Daisy Gatson Bates was a newspaper publisher whose Arkansas State Press was dedicated solely to the coverage of the civil rights movement. In it, she and her husband, Lucius Christopher Bates, exposed violations of the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education which outlawed segregated schools.
Daisy Gatson was born on Nov. 11, 1914 and died just before turning 85 in 1999. When she was only three years old, her mother was murdered by three white men. Bates dedicated her own life to ending racial injustice and became a leader in the Little Rock school integration crisis.
She organized Black students to enroll at all-white public schools. When the Court’s ruling was ignored by Gov. Orval Faubus, who called on the Arkansas National Guard to block desegregation there, Bates, then president of the Arkansas NAACP, selected, prepared, and guided the Little Rock Nine, the first group of Black students to attend the city’s Central High School.
According to the National Women’s History Museum, the state of Arkansas has proclaimed the third Monday of February Daisy Gatson Bates Day. —Kate Wallace Rogers