still being played out today. The fact that inevitable counterrevolu- tions have been launched in these areas only underscores the impact of the civil rights movement in this era. Of course, men alone were not the only participants in the civil rights movement. Women, young people, and even children took to the streets and occasionally filled the jails in this era. But it is the role of women, and specifically the role of some of the black women, in the civil rights movement that concerns us in this introductory chapter about the life of one of them. It is instructive to begin at the apex of the movement—the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, in which an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 people gathered on the Mall to hear and support their leaders as they demanded an end to racial apartheid in the United States.2 Though now remembered primarily in popular culture for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, the March on Washington and the program - 3 - Introduction at the Lincoln Memorial that afternoon, beamed all over the world, were truly two of the high points in the civil rights movement. Immedi- ately after the event, a number of the march’s leaders, including King; Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and A. Philip Randolph, who conceived the march, walked over to the White House to discuss civil rights legislation with the president.3 Not one woman, black or white, was among this select group of civil rights leaders who met that evening for seventy-two minutes with President John F. Kennedy. Not only that, not a single woman had been scheduled to address the marchers at the afternoon program. In his authoritative March on Washington: August 28, 1963, Thomas Gentile writes that the march program by “mid-August called for Randolph to introduce five black women to the assembled crowd: Rosa Parks, Mrs. Medgar Evers, Daisy Bates, Cambridge, Maryland leader Gloria Richardson and SNCC’s Diane Nash Bevell. None were to be given the opportunity to speak.”4 Though Anna Arnold Hedgmen, an organizer for the National Council of Churches and the only woman on the “administrative committee” for the march, found this absence “incredi- ble” and protested, “no serious changes were made in the [afternoon] program” at the last meeting of the committee before the march. To add insult to injury, it wasn’t only that no women were scheduled to be speakers, “without noticeable dissent, the planning committee barred Coretta King and the other wives of the male leaders from marching with their husbands.”5 Nor were the women who were to be introduced that afternoon allowed to march with the male leaders. Why were these men so seemingly determined to risk alienating half of their supporters, including their own wives? The male black leader- ship planning the march, the so-called big ten, ran the gauntlet from militant John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose fiery speech would have to be toned down in order to be acceptable to the others, to Roy Wilkins, whose sophis- tication and political skills had grown the NAACP into a crucial cash cow for the movement and a nationwide organization that dwarfed the others present that afternoon.