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- 191 Chapter Fourteen COPING WITH DEFEAT As the calendar turned over to 1959, Daisy Bates may have guessed what a fateful year it was to be for her and L. C. On January 29 she wrote Roy Wilkins that she would be in New York on “February 1, to address the Great Neck Branch. I will leave for Lakeville, [Conn.,] Monday. I plan to drop by the office Monday morning, and if it is at all possible, I would like to see you for a few minutes.”1 What Bates wanted to say in private to Wilkins is not known. Most likely, it was about money. Though there would be no black students in the Little Rock School District until the fall of 1959, the national office faithfully continued to underwrite the Arkansas State Conference of Branches. In actuality, Daisy and L. C. were being subsidized, for the checks were sent directly to her. She spent the money on everything from guards for the house to travel for the NAACP. Though she was increasingly out of town for longer periods of time, Bates still needed to watch her back in the black community. Every few months Little Rock blacks outside the NAACP still continued to try to speak on behalf of the black community on school integration matters. I. S. McClinton, president of the Arkansas Democratic (Negro) Voters League, brazenly told reporters on January 22, “We would accept anything that legal counsel for both parties agreed to.” The implication was that McClinton had authority to speak for the parents. Bates set the press straight. “He is simply speaking for himself as a private citizen,” she said. “We already have a plan.”2 The so-called Blossom plan was hardly what the NAACP had wanted, but it was all that was on the table in Little Rock. Bates was its jealous guardian, a fact that did not make everyone in the black community happy. Ozell Sutton, who considered L. C. a mentor and would later assume a leadership role in the early 1960s, remembered, “Daisy Bates was a leader for the Negroes in the contending forces concerned with integration, but there was definite disagreement within the Negro community over her tactics and her personality. However, there was never any public disagreement because of the unanimity of commitment to desegregation. Because the community power was centered in Daisy Bates, she made arbitrary decisions.”3 Increasingly, Bates was involved with the national board. In March she agreed to “accept membership on the special Committee of Fifty,” a fund-raising project that required each member to raise $5,000. It was explained that the $250,000 the committee was to bring into the NAACP’s coffers was over and above the regular fundraising goal. Given the finances of the State Press, taking on this responsibility seemed an arbitrary commitment to make, but Bates obviously saw no inconsistency. Similarly, she volunteered to help A. Philip Randolph in preparing for a “Youth March for integrated Schools,” scheduled for April 18 in Washington, D.C. Randolph wrote her that though he knew how difficult it would be to arrange, “a small delegation from Little Rock on April 18 would have tremendous effect and would electrify everyone. For Little Rock remains at the focus of this entire struggle .”4 Bates was listed as one of the “chairman,” along with such notables as Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Martin Luther King Jr., Jackie Robinson, Norman Thomas, and Walter Reuther. Bates’s attitude about money was that those who had it should feel privileged to give it to a worthy cause. Without ever quite needing to say so, she accepted contributions from others as her due. First, her foster father had provided for her, and then L. C. had done the same. Though she would make it appear that her courses at Shorter College had prepared her to cope in the business world, her behavior indicated that she was somewhat above it all. In her mind, she was serious when she said that her father had prepared her to be a “lady.” As Chris Mercer said, Bates did not have any skills. She had no nose for the bottom line. This cavalier attitude toward the grubbier aspects of daily life would finally catch up with her after L. C. died and was not there to protect her from the bad advice of others, but that was almost a quarter of a century later. Bates, for all her tactical skills, was a...

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