"BATES IS NOT A FOUR LETTER WORD"

 “BATES IS NOT A FOUR LETTER WORD”

In the summer of 1957, the Milwaukee Braves (still that awful name!) were on their way to the National League pennant.  I did not cheer for them (my teams were the Chicago White Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals), but I was delighted that they defeated the hated New York Yankees in the World Series.  I was ten years old that summer, when I learned a new “cuss” word.  I’d like to be able to say that it was the first cuss word that I had ever learned, but as a ten year old boy growing up in rural Arkansas, I already knew them all.

The cuss word that I learned that summer was not a four letter word, like many of the other cuss words that I knew.  This new cuss word had five letters – actually it was two words with five letters each.  The cuss word that I learned that summer was “Daisy Bates.”  These words became cuss words for me and for many other “white” people like me in the South because she was a Black woman at the center of the Little Rock school crisis in the fall of 1957.  She was the primary organizer and fixer who worked daily with the Black students who integrated Central High School in 1957 – these students became known as “The Little Rock Nine.”  I had been oblivious to the SCOTUS Brown v. Board of Education decision, to the lynching of Emmett Till, and to the Montgomery bus boycott – all of which were foundational events in the civil rights movement.  The Little Rock school crisis, however, brought the movement close to my home in Helena, Arkansas, and it was my first conscious awareness of the movement.

    Bates was a strong leader and mentor, and her prowess posed a threat to the “white” order of things.  She was seen as the devil incarnate by those of us who were captured by white supremacy.  It would be 20 years before I would come back and revisit Daisy Bates and learn that rather than her being an object of scorn, she should have been a subject of praise and gratitude for her courage and her tenacity and her political skills.  

    She was born in Huttig, Arkansas, a little sawmill town on the Louisiana border.  She never quite knew the year she was born, because when she was an infant, her family was attacked by white men.  Her mother was raped and murdered, and her father was assaulted. He gave her to neighbors Orlee and Susie Smith, and he fled the state.  Daisy was 8 years old when she learned this awful family history.  From that moment on, she burned with a hatred of people classified as “white.”  She married Lucius Bates in 1941, and they moved to Little Rock to founded a Black newspaper, the Arkansas State Press.  She became an editor of the paper, swimming upstream in a male world, much as her journalist predecessor Ida Wells had done.  Bates was determined to use the paper as a tool to fight to gain rights for Black people.  In 1952 she was elected president of the state NAACP, setting the stage for her leadership in the conflict of 1957.

    In the meantime, her adoptive father died, and on his deathbed, he advised her to channel her anger toward more constructive ends.  “Don’t hate white people because they are white,” he said,  “hate the humiliations we are living under in the South….and then try to do something about it, or your hate won’t spell a thing.”  His advice helped to soften her heart and harden her resolve, and it was this advice that sustained her through the rest of her life.

    She would need such inspiration and courage as 1957 approached.  After the Brown v. Board decision in 1954, the Little Rock Board of Education was one of the first in the South to issue a statement indicating that it would comply with the decision.  They announced a plan to gradually desegregate the schools, starting in high school and working down.  It would start at Little Rock’s Central High School, bringing 75 Black students into the 2,000 student high school.  Another important event in this history was the election of a white moderate, Orval Faubus, as governor of Arkansas in 1954.  When he ran for re-election in 1956, he read the political winds and announced his support of the white supremacist position:  no Black kids in schools with white kids.

    Daisy Bates led the state NAACP into federal court to force compliance with Brown v. Board, and the Little Rock school system was ordered to begin the process.  White opposition to this decision and to the school board’s decision to comply was ferocious.  The nine students were chosen by Bates and the NAACP because they were good students and because they had demonstrated that they could handle pressure well.  These are their names:  Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrance Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, and Carotta Walls. 

Through many dangers, toils and snares, Daisy and LC Bates led the children, their parents, and the system into compliance with Brown v. Board.  After Governor Faubus reneged on his promise to President Eisenhower to allow the Black students to enter, and after white riots at the school, Eisenhower sent in the U.S. Army to protect the students entering Central High School in Little Rock on September 25, 1957.  It was a rough year, but the Little Rock Nine, who met every day at the Bates’ home to train and to go to school – these nine students made it through and showed us the way.

More on this story next week, but for today, let me say that Daisy Bates is no longer a cuss word for me.  She is now among the pantheon of powerful witnesses and sheroes – may we all learn from her courage and determination and dedication.  The white South is rising again (all over the country), and we will need the courage and vision of Daisy Bates.