Daisy Bates (civil Rights Activist)
Daisy Lee Gatson Bates (November 11, 1914 – November 4, 1999) was an American civil rights activist, publisher, and writer who played a leading role in the Little Rock Integration Crisis of 1957.
Bates was raised by Orle and Susie Smith, whom she believed to be her birth parents for many years. In "The Death of my Mother," Bates recounted learning as a child that her birth mother had been sexually assaulted and murdered by three local white men. Her father left the family shortly after her mother's death and left her in the care of his closest friend. L.C. Bates, an insurance salesman who had also worked on newspapers in the South and West. L. C. dated her for several years, and they married in 1942, living in Little Rock. The Bates decided to act on a dream of theirs, the ownership of a newspaper. They leased a printing plant that belonged to a church publication and inaugurating the Arkansas State Press. The first issue appeared on May 9, 1941. The paper became an avid voice for civil rights even before a nationally recognized movement had emerged.
In 1952, Daisy Bates was elected president of the Arkansas Conference of NAACP branches.
Read more about Daisy Bates (civil Rights Activist): Little Rock Integration Crisis, Later Life, Honors and Awards
Famous quotes containing the words daisy, bates and/or rights:
“The token woman carries a bouquet of hothouse celery
and a stenographer’s pad; she will take
the minutes, perk the coffee, smile
like a plastic daisy and put out
the black cat of her sensuous anger
to howl on the fence all night.”
—Marge Piercy (b. 1936)
“A boy’s best friend is his mother.”
—Joseph Stefano, U.S. screenwriter, and Alfred Hitchcock. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins)
“Assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep rooted and every bit as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro.... this is no more a man’s world than it is a white world.”
—Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, African American civil rights organization. SNCC Position Paper (Women in the Movement)