Feeling Rebloggy
When Daisy Bates was three years old her mother was killed by three white men. Although Bates, was just a child, her biological mother’s death made an emotional and mental imprint on her. The unfortunate death forced Bates to confront racism at an early age and pushed her to dedicate her life to ending racial injustice.
Daisy Bates was born in Huttig, Arkansas in 1914 and raised in a foster home. When she was fifteen, she met her future husband and began travelling with him throughout the South. The couple settled in Little Rock, Arkansas and started their own newspaper. The Arkansas Weeklywas one of the only African Americn newspapers solely dedicated to the Civil Rights Movement. The paper was circulated state wide. Bates not only worked as an editor, but also regularly contributed articles.
Naturally, Bates also worked with local Civil Rights organizations. For many years, she served as the President of the Arkansas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)....
[After Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP attorney's like feminist Pauli Murray helped him win Brown v The Board Of Education, the behavior of white people didn't change. Whites didn't jump up and willingly comply with the law willingly with their superiority at stake.
One we had won the right to have the same quality schools, books, and supplies as white children, we had to fight at the local level to make white school boards comply with the new law of the land.]
When the national NAACP office started to focus on Arkansas’ schools, they looked to Bates to plan the strategy. She took the reins and organized The Little Rock Nine.
Bates selected nine students to integrate Central High School in Little Rock in 1957. She regularly drove the students to school and worked tirelessly to ensure they were protected from violent crowds. [The newspaper she owned with her husband kept black support at their backs] She also advised the group and even joined the school’s parent organization.
Due to Bates’ role in the integration, she was often a target for intimidation. Rocks were thrown into her home several times and she received bullet shells in the mail. The threats [eventually] forced the Bates family to shut down their newspaper.
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/daisy-bates
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