Review of Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock, reviewed by Zoë Burkholder

The photographs of fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford being turned away from Central High in Little Rock on the first day of school in 1957 are among the most iconic of the black civil rights movement. Part of what makes civil rights history so compelling is its clear moral imperative, and nothing illustrates the evils of racism better than armed white soldiers physically rebuffing a black girl, her arms full of school books, wearing her best new dress on the first day of school.

The desegregation of Little Rock, Arkansas, is part of the established cannon of civil rights history; however, until recently scholars have interpreted this event as a showdown between state and federal law. In contrast, recent scholarship has focused instead on the role of Daisy Bates, the president of the Arkansas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) who represented the black community during this crisis. Today, historians are asking new questions about the role of women in the civil rights movement, most of whom were denied leadership positions within major organizations. This film joins a body of new scholarship that seeks to recover the voices and actions of black female activists in the long struggle for civil rights.1

In the beginning of Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock, filmmaker Sharon La Cruise wonders aloud why she had never heard of Bates, who single-handedly coordinated one of the most infamous school desegregation episodes in American history. This question serves as an intriguing jumping off point for the film, which traces La Cruise’s seven year effort to uncover the remarkable history of a key female leader in the black civil rights movement.

The film opens with television footage of the desegregation of Central High School, an event that was scarred by the violent opposition of furious whites to the arrival of nine black children to a previously “white” school. The event deteriorated into a standoff between Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, who called in the National Guard to stop the black children from attending Central High, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who called in the US Army to make sure they could. Bates was in the middle of this battle, working behind the scenes to ensure that school desegregation moved forward and that the nine children continued to attend school for the entire year.

While most historical narratives mention Bates only in passing, La Cruise centers her analysis on Bates as a rare example of a black woman who rose to prominence in the civil rights movement. Viewers are introduced to Bates through footage of her speaking alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., laughing with reporters, challenging the white power structure of Birmingham in front of the shattered front window of her own home. “She was not soft spoken, she was not humble, she didn’t ask—she told, it just blew people’s minds,” says one off-camera commentator. “Daisy Bates was a rabble-rouser, she was pointing her fingers at people, she was organizing boycotts ... and people feared her,” adds another.

La Cruise does a nice job contextualizing these comments, which have a particular significance when used to describe a black woman in 1950s America. One of the hardest things about teaching civil rights history is trying to get students to fully understand the social and cultural context of the Jim Crow South. Students today, for example, find it rather unremarkable that a woman should be an outspoken leader in anything. What is more, they tend to conflate different time periods such as grainy old television footage of Bates’ cutting criticism of the white power structure in 1957 with that of a later generation of female black activists like Angela Davis in the 1970s. This is where a film can be a particularly effective teaching tool that allows students to bear witness to the cultural norms of another time and place.

We are drawn in to La Cruise’s searching questions about the life of Daisy Bates, and in the process, students are able to be part of the messy, but at times exhilarating process of doing historical research. Reared in a small community in rural Arkansas, Daisy was eight years old when she learned that her mother had been raped and murdered by three local white men, her body dumped in a pond. Fearful of reprisals, her father left town leaving young Daisy in the care of another couple who raised her as their own. According to the friends and family that La Cruise interviews on camera, this deeply traumatic coming of age left Bates scarred for life.

La Cruise balances these personal recollections by friends with a scholarly analysis by historians including Dr. Aldon D. Morris at Northwestern University. Morris explains that while the rape and murder of her mother was no doubt formative to young Daisy, it was also a regular part of life for black girls and women in the pre-1964 South. All black women, he reminds us, lived with the constant threat of sexual assault and abuse by white men, and black men lived with the knowledge that there was little they could do to protect their own wives, sisters, and daughters. Sexual violence was part of the pattern of racial oppression in the South that black people had dealt with for centuries.

These kinds of harsh and unpleasant truths are vital to understanding not only the history of the black civil rights movement, but also the intricacies of gender-based discrimination within the movement. Part of what many black activists were fighting for was the right for black men to take their rightful place as heads of households with all the social and legal authority over women that position entailed. This ideal of manhood, which was embraced by many men and women in the movement, left little room for sharing power on an equal basis with women. Black women had to choose how to respond to the inherent sexism of the movement. Many agreed to pursue non-leadership roles that were out of the public eye, while others agreed to work as secretaries or assistants to male leaders. A few, like Bates, rejected both of these options and instead created their own opportunities for leadership. While this renegade strategy had the potential for success, it also came at a steep price as this film illustrates.

