A civil rights activist and newspaper publisher Daisy Lee Gatson Bates played a huge role in the integration of  the Little Rock Nine into Little Rock, Arkansas’s Central High School in 1957.  Bates was born Daisy Lee Gatson on November 11, 1914, in Huttih, Arkansas. In a tragic event her mom, Millie Riley, was killed by three white men when she was an infant. Her father, John Gatson, fled town and left his daughter in the care of friends Orlee and Susie Smith.

When she was 15, she met Lucius Christopher Bates, a traveling salesman based in Memphis, Tennessee.  The pair moved to Little Rock, Arkansas in 1941 and got married on March 4, 1942. The couple launched The Arkansas State Press, a weekly state-wide newspaper which advocated civil rights for Black people in Arkansans. Bates joined the Little Rock National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) branch and were elected president of the Arkansas Conference of Branches in 1952. Bates remained active and a member of the National NAACP Board for the next twenty years.

Bates and her husband were able to chronicle the 1954 Brown v Board of Education case which led to the court decision to integrate Little Rock Central High School. Bates home wasn’t far from Central High, became the organizing center for nine Black students, known as the Little Rock Nine, selected to desegregate the school in 1957. Bates walked into schools daily with the children for an entire school year (1957-58). At the time Bates received numerous death threats and she and her husband were forced to close the Arkansas State Press. During the year-long struggle in Little Rock, Bates became friends of Dr. Martin Luther King. Bates invited her to be the Women’s Day speaker at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama in 1958.  Bates was subsequently elected to the executive committee of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Bates talked at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Bates moved to Washington D.C. in 1964 to work for the Democratic National Committee and briefly served in the administration of  President Lyndon B. Johnson, working on anti-poverty programs. After suffering a stroke in 1965, she went back to Little Rock, Arkansas, however, in 1968 she and her husband moved to the small Black community of Mitchellville in Desha County. Bates established and became director of the Mitchellville Office of Equal Opportunity Self Help, a program responsible for a water and new sewer systems, a community center and paved streets.

Bates moved back to Little Rock after the death of her husband in 1980 and revived the Arkansas State Press. In 1984, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. The university press republished her memoir in 1986, and it became the first reprinted edition to receive an American Book Award. In 1987, she sold newspaper and continued to act as a consultant for several years. Bates passed away from a heart attack in Little Rock on November 4, 1999. She was the first African American to rest “In State” in the Arkansas State Capitol Building.

Sources:

Nielsen, E. (2007, January 22). Daisy Lee Gatson Bates (1914-1999). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/bates-daisy-1914-1999/

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