Daisy Lee Gaston Bates (1914-1999)
Place of Birth: Huttig, Arkansas
In the fall of 1957, Little Rock's Central High School mesmerized the nation when nine black students tested the resolve of the federal government to enforce the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, which declared school segregation unconstitutional. As president of the state NAACP, Daisy Bates coordinated the school integration effort in Little Rock. Her home served as the meeting place for the students who became known as the Little Rock Nine. Governor Orval Fabus (who declared that "blood would run in the streets of Little Rock" should black students attempt to integrate Central High), the Arkansas National Guard, and a threatening, jeering crowd successfully repelled the nine students on their initial attempts to enter the school. The following day, Bates telegrammed President Dwight Eisenhower for help. Eisenhower dispatched the 101st Airborne Division to escort the students into school and maintain order. For weeks Bates and the students endured unrelenting racial taunts, slurs, and threats, but rocks hurled through Bates' windows, a cross burned on the roof of her home, and being burned in effigy.

Bates had never been a stranger to racial violence. As a child in Huttig, Arkansas, she had been raised by Orlee and Susie Smith after her mother was raped and murdered by three white men and her father fled the town. As a young woman, Daisy Bates (with her husband L.C.) co-edited and published the Arkansas State Press, a newspaper devoted to civil rights and exposing injustices. After the Central High School episode, advertising revenue for the paper dried up, forcing its closure and nearly ruining the Bateses financially. Bates moved to New York City and spent the next two years writing The Long Shadow of Little Rock, chronicling the Central High School crisis. The book was published with a preface by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1962. In the mid-1960s Daisy Bates moved to Washington, D.C. and worked for the Democratic National Committee and served in President Lyndon Johnson's anti-poverty crusade. She returned to Arkansas in 1968 and worked on the local level to improve conditions in black communities. In 1984 the State Press circulated again but Bates sold it in 1987. She died in Little Rock at the age of 84 in 1999. In the fall of 1957, Little Rock's Central High School mesmerized the nation when nine black students tested the resolve of the federal government to enforce the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, which declared school segregation unconstitutional. As president of the state NAACP, Daisy Bates coordinated the school integration effort in Little Rock. Her home served as the meeting place for the students who became known as the Little Rock Nine. Governor Orval Fabus (who declared that "blood would run in the streets of Little Rock" should black students attempt to integrate Central High), the Arkansas National Guard, and a threatening, jeering crowd successfully repelled the nine students on their initial attempts to enter the school. The following day, Bates telegrammed President Dwight Eisenhower for help. Eisenhower dispatched the 101st Airborne Division to escort the students into school and maintain order. For weeks Bates and the students endured unrelenting racial taunts, slurs, and threats, but rocks hurled through Bates' windows, a cross burned on the roof of her home, and being burned in effigy.

Bates had never been a stranger to racial violence. As a child in Huttig, Arkansas, she had been raised by Orlee and Susie Smith after her mother was raped and murdered by three white men and her father fled the town. As a young woman, Daisy Bates (with her husband L.C.) co-edited and published the Arkansas State Press, a newspaper devoted to civil rights and exposing injustices. After the Central High School episode, advertising revenue for the paper dried up, forcing its closure and nearly ruining the Bateses financially. Bates moved to New York City and spent the next two years writing The Long Shadow of Little Rock, chronicling the Central High School crisis. The book was published with a preface by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1962. In the mid-1960s Daisy Bates moved to Washington, D.C. and worked for the Democratic National Committee and served in President Lyndon Johnson's anti-poverty crusade. She returned to Arkansas in 1968 and worked on the local level to improve conditions in black communities. In 1984 the State Press circulated again but Bates sold it in 1987. She died in Little Rock at the age of 84 in 1999.
Publications: The Long Shadow of Little Rock, A Memoir (New York: David McKay Co, 1962)

Elizabeth Eckford (1942 - )
Place of Birth: Little Rock, Arkansas
On September 4, 1957, fifteen year old Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, attempted to integrate Little Rock's Central High School by herself. Two days earlier Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus vowed to defy federally mandated school integration and dispatched more than 200 National Guardsmen to surround Central High School. The guard, Fabus alleged, were sent "to prevent violence." The nine black students chosen by school authorities to integrate the school had originally planned to meet at Central on September 4th and walk into the school as a group. But because of the heightened danger and the volatility of the white community, the group's leaders decided in the interest of safety to meet off-campus and approach the school accompanied by a group of black and white ministers. Because the Eckford family had no telephone, word of the new meeting place never reached Elizabeth, leaving her all alone to face a jeering, white mob and the National Guard. Believing the guards were present to protect her, she tried to pass through the line several times before being rebuffed by bayonettes and forced back into the white crowd. Terrified, Eckford retreated and started to walk away but the crowd pursued her, spat on her, and clawed her, yelling, "Nigger!" and "Lynch her!" Finally, Grace Lorch, the wife of a local white minister, helped Eckford board a city bus and returned her to her mother safely. The following day Will Counts' famous photograph of the somber and frightened Eckford hounded by a group of heckling whites appeared on countless newspapers, pushing Eckford and the Little Rock crisis onto the national stage.

Over the next few weeks, Faubus continued to fight federal authorities until finally on September 24th, President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard wresting control away from Faubus and ordered the 101st Airborne Division to escort the nine students into the school. For the remainder of the school year, the guard accompanied the students from class to class.

The Little Rock Nine eventually succeeded in integrating Central High School. Elizabeth Eckford later received a degree in history from Central State College in Wilberforce, Ohio. She served in the United States Army for several years, was a social worker and substitute teacher, and in 1974 returned to live in her family's home in Little Rock, the only one of the Nine to return to that city to live. In 1999, forty-two years after the crisis, Eckford and the other Little Rock Nine students received the Congressional Gold Medal from President Bill Clinton as "a permanent remembrance of their unforgettable moment of courage." She is also the recipient of the Spingarn Medal, the highest award for achievement given by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.