Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas

Chapter 3: A Newspaper All Their Own

- 32 Chapter Three A NEWSPAPER ALL THEIR OWN When L. C. and Daisy arrived in Little Rock, they were virtual strangers in a city of around 100,000 inhabitants, almost a quarter of whom were black. Every community of any size in the South has always had its black elites, and Little Rock was no exception . Two of these representatives were passing their last years in the capital city just as Daisy and L. C. were arriving on the scene. Both born slaves, Charlotte Stephens and Scipio Africanus Jones had not merely survived Jim Crow, they had mastered its intricacies and taken advantage of its possibilities. With the blood of their former masters coursing through their veins, both were hypersensitive to their place in black society and were at the same time guardians of the old etiquette of race relations. When interviewed for the Federal Writers’ Project in 1937, Stephens, Little Rock’s first black schoolteacher, noted in her formal, measured way that whites, even during slavery, had no monopoly on the right to define the social pecking order. In fact, Stephens, then eighty-three years old, remembered, “There was class distinction, perhaps to greater extent than among the white people.” Understandably, Stephens had not identified with the 400,000 uneducated blacks in the state who toiled in the fields but rather with the house slaves of her owner, Chester Ashley, whose education, wealth, and status as a lawyer and landowner made him first among equals in the rough-and-ready frontier town of Little Rock. According to Stephens, the Ashley family had referred to her people not as slaves but as “servants.” Her father, William Wallace Andrews, “brought up in the mansion, enjoying opportunities and privileges” with the Ashleys’ two young sons, was regarded almost as a family member.1 The irony, of course, was that Andrews and his little daughter, Lottie (like many members of the black elite in the South), were family members—Stephens’s paternal grandfather was white. “On the subject of segregation,” her biographer writes, “Mrs. Stephens during the last years of her life, was more of a conservative than a radical. At the root of her attitude in this matter there was personal pride and self-respect, the feeling that gentle folk do not intrude where they aren’t wanted. . . . She thought some segregation was still natural. The time was not ripe for its entire abolition.”2 A teacher in a segregated system all her life, Stephens and those like her in the black elite, including other teachers, college professors, doctors , lawyers, and certain members of the business community, readily accepted the notion of a black aristocracy based on education, skin color, or wealth, or any combination of these. Often given special privileges themselves (such as education) as a result of their partly white ancestry, they were less than enthusiastic about challenging Jim Crow. In the past few years, a number of historians writing about race in Arkansas have taken note of this phenomenon.3 Most recently, in a study of Little Rock’s black leadership between 1940 and 1970, historian John Kirk has written, Segregation provided black businesses and black professionals with an exclusive black clientele for their services that they remained reluctant to sacrifice in a push for social equality. Moreover, black leaders relied on their position as spokesmen for their race to gain status and prestige within the community, with their standing in part both defined and enhanced by their liaisons with influential whites for whom they often acted as go-betweens with the black community. Working to destroy segregation for black leaders ultimately meant undermining their own financial position, by abolishing their protected market, and community standing, by alienating influential whites.4 It goes without saying that blacks would have been at considerable personal risk in challenging the doctrine of white supremacy for much of the Jim Crow era. The history of the Old South, especially, is the history of white violence against African Americans. Any leaders too far ahead of their time risked their life and property. The male analogue of Charlotte Stephens in Arkansas was Scipio Africanus Jones, born in 1861 or 1862 and son of a south Arkansas planter/physician and his house slave. The father saw that his son was educated at Philander Smith College and Shorter College in Little - 33 A Newspaper All Their Own Rock and arranged to have him study for...