The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir

By Daisy Bates, Eleanor Roosevelt and Clayborne Carson

At an event honoring Daisy Bates as 1990’s Distinguished Citizen then-governor Bill Clinton called her "the most distinguished Arkansas citizen of all time." Her classic account of the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, couldn't be found on most bookstore shelves in 1962 and was banned throughout the South. In 1988, after the University of Arkansas Press reprinted it, it won an American Book Award. On September 3, 1957, Gov. Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to surround all-white Central High School and prevent the entry of nine black students, challenging the Supreme Court's 1954 order to integrate all public schools. On September 25, Daisy Bates, an official of the NAACP in Arkansas, led the nine children into the school with the help of federal troops sent by President Eisenhower–the first time in eighty-one years that a president had dispatched troops to the South to protect the constitutional rights of black Americans. This new edition of Bates's own story about these historic events is being issued to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Little Rock School crisis in 2007.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781610752473

Book preview

ROOSEVELT

CHAPTER I

LITTLE ROCK

UNTIL a September day in 1957 Little Rock was a quiet, undistinguished southern city, notable principally as being the capital of the State of Arkansas and for having won several national awards for being one of the cleanest cities of its size. Then suddenly it became a term heard around the world, a milestone like Lexington and Concord in man's long struggle for freedom and justice.

Even after the words Little Rock were on everyone's lips, few bothered to locate the city on the map. Those who went to the trouble would have found it located close to the geographical center of Arkansas. It is bounded on the north by the Arkansas River and on the south by low, granite-based hills. To the east lies open farming country, and to the west beautiful homes nestle in the shadows of gently rolling hills. The city itself rests on fairly level ground.

The city's hundred thousand citizens, Negroes and whites, took pride in the physical beauty of their town and for many years had lived side by side with little surface friction. The city had a progressive Public Housing Authority that made it possible for low income families—Negro and white—to move into well-appointed, but segregated, public housing. There was also a good, but segregated, school system with several modern educational plants of recent construction.

The tragedy that placed Little Rock on the world stage centered around Central High School located in the heart of the city. The school was built in 1927 at a cost of $1,500,000. It is an impressive structure, rising from landscaped grounds like a small university in yellow-bricked grandeur. It accommodates possibly three thousand pupils in a hundred classrooms built on seven levels. For years it has enjoyed the highest academic rating given by the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. Two of its graduates have become Rhodes scholars.

For many years prior to the unfolding of the events I am about to describe, race relations in the city had been relatively calm and improving. By this I do not mean there had not been many incidents of police brutality toward Negroes, and that the vicious southern system of relegating the black population to the role of secondary citizens had not been maintained in full force. But a spirit of calm pervaded the atmosphere, and there was a notable lack of tension.

My husband, L. C. Bates, and I had moved to Little Rock in 1941 and started a newspaper, the State Press. In spite of its crusading spirit, the paper prospered; and L. C., as my husband was always known, looked forward to a life of, if not serenity, at least quiet, progressive, journalistic endeavor. We had, of course, hailed the 1954 Supreme Court decision on school integration as a great forward step in achieving true equality for our race; and we felt the school board of Little Rock, while moving all too slowly, was determined to obey the law at least in token form and make a start on integration according to plans it had formulated and announced well in advance.

The plans called for the entrance into Central High School of nine Negro pupils when school opened on September 4, 1957. The city had apparently accepted the board's plans; and there seemed little reason to expect serious opposition, much less what followed. The summer passed quickly for those of us active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in preparing the children selected for this initial move toward integration to hold their own academically. And almost before I knew it, we were deep into August and the opening of school but a few weeks away.

On the evening of August 22, I was sitting in my living room listening to the eleven o'clock news broadcast on television. I heard the announcer say:

Governor Marvin Griffin, of Georgia, and Roy V. Harris, two of the South's most ardent segregationists, tonight addressed a state-wide meeting. The report continued that approximately three hundred fifty persons attended the dinner and heard Governor Griffin attack the Supreme Court decision and praise the courage of the Arkansas groups who were fighting to preserve the rights of states. He referred to them as patriots. He urged the support of a national propaganda campaign to support their stand. The announcer went on to state that the Capital Citizens Council, a local segregationist group, was host, and that while the Governor of Arkansas, Orval Eugene Faubus, had not attended the meeting, he would entertain Governor Griffin at breakfast the following morning.

After the broadcast I took Skippy, our dog, for his nightly walk. Little did I realize that this would be the last quiet walk that Skippy and I would enjoy for many years.

After we re-entered the house, I sat down on the divan in the living room, directly in front of our large picture window, and started glancing through the newspaper. Suddenly a large object came crashing through the glass. Instinctively I threw myself on the floor. I was covered with shattered glass. L. C. rushed into the room. He bent over me as I lay on the floor. Are you hurt? Are you hurt? he cried.

I don't think so, I said uncertainly. I reached for the rock lying in the middle of the floor. A note was tied to it. I broke the string and unfolded a soiled piece of paper. Scrawled in bold print were the words: STONE THIS TIME. DYNAMITE NEXT.

I handed the note to L. C. "A message from the Arkansas patriots, I remarked. As he left the room to telephone the police, I heard L. C. say, Thank God their aim was poor."

Suddenly I realized that this calm I had so taken for granted was only the calm before the storm, that this was war, and that as State President of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People I was in the front-line trenches. Was I ready for war? Was I ready to risk everything that L. C. and I had built? Who was I really and what did I stand for? Long after I had gone to bed my mind ranged over these questions and over the whole course of my life. Toward dawn I knew I had found the answer. I was ready. I drifted off into the sleep of a mind no longer torn by doubt or indecision.

CHAPTER II

REBIRTH

I WAS BORN Daisy Lee Gatson in the little sawmill town of Huttig, in southern Arkansas. The owners of the mill ruled the town. Huttig might have been called a sawmill plantation, for everyone worked for the mill, lived in houses owned by the mill, and traded at the general store run by the mill.

The hard, red clay streets of the town were mostly unnamed. Main Street, the widest and longest street in town, and the muddiest after a rain, was the site of our business square. It consisted of four one-story buildings which housed a commissary and meat market, a post office, an ice cream parlor, and a movie house. Main Street also divided White Town from Negra Town. However, the physical appearance of the two areas provided a more definite means of distinction.

The Negro citizens of Huttig were housed in rarely painted, drab red shotgun houses, so named because one could stand in the front yard and look straight through the front and back doors into the back yard. The Negro community was also provided with two church buildings of the same drab red exterior, although kept spotless inside by the Sisters of the church, and a two-room schoolhouse equipped with a potbellied stove that never quite succeeded in keeping it

Reviews for The Long Shadow of Little Rock

[cal8769 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An eye opening account of Daisy Bates part in the desegragation of schools. It's unreal that people are so cruel to each other.