Daisy Bates did not set out to be a publisher. Her birth date is usually given as November 11, 1914, and her parentage is uncertain. Before she was seven she was taken in by Susie and Orlee Smith in Huttig. In 1941 she and L. C. Bates, a Mississippi-born newspaperman, moved to Little Rock to start a weekly, the Arkansas State Press. They married on March 4, 1942, in Fordyce.
The paper on Ninth Street
The State Press was modeled on Northern Black papers such as the Chicago Defender. For most of its life its offices were on West Ninth Street, in Little Rock's Black community. It reached readers in Pine Bluff, Texarkana, Hot Springs and Helena, and circulation grew to 20,000 despite a temporary boycott by white advertisers. From 1954 until it closed, it was the only newspaper in Arkansas demanding an immediate end to segregated schools. Daisy rarely wrote for it at first, but she became city editor in 1945, and in 1952 she was elected president of the Arkansas Conference of NAACP Branches.
The house on West 28th Street
In 1957 the Bateses' home at 1207 West 28th Street became a command post for the integration of Central High. On the evening of September 3 Bates telephoned the families of the Nine with the plan: the students were not to go alone, but to meet near the school around 8:30 the next morning, where Black and white ministers would walk them in. Elizabeth Eckford's family had no telephone, and the message never reached her.
The house became the daily pick-up and drop-off point for the Nine, and a place for them to plan. A rock had come through the living room window in August with a note reading "STONE THIS TIME. DYNAMITE NEXT." That school year it had floodlights and a volunteer guard committee. In early October, after Jefferson Thomas was struck behind the ear at school, Bates took him to a doctor, then home, and called General Edwin Walker, who commanded the troops at Central. The Army then assigned each student a guard.
The bill
The city turned on the NAACP that October with an occupational tax ordinance that required nonprofits to disclose their members' names and the sources of their dues. Bates and other chapter record keepers refused to produce membership lists and were fined $25 each. The Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the convictions, 5 to 2. On February 23, 1960, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously held in Bates v. City of Little Rock that the ordinances infringed the right of free association.
By then the paper was gone. White advertisers boycotted it again over its stand in 1957, and news carriers were intimidated; NAACP money did not cover the loss. The last issue appeared in late October 1959. Bates moved to New York in June 1960 to write The Long Shadow of Little Rock. She revived the State Press in 1984, sold it in 1988, and died on November 4, 1999. In 2024 her statue was unveiled in the U.S. Capitol.
The Daisy Bates House is a National Historic Landmark, privately owned but open for tours by appointment. For the school itself, see Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site, whose visitor center is free.