La Cruise’s research uncovers details about Bates that would never make it into a standard US History textbook, such as the fact that young Daisy met her future husband when she was a girl of fifteen and he a married man of twenty-eight. Daisy ran off with L.C. Bates when she was eighteen and spent years drinking, dancing, and partying. La Cruise uses these details to show that Bates was not a part of the more established black middle class. As a young woman with only an eighth grade education and no real ties to Little Rock, she was looked down on by many people who viewed her as an outsider and a trouble maker. Yet according to La Cruise, these were the very traits that allowed Bates to rise to power within the inherently sexist infrastructure of the NAACP.

Bates ran for president of the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP in 1955, but was forced out by the national leadership which viewed her as an unsuitable candidate. Bates quietly withdrew and waited for two years until she saw a chance to run for the position unopposed. After seizing power, she used her position to force the issue of school desegregation in Little Rock. Citing the recent US Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), Bates recruited black families willing to send their children to white schools and then petitioned the superintendent to admit the black children. When he refused, she sued him on behalf of the NAACP and won. A local judge informed the superintendent that he would have to admit some black children to the all-white Central High School in the fall of 1957.

The debacle that unfolded at Little Rock is familiar to anyone with a basic knowledge of American history, but nevertheless La Cruise’s focus on Bates reveals previously hidden aspects of this showdown. Chief among them is the fact that Bates acted more or less alone as she confronted the superintendent, rounded up black families willing to participate, and coordinated the children’s lives for the next year. The local black community responded alternatively with suspicion, awe, and resentment to what they perceived was a one-woman show that too often seemed to place Bates’s personal quest for glory above the best interests of the nine black students at Central High. In fact, Bates deliberately cut the students’ families out of nearly every interaction with the school, apparently because she did not trust them to do what she wanted them to, and at the same time she staged newspaper and television interviews that catapulted her to national fame.

Viewers are left at once awed by Bates’s courageous activism, and at the same time flinching at her seemingly shameless self-promotion. This is an especially promising place for students to analyze the director’s intentions. La Cruise has woven together a succession of clips that feature a stunningly beautiful, glamorous Daisy Bates at the center of controversy, danger, and constant attention. Meanwhile, off-camera commentators including the former Little Rock Nine students pose a series of questions that make viewers uncomfortable. While La Cruise’s goal here is to force the audience to consider the implications of Bates’s obvious pleasure in front of the camera, I can’t help but wonder if a male civil rights leader would be subjected to the same kind of scrutiny. While La Cruise glosses over this, it presents another good point of classroom discussion. Does it matter that Bates was movie-star gorgeous and incredibly fashionable? How did her personality, which shines through even on brief clips, affect school desegregation in Little Rock? Did it ultimately contribute to her demise as a civil rights leader?

The story of the Little Rock Nine ends on a positive note, as eight of the nine children make it through a daunting school year. Bates, meanwhile, emerges from the desegregation of Little Rock scarred and battle-weary. She drew the wrath of the white community in Little Rock, which saw to it that her husband’s newspaper was shut down. She also aroused the suspicion of the local black community, which remained wary of Bates as an outsider, an opportunist, and a troublemaker. Her marriage in tatters, her livelihood destroyed, and her reputation damaged, Bates moved first to New York City and then later back to Arkansas where she tried her hand at community organizing at the grassroots level. While she helped bring paved roads, better schools, and a community center to a poverty stricken black town in rural Arkansas in the 1970s, she never again experienced the power she enjoyed during the desegregation of Little Rock in 1957. When we see Bates as she is honored at the fiftieth anniversary of Little Rock, she is old, weakened by a series of strokes, and living in desperate poverty. She died soon after sick, impoverished, and mostly forgotten.

While the end of the film is sad, La Cruise resists from portraying this end as tragic. Instead, she wants viewers to consider how a woman could rise to such a prominent leadership position in the movement and then come to this ignoble end. Bates was able to use her drive, glamour, sharp wit and assertiveness to rise to power and make a difference in the history of the black freedom struggle, but it was these same qualities that doomed her long-term career. The story of Daisy Bates as told here will make an interesting contrast to a recent book about Rosa Parks. In The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, Jeanne Theoharis notes that our national memory of Parks insists that she was “humble,” “dignified,” “quiet,” “soft-spoken,” “not angry” and that she “never raised her voice,” although Theoharis describes Parks as outspoken, assertive, and rebellious.2 So if Parks was really more “rebellious” than we give her credit for, why was she celebrated as a heroine of the civil rights movement while Bates was discredited? Why is it that Parks is almost always describes in passive, feminine terms—even if historians can find little evidence of the truth of these claims? How did Parks successfully negotiate a leadership position within the movement, while Bates apparently did not? Why are some activists honored and memorialized, while countless others go forgotten? Students could use a comparison of Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock and The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks to try to disentangle how race, gender, and social class worked in the lives of these two women and in the long struggle for black freedom in the United States.