"TALKIN DAISY BATES"

 “TALKIN’ DAISY BATES”

I wrote last week a bit about the story of Daisy Bates and her central part in the desegregation of public schools in Little Rock and indeed in the nation.  I had first learned her name as a cuss word in Arkansas, when I was ten and was still in deep captivity to white supremacy.  It was not until I was a young adult that I began to see her in a very different light – a courageous and determined woman, who nurtured the Little Rock Nine students, all of  whom had to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous white supremacy.  

Because of the brevity of the blog, I was not able to include some of the stories and quotes of those events.  So, I want to include several now, asking us to remember, but also as we watch the White South Rising in our time.  I’ll have more of that Rising next week.  I want to share these stories and quotes to help us find our way to be visionaries and resisters in our time.  

The nine students gathered at the home of Daisy and LC Bates every day in 1957 for nonviolence training and for preparation for entering Central High School.  After they had been driven away from the school by the violence of a white mob, President Dwight Eisenhower finally ordered 1,000 US Army troops from the Screaming Eagles to go to Little Rock to guard the students and to maintain order.  Daisy Bates remembers the arrival of the troops at her house on that first day this way:

“Army jeeps were rolling down Twenty-eighth Street.  Paratroopers quickly jumped out and stood across the width of the street at each end of the block…..The paratrooper in charge of the detail leaped out of the station wagon and started up our driveway.  As he approached, I heard Minniejean say gleefully:  “Oh, look at them, they’re so – so soldierly!  It gives you goose pimples to look at them!.”  And then she added solemnly, “For the first time in my life, I feel like an American citizen.”

The Little Rock Nine were delivered safely that day to Central High, but it would be a long and difficult year.  One of the Nine, Melba Patillo Beals, has written a powerful book on her experience “Warriors Don’t Cry.”  On May 29, 1958, Ernest Green would become the first Black graduate in the South from a previously all-white high school. 

At the center of this whirlwind was Daisy Bates, and her name was spread around the country – for bad in my case, but for good in so many other places.  Indeed, Daisy Bates would be the only woman allowed to speak at the March on Washington in August, 1963 – she broke through that male glass ceiling, as she had broken so many other barriers.   One of the emcees that day was Bayard Rustin, and he introduced her before she spoke.  In his intro, he connected her work with that of the Children’s Campaign in Birmingham in the spring of 1963.  This is how he introduced her:

“Now I want to introduce a woman.  She is important because she started the children’s movement, a movement of young people which culminated in the thousands of children who demonstrated in Birmingham.  You know who I mean, Daisy Bates.”  She gave a short speech:

“Mr. Randolph, friends, the women of this country give our pledge to you, to Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins and all of you fighting for civil liberties—that we will join hands with you as women of this country. Rosa Gregg, Vice President; Dorothy Height, the National Council of Negro Women; and the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority; the Methodist Church Women, all the women pledge that we will join hands with you. We will kneel-in; we will sit-in until we can eat in any corner in the United States. We will walk until we are free, until we can walk to any school and take our children to any school in the United States. And we will sit-on and we will kneel-in and we will lie-in if necessary until every Negro in America can vote. This we pledge to the women of America.”

Towards the end of her life in 1999, Daisy Bates was asked about her motivation for stepping up to take leadership in Little Rock and beyond.  She replied:  “If you live as long as I have, and have been recognized for doing anything considered brave or worthy, people will always want to know how you became that person, or where you found the courage to be that person.  I never thought I was doing anything a whole of lot of other people in Little Rock couldn’t have done.  It was just something that had to be done if we expected to make progress.  I was in the position to take the lead on it, and I took it.

As the White South seeks to rise again (and not just in the South), we would all do well to remember the witness and work of Daisy Bates and so many others, and we should seek to find our place in that great cloud of witnesses in our time.