"BATES IS NOT A FOUR LETTER WORD"

“BATES IS NOT A FOUR LETTER WORD”

            Last month I wrote about my intrigue with the overlapping of Black History Month and the Season of Lent.  The same goes for the month into which we are now entering:  Women’s History Month.  Though we have seen extraordinary gains in women’s rights during my lifetime, it is jut as if we are at 1 AM on the historical clock.  As we have seen in the #MeToo and many other movements, the power of male domination is still so deep and strong, and the desire of white men to turn back the clock to midnight resulted in the election of Donald Trump.

            When I was growing up in segregated, small town Arkansas, I was not allowed to curse - or “cuss” as we called it – at all, much less in public.  My mother told me never to say the “four letter” words, such as s**t, hell (seems pretty tame these days), damn, c**t, and the f-word.  Of course, by the time that I was in the second grade, we boys used them all the time, except around adults. To caution ourselves, we used a little ditty that others know also:

“Don’t cuss, call Gus,

He’ll come on the bus

And cuss for all of us.”

            There was one cuss word that I was allowed us say, however, and that was “Bates,” although it was 5 letters.  I did not learn this cuss word until 1957, when I was in the 6^th grade.  All I knew then was what my elders were teaching me, that Daisy Bates was the terrible, communistic, n-word woman who was helping to organize the Little Rock 9 to seek to integrate the public schools in Little Rock in the fall of 1957.  And, of course, for my white supremacist background, such a person was Satan incarnate.

            Later when I learned about my captivity to race, I found that there was another side to Mrs. Daisy Bates, whom I had cursed so much without having any idea what I was doing.  I don’t have any trouble relating to that uttering on the Cross from Jesus in Luke 23:  “Forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.”  That was definitely me and my white culture in the fall of 1957.  Daisy Bates was born in Arkansas near the Louisiana border.  She was never quite sure what year she was born because when she was an infant, her parents were attacked by white supremacists – her mother was raped and murdered, and her father fled for his life.  Daisy Bates was raised by neighbors, Orlee and Susie Smith.

            In 1941 she married Lucius Bates and moved to Little Rock, where they founded a black newspaper – The Arkansas State Press.  She became editor, and given her history, she was determined to use it as a tool to gain rights for women and black people.  In 1952 she was elected president of the state NAACP, and that began to set the stage for the conflicts of 1957, which led to “Bates” being designated a cuss word in my white supremacist culture.  The Little Rock school board was the first in the South to issue a statement of compliance with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, and work was begun to gradually desegregate the schools.

            Elections intervened, however, and in 1956 Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas proclaimed that he would not allow the integration of any Arkansas schools.  Daisy Bates led the fight to bring Arkansas into compliance, and during the summer, the 9 black students selected to integrate the schools met often at Bates’ home to get ready.  As we know, it was quite an ordeal, culminating with President Eisenhower taking over the Arkansas National Guard and ordering the Screaming Eagles of the 101^st Airborne Division of the US Army to protect the 9 students.  And, they did. 

            There were many more twists and turns, but on May 29, 1958, one of the Little Rock 9, Ernest Green, became the first black student to graduate from a previously all white school in the South in the age of neo-slavery.   Daisy Bates had endured all kinds of threats, violence, heartache, and disappointments, but nevertheless, she persisted.  We give thanks to women like her who have refused to accept the patriarchal definition of themselves, and who have stood up and sat down and showed us a better way.

            We’re still not sure if we believe Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896 (separate but equal) or Brown v. Board of Education.  Those battles of male and white supremacy still rage, and we give thanks for people like Daisy Bates who remind us of the call to equality and justice and equity.  They are in our midst now.  Let us find them and cherish them AND follow them.