Daisy Bates was later recognized as co-publisher of the paper.Īs the former president of the Arkansas State Conference of the NAACP, Bates was involved deeply in desegregated events. The paper became an avid voice for civil rights even before a nationally recognized movement had emerged. Pictures were also in abundance throughout the paper. Stories about civil rights often ran on the front page with the rest of the paper mainly filled with other stories that spotlighted achievements of black Arkansans. The Arkansas State Press was primarily concerned with advocacy journalism and was modeled off other African-American publications of the era, such as the Chicago Defender and The Crisis. They leased a printing plant that belonged to a church publication and inaugurated the Arkansas State Press, a weekly statewide newspaper.

In 1952, Daisy Bates was elected president of the Arkansas Conference of NAACP branches.Īfter their move to Little Rock, the Bateses decided to act on a dream of theirs, the ownership of a newspaper. Lucius divorced his first wife in 1941 before moving to Little Rock and starting the Arkansas State Press. Daisy was only 15 years old when they first met, and Lucius was still married to Kasssandra Crawford. ĭaisy was 17 when she started dating Lucius Christopher Bates, an insurance salesman who had also worked on newspapers in the South and West. Even after the death of Orlee Smith, the two had a falling out. Susie Smith would punish Daisy and, 'often clobbered, tamed, switched, and made to stand in the corner'. In contrast to their relationship, Daisy had an austere relationship with her mother. Bates had great adulation for the man where she couldn't 'remember a time when this man I called my father didn't talk to me almost as if I were an adult'. Daisy deeply appreciated her father, leading to her own assumption that she married her husband because he shared similar qualities with her father. Orlee Smith died when Bates was a teenager, leaving her with her mother. īates' childhood included attendance in Huttig's segregated public schools, where she learned firsthand the poor conditions to which black students were exposed. They shared pennies for hard candy, and got along well. She believed that this memory supported her strength for leadership in the cause of civil rights.īefore Daisy was exposed to her biological mother's death, she often played with Beatrice, a white girl around her age. Hate the insults hurled at us by white scum-and then try to do something about it, or your hate won't spell a thing. Hate the discrimination that eats away at the soul of every black man and woman. Hate the discrimination that eats away at the South. Hate the humiliations we are living under in the South. If you hate, make it count for something. Don't hate white people just because they're white. Out of concern and hope, her adoptive father gave her some advice from his deathbed: The young man later pleaded with Daisy, 'In the name of God, please leave me alone.' He drank himself to death and was found in an alleyway. After this interaction, Daisy would go there often to belittle the drunken man with just her eyes.

At a commissary, she stumbled upon a gaze from a young white man that would imply that he was involved. 'My life now had a secret goal – to find the men who had done this horrible thing to my mother.' She eventually identified one of her mother's killers. Her adoptive father, Orlee Smith, told her that the killers were never found and that the police showed little interest in the case. Learning that no one was prosecuted for her mother's murder stoked Daisy's anger about injustice. In The Death of My Mother, 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 was later discovered. Her father Hezekiah abandoned her, and Daisy never saw him again. Her mother Millie Riley was murdered when Daisy was an infant, and the girl was given care to her mother's close friends: Orlee Smith, a World War I veteran, and his wife Susie Smith. Hezekiah Gatson supported the family by working as a lumber grader in a local mill. She grew up in southern Arkansas in the small sawmill town of Huttig. Daisy Bates was born on November 11, 1914, to her father Hezekiah Gatson, and her mother Millie Riley.

Daisy bates