Awesome Women

In the mid-1930s, an Australian journalist visited Germany to report on the rise of fascism and interview Adolf Hitler. The atrocities she saw there, which included the public beating of Jews, forever changed the course of her young life. Nancy Wake, who died Sunday at age 98, would spend World War II fighting Nazism tooth and nail, saving thousands of Allied lives, winding up at the top of the Gestapo’s most-wanted list and ultimately receiving more decorations than any other servicewoman.

She was NUMBER ONE on the Gestapo’s most wanted list during the war.  There was a 5 MILLION FRANC prize on her head.

They called her the White Mouse because of her skill for escaping certain death. 

She was parachuting into a camp once and got tangled in a tree. A French soldier saw her flailing around and said, “I hope that all the trees in France bear such beautiful fruit this year.” She answered only, “Don’t give me that French shit.”

She would smuggle messages, food, and supplies in a supply truck and when she passed German posts she’d wink at the soldiers and say, “Do you want to search me?” They never did.

She found out at one point that her men had been hiding a female German spy, protecting her. The rule was to kill them, but the men didn’t have the heart. But Nancy Wake did. And she never regretted it.

When she killed a man with her bare hands, it was an SS sentry who’d spotted her and she killed him to prevent him from raising the alarm during the raid. She would later say of it, “They’d taught us this judo-chop stuff with the flat of the hand at SOE, and I practiced away at it. But this was the only time I used it - whack - and it killed him all right. I was really surprised.”

She died in 2011, 3 weeks before her 99th birthday.

David Cordingly, Seafaring Women (via queencardigan)

AWESOME. I need to make sure medievalpoc sees this. 

(via ardatli)

Done!

Reconstructionist Maria Mitchell, herself a pioneer who paved the way for women in science, captured Somerville’s singular genius in a May 1860 article for The Atlantic:

To read mathematical works is an easy task; the formulae can be learned and their meaning apprehended: to read the most profound of them, with such appreciation that one stands side by side with the great minds who originated them, requires a higher order of intellect; and far-reaching indeed is that which, pondering in the study on a few phenomena known by observation, develops the theory of worlds, traces back for ages their history, and sketches the outline of their future destiny.

Somerville came to science by way of the arts, the era’s traditional domain for young girls. When her art teacher made a passing reference to Euclid and his theories of geometry to explain perspective in painting, noting that they also illuminated the foundations of astronomy and physics, young Mary found herself mesmerized by the promise of a science so expansive and dimensional. So she pleaded with her brother’s science tutor to help her learn about Euclid. But her ascent to science was far from smooth — this early initiative was met with adamant resistance by her father, who found mathematics not only unsuitable but also sanity-jeopardizing for his daughter. Somerville recalls in her journals:

My father came home for a short time, and, somehow or other, finding out what I was about, said to my mother, ‘Peg, we must put a stop to this, or we shall have Mary in a strait jacket one of these days. There was X., who went raving mad about the longitude!’

To correct young Mary’s intellectual aberrations, her parents put her on a steady diet of illustrated ladies’ journals. But those happened to contain puzzles and logical riddles, many of which required mathematical solutions. It was in them that Mary discovered the curious symbols of algebraic equations and was once again enthralled.

Rather than thwarting her budding crush on mathematics, her parents had inadvertently turned it into a lifelong love.

Even so, however, they were bent on sending their daughter down the traditional path destined for women of the era. When she was twenty-four, Mary was married to her distant cousin, Samuel Grieg — a severe man with little faith in women’s capacities beyond their childbearing ability, who forbad Mary from pursuing her studies.

When Grieg died three years later, he left Somerville with two young children, but also with an inheritance and a freedom that opened a new horizon for learning. She soon began corresponding with the mathematician William Wallace at the University of Edinburgh, who mentored her studies in math and astronomy as she at last indulged her intellectual calling.

In 1832, Somerville married another cousin, Dr. William Somerville — a bright and gentle man who thought the world of her, encouraged her studies, and relentlessly helped her master the physical sciences. After the couple moved to London, along with their four children and the two boys from the previous marriage, Somerville met some of the era’s greatest scientific minds, from legendary astronomer William Herschel to computing pioneer Charles Babbage. It was there she became the first mathematical tutor of reconstructionist Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer, thus illustrating the beautiful daisy chain of brilliance that unfolds when the hunger for knowledge is set free from the shackles of stereotypes and cultural norms.

