Abstract
Daisy Bates was a woman who decided to not submit to the white violence that black people were facing in the South. She is an interesting case because of her evolution from hatred to activism.
Scholars do not usually stress the role that Daisy Bates played within the Civil Rights movement –except when relating the Little Rock crisis- although she was a pillar of this movement and that is what I will discuss. I am interested in how this black woman became a symbol of a generation, a figure of strength and persuasion, a figure of activism and determination.
Indeed, “as a central participant in the 1957 Little Rock school integration crisis and head of the Arkansas State Conference of branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Bates became one of the earliest women activists in the movement to gain national recognition”. I choose to focus on a wider definition of leadership which was given by Victoria Gray that states “what defines a leader is not [necessarily] his or her position in terms of titles or recognition by the state, public, or international community but the ability to influence others”.
Besides, as Belinda Robnett argued “for most women, the ladder up to a position of formal leadership and power within a movement organization did not exist”. The Bates's case is an excellent example of an “exception”. She was one of the earliest women to gain legitimacy in the Civil Rights movement as a leader. Thus, as opposed to what wrote Payne that “men len and women organized” this perspective could not be correct. Indeed, Barnett showed that black woman in the Civil Rights movement they organized but that this “organization is an important aspect of leadership”.
Therefore, it is with all those paths that I will try to show that her activism was shaped by her childhood and that the gender perspective is important to bear in mind reading this analysis.
