Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock

[sanguinity]

10. Daisy Bates, The Long Shadow of Little Rock

Unlike the other two Little Rock memoirs I read, Daisy Bates does not focus tightly on the 1957-1958 school year. Instead, she has a long lead-in, covering the decades of racial progress and non-progress in Little Rock (the story of her childhood is alone worth the price of admission), and narrates all three years of the Little Rock integration crisis. She is also the only memoirist of these three who gives a thorough overview of the legal struggle between Governor Faubus and the state legislature on one side, and Thurgood Marshall and the federal courts on the other, or a narrative of what happened to the other participants in the integration crisis.

Bates was the co-owner of Little Rock's black newspaper and president of the Arkansas NAACP, both of which put her in a central position during the crisis. Her house served as the convoy point for the students and served as the venue for after-school debriefings and strategy sessions. She typically took the role of "doing what needed to be done" -- telegramming Eisenhower with updates and demand for support, countering repeated media rumors that the students had all been killed, demanding the identification and arrest of mob members photographed in the act of beating black journalists, coordinating the students' next legal move with Thurgood Marshall and the national NAACP, trying to rally support among Little Rock ministers and other interracial groups, as well as meeting with school officials, local government, and the national press. For her trouble, she was the target of fire-bombings, cross-burnings, a boycott of the newspaper, and criminal prosecution. (She had the "honor" of having several state laws passed specifically for the purpose of breaking the NAACP.)

Even Daisy Bates was surprised by the crisis -- just the previous year, another high school in Arkansas had integrated without fuss, and Little Rock had a reputation for being liberal. However, Governor Faubus had decided to turn the integration of Central High into a statewide election issue, and through a series of inflammatory speeches ("if Negroes try to enter Central High, blood will run in the streets") signaled that he would support segregationist violence. The first threats -- a rock through her window with an attached note that the next object thrown through her window would be dynamite -- occurred within hours of Faubus' speech.

Bates' memoir doesn't provide a coherent view of what the crisis felt like -- for that, refer to Beals' Warriors Don't Cry -- but she provides details and perspectives that cannot be included in memoirs with a tighter perspective. One girls' family had kept her enrollment at Central secret from her father, in deference to his heart condition; he discovered her enrollment only when her name was read over the radio during a report of the violence at the school. Another boy's father was kidnapped by the police. When officials told Bates that the students should arrive at the school sans parents, Bates called members of the Interracial Ministerial Alliance to ask them to escort the students through the mob -- and was told by most that integration wasn't God's will. During the second school year, the governor (empowered by new laws created for the purpose) shut down the Little Rock high schools, allowing gangs of high-schoolers to roam the city freely for the year. During the third year, only one of the two remaining students was available to attend on the first day; Elizabeth Eckford (who had, through an error made by Bates, been stranded alone in the mob two years previously) volunteered to walk through the mob with him. During the third year, the intensity of the mob had not lessened; the police chief fended them off with fire hoses. Bates also includes a chapter accounting the very few white allies for integration -- it's a chilling list of political ruin, financial ruin, and suicides.

Bates closes the book with a look toward the future, written from 1962, after the lunch-counter sit-ins, but before Freedom Summer and the Voting Rights Act.

There are stirrings among Negro Americans that the politicians ignore at the peril not only to themselves but to any government that turns its back on the lessons of history. Disillusionment breeds contempt and hostility. It fosters ugliness and undermines the democratic spirit from which our nation draws its strength.

Meanwhile, a large portion of the Negro masses is losing its faith in democracy. Thes is demonstrated by the growing influence on the American Negro of the nationalist organizations thta have sprung up during recent years. The strongest and most widely known of these is the "Black Muslims." Whites are barred from membership. The Muslims stress the dignity of the black man. They are passive only as long as they are treated by the white man with dignity and respect. Many have joined because of a desire to belong. For the most part they have been denied a right to participate in the political and cultural development of this nation. With few exceptions, millions of Negroes live and die feeling unwanted in this country.

The leaders of these organizations claim well over two hundred thousand members. Most want no part of the whiet world. One Muslim told me: "We are organized for peace, but we are prepared for war." Will there one day be a bloody war on American soil--between Americans--because of the lack of forthrightness on the part of our Government to eradicate the inhuman practice of brutality and degradation now being perpetrated against American Negroes? Only America can answer this question.

And so the battle for civil rights continues. The actors on the 1957 Little Rock stage have faded from the national scene. Their places have been filled by thousands of Negro and white Americans in the crusade for equality--at the ballot box and at the lunch counter, at work and in school, in the churches and in the neighborhood, in the buses and on the beaches.

L.C. [Bates' husband] and I have committed our lives to this crusade. Together we continue to take an active part in the fight for the emancipation of the Negro in the South. That is why L.C. has accepted the position of Field Secretary of the NAACP in Arkansas. Together we look to the time when the citizens of this land will erase the shame of Little Rock, when the Constitution of the United States will embrace every man regardless of his color, when brotherhood will be more than a mere topic for an annual church sermon. For all this, the American Negro today asks, "How long, how long...?"

---

Above, I mentioned reading two other Little Rock memoirs:

• Melba Beals (one of the nine students), Warriors Don't Cry. Reviews here (into_desire) and here (myself).
  
• Elizabeth Huckaby (white vice-principal for girls at Central High), Crisis at Central High, review in my own journal.

This may or may not be the last of my reading about Little Rock, depending on what is contained in Thurgood Marshall: His Speeches, Writings, Arguments, Opinions, and Reminisces.

Comments

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Um. I am kind of disturbed by the association of the Black Muslim movement with extreme violence, and with its opposition to America (instead of even "white America"), because without further explanation it seems to be playing off prejudices about violent black men and violent Muslims, especially with America personified as female. Can you elaborate, maybe, on what you were thinking and/or whether you were offering your opinion or paraphrasing Bates?

[sanguinity]

I was paraphrasing Bates. I'm at school now, and don't have the text with me -- I'll look up the passage tonight and check whether I was reading too much into it. In my recollection, she was clear that she felt a window of opportunity was closing, and I had the distinct impression that she had negative feelings about the future with respect to the Black Muslim movement.

But as I said, I'll check to be sure.

[sanguinity]

(Hurrah for university libraries!)

You're correct -- I was interjecting discussions about disenfranchisement and patriotism from elsewhere in the book when I set up America in opposition to the Black Muslim movement; her warning of a possibly violent future was gentler than my paraphrase; personifying America as female was stupid of me. My apologies, and thank you for bringing it up.

At the risk of overemphasizing her statements about nationalist movements and the Black Muslims, I'm going to strike my paraphrase and directly quote the last two pages of the book. That seems safer than me trying for a more thoughtful paraphrase, especially since the passage runs close to sensitive stereotypes.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

Thanks!