In 1835, Somerville and Caroline Herschel, sister of William Herschel and a trailblazing astronomer in her own right, became the first female members of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Above all, however, Somerville embodied the richness of mind and spirit that marks out the true scientist. Maria Mitchell, who had met her in 1858, poignantly observes in her Atlantic essay:

No one can make the acquaintance of this remarkable woman without increased admiration for her. The ascent of the steep and rugged path of science has not unfitted her for the drawing-room circle; the hours of devotion to close study have not been incompatible with the duties of the wife and the mother; the mind that has turned to rigid demonstration has not thereby lost its faith in the truths which figures will not prove.

Anne Bonny 1702- 1782

Anne Bonny is one of the most notorious pirates in recorded history. She was born in Ireland but moved to America when her father was disgraced. She was tough and a rebel even before her days on the high sea. Legend says she stabbed one of her father’s maids, beat a man who attempted to rape her and put him in the hospital and publicly stripped her fencing instructor with her sword.

At sixteen Anne fell in love with a poor man named James Bonny and insisted on marrying him despite her father’s objections. She did and her father disowned her. She moved with James to New Providence where her husband worked capturing pirates. Anne thought this was exceptionally lame and left him for a pirate named Calico Jack. 

Anne was an excellent pirate. She did not hide her gender from her crew mates, but when attacking ships she dressed like a man and kicked ass like a woman. While on the high seas, Anne developed a friendship with fellow woman pirate, Mary Read. Some accounts report the two were lovers. 

I’ve always thought Pirata was very translatable into English, not only because of the topic but also because I think it definitely draws from The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, and is equally readable, if a little heavier on gender politics. (Incidentally, the Galician translation of Charlotte Doyle was a required reading in college. Galician and pirates go hand in hand, it seems! We were frequently visited by English pirates who are considered nobility up there, so I guess it makes sense. :)

Why you should be in passionate horny love with Elizabeth ‘Nellie Bly’ Cochrane

Born in 1864/65, Elizabeth, one of 15 children, was always ‘the rebellious one’. Fierce as fuck from an early age, she testified against her abusive stepfather in her mother’s divorce trial.

In 1880 she enrolled in a teacher-training college but had to leave after her first semester due to lack of funding - then moved to Pittsburgh to help run a goddamn boarding school. 

This is where we get to the good shit. Age 18, she wrote a letter-to-the-editor of the Pittsburgh Dispatch bitchslapping the everloving fuck out of a sexist ballsack of an article entitled ‘What Girls Are Good For’. 

The editor was so goddamn wooed by her razor-sharp tongue that he RAN AN AD asking her to identify herself. Elizabeth owned up, and was hired instantaneously, her badassery radiating from her pores and intoxicating all within a twenty mile radius.

Working under the pen-name Nellie Bly, Elizabeth kicked the butts of morons everywhere, writing articles aimed at social justice, particularly labour laws to protect working ‘girls’ and reform of Pennsylvania’s divorce law, which greatly favoured men.

Not content with changing the world from behind her desk, Elizabeth became a founding mother of investigative journalism. She was expelled from Mexico for exposing political corruption, and henceforth wrapped in cotton wool by her editors. Infuriated by their mollycoddling, Lizzie left them a note essentially telling them to fuck themselves and hot footed it to NYC. She was still only 23.

Within six months she was hired by Joseph fucking Pulitzer himself, and continued her batshit crazy investigations uninhibited. Her very first assingment had her feigning mental illness to expose repulsive conditions in Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum. Her cutting report was so fucking horrifying, compelling and persuasive that it triggered public and political action, leading to reform of the institution.

In the next couple of years she had herself thrown in jail and hired by a sweatshop, all for shits and giggles. Oh, and to uncover incomprehensible injustice, cruelty, poverty, and the concealed, heinous treatment of the vulnerable and voiceless. 

But was pioneering journalism, social revolution and batshit badassery enough for our Liz? Like fuck it was. On a whim Nellie did what any self-respecting 25 year old woman in the 1800s would do - she emulated Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, and did it in 72.

Millions followed her journey, and its appeal to a semi-literate populace resulted in greatly increased newspaper readership. So while travelling the entire globe (IN THE 1800s, AS A WOMAN) by ship, train, burro and balloon, she helped the world to read.

Having essentially conquered the entire goddamn universe before hitting 30, Nellie retired, and wed 72 year old industrialist Robert Seaman. Their marriage was a happy one, and after his death she took over Iron Clad Manufacturing Co.

