Why is daisy bates famous
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Daisy Bates
(1914-1999)
Who Was Daisy Bates?
Daisy Bates married journalist Christopher Bates and they operated a weekly African American newspaper, the Arkansas State Press. Bates became president of the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP and played a crucial role in the fight against segregation, which she documented in her book The Long Shadow of Little Rock.
Early Life
Born Daisy Lee Gatson on November 11, 1914, in Huttig, Arkansas. Bates’s childhood was marked by tragedy. Her mother was sexually assaulted and murdered by three white men and her father left her. She was raised by friends of the family.
As a teenager, Bates met Lucious Christopher “L.C.” Bates, an insurance agent and an experienced journalist. The couple married in the early 1940s and moved to Little Rock, Arkansas. Together they operated the Arkansas State Press, a weekly African American newspaper. The paper championed civil rights, and Bates joined in the civil rights movement.
NAACP Presidency
Bates became the president of Arkansas chapter of the National Association for Advancement of Colore
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Bates, Daisy
November 11, 1914 to November 4, 1999
Daisy Lee Gaston Bates, a civil rights advocate, newspaper publisher, and president of the Arkansas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), advised the nine students who desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. Martin Luther King offered encouragement to Bates during this period, telling her in a letter that she was “a woman whom everyone KNOWS has been, and still is in the thick of the battle from the very beginning, never faltering, never tiring” (Papers 4:446).
Bates was born in 1914 in the small town of Huttig, Arkansas. Following the murder of her biological mother and the disappearance of her father, family friends Orlee and Susan Smith raised her. At an early age she developed a disdain for discrimination, recalling in her autobiography, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, an incident when a local butcher told her, “Niggers have to wait ’til I wait on the white people” (Bates, 8).
At the age of 15 she met L. C
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Daisy Bates (activist)
American civil rights activist (1914–1999)
For other people named Daisy Bates, see Daisy Bates (disambiguation).
Daisy Bates (November 11, 1914 – November 4, 1999) was an American civil rights activist, publisher, journalist, and lecturer who played a leading role in the Little Rock Integration Crisis of 1957.
Early life
Daisy Bates was born on November 11, 1914, to her father Hezekiah Gatson, and her mother Millie Riley. She grew up in southern Arkansas in the small sawmill town of Huttig. Hezekiah Gatson supported the family by working as a lumber grader in a local mill. Her mother Millie Riley was murdered when Daisy was an infant, and the girl was given care by her mother's close friends: Orlee Smith, a World War I veteran, and his wife Susie Smith. Her father Hezekiah abandoned her, and Daisy never saw him again.[1] In The Death of My Mother,[2] Bates recounted learning, at the age of eight, that her birth mother had been raped and murdered by three local white men, and her body thrown into a millpond, where it wa
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