Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas

Introduction

- 3 INTRODUCTION The richness and complexity of the men, both black and white, who marched in opposing camps during the critical period of the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s are only now being fully appreciated as scholars gain distance from that era.1 One can almost hear the dead sighing in relief from their graves. Yet whatever their motives and the influences that shaped them, these men participated in a revolution such as the United States has never seen, before or since. In retrospect, their accomplishments were astonishing. In a matter of years, customs and laws that had endured for centuries simply vanished into history. Surely as important, the civil rights movement helped to spawn revolutions in the treatment of women, people with disabilities, juveniles, gays and lesbians, the environment, and a host of other concerns (such as the rights of criminal defendants) that are still being played out today. The fact that inevitable counterrevolutions have been launched in these areas only underscores the impact of the civil rights movement in this era. Of course, men alone were not the only participants in the civil rights movement. Women, young people, and even children took to the streets and occasionally filled the jails in this era. But it is the role of women, and specifically the role of some of the black women, in the civil rights movement that concerns us in this introductory chapter about the life of one of them. It is instructive to begin at the apex of the movement—the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, in which an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 people gathered on the Mall to hear and support their leaders as they demanded an end to racial apartheid in the United States.2 Though now remembered primarily in popular culture for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, the March on Washington and the program at the Lincoln Memorial that afternoon, beamed all over the world, were truly two of the high points in the civil rights movement. Immediately after the event, a number of the march’s leaders, including King; Roy Wilkins, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and A. Philip Randolph, who conceived the march, walked over to the White House to discuss civil rights legislation with the president.3 Not one woman, black or white, was among this select group of civil rights leaders who met that evening for seventy-two minutes with President John F. Kennedy. Not only that, not a single woman had been scheduled to address the marchers at the afternoon program. In his authoritative March on Washington: August 28, 1963, Thomas Gentile writes that the march program by “mid-August called for Randolph to introduce five black women to the assembled crowd: Rosa Parks, Mrs. Medgar Evers, Daisy Bates, Cambridge, Maryland leader Gloria Richardson and SNCC’s Diane Nash Bevell. None were to be given the opportunity to speak.”4 Though Anna Arnold Hedgmen, an organizer for the National Council of Churches and the only woman on the “administrative committee” for the march, found this absence “incredible ” and protested, “no serious changes were made in the [afternoon] program” at the last meeting of the committee before the march. To add insult to injury, it wasn’t only that no women were scheduled to be speakers, “without noticeable dissent, the planning committee barred Coretta King and the other wives of the male leaders from marching with their husbands.”5 Nor were the women who were to be introduced that afternoon allowed to march with the male leaders. Why were these men so seemingly determined to risk alienating half of their supporters, including their own wives? The male black leadership planning the march, the so-called big ten, ran the gauntlet from militant John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose fiery speech would have to be toned down in order to be acceptable to the others, to Roy Wilkins, whose sophistication and political skills had grown the NAACP into a crucial cash cow for the movement and a nationwide organization that dwarfed the others present that afternoon. Surely one of these men could have stepped forward and brought the others to their senses. In fact, no one perceived the need to do so. The answer to the question is that black women in 1963 were not ready to seriously challenge the unvarnished sexism displayed by black males, which mirrored...