In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

- 233 Chapter Sixteen GOING IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS As the civil rights movement picked up steam, it would become more apparent that the differences between Daisy and L. C. were widening . First, there was the fact of their physical separation. In November 1961 L. C. was assigned to work in Louisiana for “at least the next six months.”1 His year-end report in December 1961 offers a glimpse into his conservatism. Writing in the third person, he noted that “the Secretary has not been involved with Sit-Ins or Demonstrations this year. There has been only one attempt to sit in this year and it was poorly planned by a member of SNCC. The sponsor served notice that the students didn’t need the NAACP and did not want the NAACP. Seven of the students from Philander Smith College went downtown in March. The police told them to leave. They left and came back to the college. They renewed their attack on the NAACP.”2 In fact, L. C.’s attitude was probably not too much different than the year earlier, but then he had always been more conservative than Daisy. In his view, demonstrations, sit-ins, and “freedom rides” only caused conflict that served no purpose. His reluctance to support demonstrations wasn’t from a lack of courage. He had demonstrated courage far beyond his young rivals. But he couldn’t bring himself to believe that white supremacy would disappear as a result of blacks going out into the streets. To L. C., protest activities seemed too much like blacks asking whites to give them something. It offended his sense of the work ethic. If African Americans wanted to change things, they had the power of the ballot. Daisy might think she could “prick” the conscience of a white supremacist; L. C. never did, at least he never stated so publicly. Soon, he would even go to Faubus for jobs for blacks, a move that would get him into trouble with his bosses at the NAACP. Bates was now expecting her book to be published in April 1962 and once again began declining speaking engagements. Every time she turned in her manuscript to her publisher, Kenneth Rawson, she expected it to be the last time. On April 2, however, she wrote to Thelma Mothershed that “I am still working on the book.”3 No longer was she telling people when she expected it to be published. But then sometime in April, Rawson accepted it. Instead of returning to Little Rock, however, she stayed in New York. The months waiting for a book finally to appear in print are a hopeful time for many first-time authors, who, despite all the evidence to the contrary, allow themselves to dream of having a best seller. Bates had helped her chances by approaching Eleanor Roosevelt to write the foreword for the book. In 1962, seventeen years after the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, his widow was still a familiar though controversial figure in the South because of her vocal support for civil rights and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Though just two pages long, the foreword signaled to would-be readers, not to mention book reviewers, that Bates’s memoir was to be taken seriously as an important account of the modern civil rights movement. Given what Bates had gone through and the savagery that still awaited those most active in the civil rights movement in the South, Eleanor Roosevelt’s words strike a sympathetic reader today as hopelessly naive. She wrote in part, “I wish that Mrs. Bates who suffered so much . . . had been able to keep from giving us some of the sense of her bitterness and fear in the end of her book.”4 It is an astonishing comment , but doubtless one shared by many whites who did not wish to be unduly discomforted by thoughts of anger that might be welling up in the hearts of black people. As long as Bates and her many helpers were cobbling together a heartwarming account of a plucky black woman who forgave her enemies and expressed long-lasting hope for the country’s future, no one needed to feel nervous about The Long Shadow of Little Rock. In retrospect, Bates’s expression of the sense of frustration she felt one wintry day in Washington, D.C., after the 1957–58 school desegregation crisis, ring the truest of any of her words in her book. In the last few pages...

Share