Daisy Bates

Daisy Lee Gatson Bates was the strategist, protector, and fierce guardian behind the Little Rock Nine — the nine Black students who desegregated Central High School in Arkansas in 1957. As president of the Arkansas NAACP, Bates recruited and prepared the students, coached them in nonviolent resistance, and literally walked them through screaming mobs. When Governor Orval Faubus sent the National Guard to block the students, Bates called the White House until President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to escort them inside.

Born in Huttig, Arkansas, in 1914, Bates learned early the cost of racism — she was told as a child that her mother had been murdered by three white men who were never prosecuted. That knowledge fueled a lifetime of defiance. With her husband L.C. Bates, she co-published the Arkansas State Press, a Black newspaper that challenged segregation and police brutality long before the Central High crisis.

Bates endured constant threats — her home was firebombed, her newspaper was driven out of business by advertisers pressured to withdraw, and she was arrested multiple times. But she never wavered. She continued organizing and advocating for decades, and in 2001, the State of Arkansas designated the third Monday of February as Daisy Gatson Bates Day.