Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas

Notes

- 298 NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. Ted Ownby, ed., The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002); David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophecy, Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 2. Thomas Gentile, March on Washington, August 28, 1963 (Washington, D.C.: New Day Publications, 1983), 229. 3. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963 (New York: Touchstone, 1989) 882–86. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 880. 6. One of the ironies of the period was A. Philip Randolph’s appearance at the all-male Press Club in Washington just days before the march. Women, white or black, were not permitted but could observe the proceedings from the balcony. Gentile, March on Washington, 140. 7. Douglas Brinkley, Rosa Parks (New York: Viking Penguin, 2000), 185. 8. Ibid., 186. There is much recent discussion in the literature about the role of women in the civil rights movement. See particularly Anne Standley, “The Role of Black Women in the Civil Rights Movement,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement : Trailblazers and Torchbearers 1941–1965, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1993), 183–201; Bettye Collier-Thomas and V. P. Franklin, eds, Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2001); Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 9. Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Free Press, 2000), 199. 10. Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, quoted in Dyson, I May Not Get There, 207. 11. In his review of the civil rights career of Modeska Simpkins in Stone of Hope, 63–66, David L. Chappell whets the reader’s appetite for more information about this powerfully outspoken and talented woman. 12. Ibid., 206. 13. John Andrew Kirk, “Black Activism in Arkansas, 1940–1970” (Ph.D. diss., Newcastle University, 1997), 21. Kirk’s book on this subject is Redefining the Color Line: Black Activism in Little Rock, Arkansas 1940–1970 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002). 14. American Legacy, Spring 2004, 37. Height was undoubtedly remembering that no woman was scheduled to speak. 15. Gentile, March on Washington, 141. 16. Gentile records that A. Philip Randolph made the first speech (all the main speakers were limited to seven minutes and remarkably stayed on time) at 1:15 and followed it with the “the tribute to women” with his introductions of the women mentioned above, though Myrlie Evers, the widow of Medgar Evers, was absent. Gentile, March on Washington, 225. It would have been here that Daisy Bates made her brief remarks, though her own memory of the events had her speaking after Martin Luther King Jr., whose speech was undeniably the last on the program. It is likely that Roy Wilkins prevailed upon the others to allow Bates to speak. 17. Sound recording of excerpts of speeches at the March on Washington, August 28, 1963, Exhibit 15, National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, Tennessee. 18. Daisy Bates to Roy Wilkins, Oct. 19, 1962, Box 1, File 1, Daisy Bates Papers, Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries, Fayetteville (hereafter cited as Fayetteville). 19. Gender issues as they affect racial history are finally becoming part of the intellectual landscape. Jeannie M. Whayne has summarized the often sharp differences among historians, primarily women historians, who have written within the last thirty years on women’s roles within the family and the gender issues facing black and white Southern women as the Civil War ended. See Jeannie M. Whayne, “Southern Women in the Age of Emancipation,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction, ed. Lacy Ford (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005). 20. Tony Freyer, The Little Rock Crisis: A Constitutional Interpretation (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), 54. 21. Arkansas Gazette, May 5, 1956. 22. State Press, May 11, 1956. 23. In commenting on the legacy of white supremacy for a conference commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the Central High Crisis, historian David R. Goldfield has written, “The damage all of this did to black southerners is incalculable and, in - 299 Notes fact, historians have scarcely begun to assess the impact of segregation on blacks, whites, and the South.” David R. Goldfield, “Segregation and...