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- 280 Chapter Nineteen FIGHTING OVER A LEGEND During the years that Daisy Bates spent in Mitchellville, a profound change was occurring in Arkansas politics, as it was throughout the South. It wasn’t just the politics of expediency that produced a new breed of Arkansas Democrats in the late 1960s who turned their backs on white supremacy as a governing principle. The civil rights movement had a cumulative effect that today is taken for granted. Thanks to the success of Republican Winthrop Rockefeller, the politics of racial inclusion was now acceptable. It was a moment in Arkansas like no other. Democratic racial progressives such as Dale Bumpers and David Pryor would occupy the governor’s chair and then go on to the U.S. Senate, replacing racial mossbacks J. William Fulbright, who despite his liberal reputation in foreign policy was no friend to blacks, and John McClellan. Locally, too, roughly in this time period, there began a transformation within Little Rock in the attitudes of some of its most powerful movers and shakers. For example, the Arkansas Gazette relatively quickly transformed its editorial stance from that of “Southern Moderate” to that of “Liberal Queen” and became a stalwart defender of racial integration within the Little Rock schools and elsewhere. Both L. C. and Daisy felt this sea change in attitude, though among whites it was patchy at best. In doing interviews for her master’s thesis on L. C. in 1980, Irene Wassell discovered that it was “difficult to find a public official who will speak ill of him, but in the private sector it is a different story.” “Many of us who were here during the crisis do not think kindly of the Bateses and did not appreciate what they did to the community during the 1950s,” one individual told her.1 Within the black community, it was a given that Daisy Bates’s name would always be sacrosanct in the halls of the NAACP. She had owed too much to Roy Wilkins to do anything but complain about him in private, hence her status as a silent member of the Young Turks. If one wants to view it this way, Bates’s growing acclaim was a vindication of Wilkins’s leadership, even as she once gave her tacit approval to those who would overthrow him. According to Annie Abrams, however, even as Bates was gradually becoming a civil rights icon after her return to Little Rock, she felt lonely and isolated from the black community. “The only time she would get called is the Democratic connection during an election season . She was not called in Little Rock to do a lot of speaking . . . because people were very elitist. She was a Delta [sorority member] at the national level because Dorothy Height and Lena Horne and all those folks were the ones who made her a Delta. . . . She was honorary. The Deltas here in Little Rock didn’t accept her. They resented her and therefore she didn’t have a lot of speaking engagements in Little Rock or in Arkansas.”2 However some blacks in Little Rock privately felt about her, officially there was no doubt about her status. Because she stayed true to nonviolence and the mainstream principles of American democracy, Bates gradually became in Arkansas what Martin Luther King Jr. became in death to the rest of the nation: an icon to genuinely revere, or at least to give lip service to. An irony in the 1970s was that blacks on a national level did not know what to do with their new-found political clout. In March 1974 blacks were so fragmented about the direction they should take that about the only thing those attending the National Black Political Convention could really find to agree on was how to honor the principals of the Little Rock Crisis. Though the convention was primarily notable for its absence of big-name politicians, with the exception of Jesse Jackson of Chicago, who was viewed by the others as a shark circling a school of smaller fish, the events of 1957 in Little Rock provided the delegates a unifying symbol. Though the parents and L. C. were honored as well, it was Daisy who received wave after wave of sustained applause from the frustrated delegates, who got to their feet to acknowledge her.3 Deeply moved, Bates could not stop herself from crying, a response that would have been unthinkable back in the days when she was a regular on...

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