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Concept
Daisy Bates (activist)
Summary
Daisy Bates (November 11, 1914 – November 4, 1999) was an American civil rights activist, publisher, journalist, and lecturer who played a leading role in the Little Rock Integration Crisis of 1957.
Daisy Bates was born on November 11, 1914, to her father Hezekiah Gatson, and her mother Millie Riley. She grew up in southern Arkansas in the small sawmill town of Huttig. Hezekiah Gatson supported the family by working as a lumber grader in a local mill. Her mother Millie Riley was murdered when Daisy was an infant, and the girl was given care to her mother's close friends: Orlee Smith, a World War I veteran, and his wife Susie Smith. Her father Hezekiah abandoned her, and Daisy never saw him again. In The Death of My Mother, Bates recounted learning, at the age of eight, that her birth mother had been raped and murdered by three local white men, and her body thrown into a millpond, where it was later discovered.
Learning that no one was prosecuted for her mother's murder stoked Daisy's anger about injustice. Her adoptive father, Orlee Smith, told her that the killers were never found and that the police showed little interest in the case. Daisy wanted vengeance. She later wrote:
"My life now had a secret goal – to find the men who had done this horrible thing to my mother." She eventually identified one of her mother's killers. At a commissary, she stumbled upon a gaze from a young white man that would imply that he was involved. After this interaction, Daisy would go there often to belittle the drunken man with just her eyes. The young man later pleaded with Daisy, "In the name of God, please leave me alone." He drank himself to death and was found in an alleyway.
She began to hate white people. Out of concern and hope, her adoptive father gave her some advice from his deathbed:
You're filled with hatred. Hate can destroy you, Daisy. Don't hate white people just because they're white. If you hate, make it count for something. Hate the humiliations we are living under in the South. Hate the discrimination that eats away at the South.
Official source
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