Daisy Bates, Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 84
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Daisy Bates, a civil rights leader who in 1957 led the fight to admit nine black students to Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., died yesterday at a hospital there. She was 84. In the integration struggle, rocks were thrown through her window, a burning cross was placed on her roof and the newspaper published by her and her husband, L. C. Bates, was ultimately destroyed financially. But she nurtured the nine black children who faced vicious insults and physical intimidation. She encouraged them to be courageous, while striving to guard them against howling white mobs. The result was one of the early major victories in the civil rights movement. The desegregation of Central High School with the aid of federal troops signaled that Washington would enforce the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, which declared school segregation unconstitutional. Mrs. Bates, as Arkansas president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was a central figure in the litigation that led to the confrontation in front of Central High, as well as the snarling scenes that unfolded in front of it. The success of the Little Rock campaign, she later said, ”had a lot to do with removing fear that people have for getting involved.” In her forward to Mrs. 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.” President Clinton yesterday called her a dear friend and a heroine and said her death ”will leave a vacuum in the civil rights community, the State of Arkansas and our country.” Daisy Bates was born in the little sawmill town of Huttig in southern Arkansas, growing up in a shotgun shack, so called because one could stand at the front door and fire a shotgun straight through the back door into the yard. She attended segregated schools that used out-of-date textbooks passed on from white schools, according to the African-American Almanac. In her book, she told of the trauma of learning at 8 that her mother had been killed in a rape attempt by three white men. After she had heard rumors, her father told her the truth in simple and straightforward terms. ”So happy once,” she wrote, ”now I was like a little sapling which, after a violent storm, puts out only gnarled and twisted branches.” When she was about 15, an insurance agent came to visit her home. He was L. C. Bates, who had studied journalism and then worked for newspapers in Colorado and Kansas City. Newspapers were a shaky calling in the Depression, and he had turned to selling insurance. More : query.nytimes.com |