Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

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. ( Edit: the closing passage of the book )

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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.

3. Toni Morrison, Remember: The Journey to School Integration

( Mixed Review )

It's a gorgeous book. If I had a kid of the right age, I'd definitely use it with them. But I'd also want to study up and supply some of the context that the book doesn't provide.