But Lizzie was a writer, what would she know about the metal industry? Well, she INVENTED the steel barrel that became the model for the widely used 55-gallon drum and turned her inherited businesses into multimillion-dollar companies, so apparently a fuck ton.

Furthermore, she set a precedent for working conditions, ensuring her workers had good pay, gymnasiums, staffed libraries, and health care, all completely unheard of at the time, while still writing to further the plight of the Suffragette movement.

Julie D’Aubigny was a 17th-century bisexual French opera singer and fencing master who killed or wounded at least ten men in life-or-death duels, performed nightly shows on the biggest and most highly-respected opera stage in the world, and once took the Holy Orders just so that she could sneak into a convent and shag a nun.

If you’re Mexican, of Mexican descent, or live in a culturally Mexican area, you may know the story of La Llorona.

Inspiring read on women architects who defied great odds (re: men) via ArchDaily.

A sampling:

Sophia Hayden Benett was the first woman to receive an architecture degree from MIT when she graduated in 1890

Marion Mahony Griffin, was not only one of the first licensed female architects in the world, but was the first employee of Frank Lloyd Wright

Charlotte Perriand applied for a job at Le Corbusier’s studio in 1927. Unimpressed, he dismissed her work with the comment: “We don’t embroider cushions here.”

Hattie Elizabeth Alexander (1901 – 1968) was an American pediatrician and microbiologist. She is known for her development of the first effective remedies for Haemophilus influenzae infection, as well as being one of the first scientists to identify and study antibiotic resistance.

She worked for the United States Public Health Service and the Maryland Public Health Service, and then enrolled at Johns Hopkins University medical school, where she received her M.D. in 1930. In 1932, she became an instructor and researcher in the Department of Pediatrics at Columbia University, where she spent her entire professional career.

In the 1940s, Hattie began researching Haemophilus influenzae (Hib), a nearly always fatal disease in infants and young children at the time. She developed an improved antiserum for the disease; by combining antiserum therapy with the use of sulfa drugs, and developing standardized techniques for diagnosis and treatment, she and her associate Grace Leidy helped reduce the mortality rate from Hib from nearly 100 percent to less than 25 percent. Later, Alexander and Leidy studied the effect of antibiotics on Hib, finding streptomycin to be highly effective. The combined use of the antiserum, sulfa drugs, and antibiotics significantly lowered the mortality rate from Hib.

In the course of her research on antibiotics, Alexander noted and reported the appearance of antibiotic-resistant strains of Hib. She concluded, correctly, that this was caused by random genetic mutations in DNA which were positively selected through evolution; she and Leidy demonstrated the occurrence of transformation in the Hib bacillus, leading to resistance.

This lady was such a badass, I can’t count the ways, but let’s try.

She got married to an already successful pirate, Zheng Yi, and took over when he died. She was crazy strict to keep an iron fist over her fleet of pirates, and the punishments for stepping out of line were brutal. If you stole or looted from a town that provided assistance or tribute to the pirate fleet, Ching would chop your fucking head off with a battle axe and dump your lifeless body in the ocean.  If you stole from the pirate treasury, or she thought you were stealing from the pirate treasury, Ching would chop your fucking head off dump your lifeless body in the ocean.  Raping any captured female prisoners was punishable by immediate death.  Fuck, if you had consensual sex while on duty you got your head chopped off and the woman was chucked off the boat no matter where they were at.  Ching wasn’t fucking around, and she wanted to make damn sure you weren’t fucking around when you should have been working.

Two years after she took over, she got so notorious for ransacking towns and taking taxes on them that she pissed off the entire Chinese government, and sent out a massive fleet to bring her in line. Most pirates probably would’ve said this was out of their pay grade and taken off to hide out or ransack some other country.

Ching Shih said fuck that.

She not only faced them head on, she wiped the floor with them, killing hundreds and capturing sixty-something ships from the Imperial Fleet. Prisoners were given the choice of joining up or being executed on the spot. The Admiral of the Chinese navy, Kwo Lang, was so afraid of being captured by her or going back to admit he’d been beaten by her that he committed suicide.

For the next two years, Ching Shih not only kept on pirating, she fought off Chinese forces as well as Dutch and British warships that the navy called in to help. Finally the government gave up and offered her amnesty as well as amnesty for her then SEVENTEEN THOUSAND crewman. Ching Shih got to keep all her plunder, so she retired to the countryside where she opened up a brothel and lived until she was 69.

Mae Jemison Became 1st Black Woman To Fly In To Space On This week In 1992

On September 12, 1999, Jemison fulfilled a lifelong dream she held ever since she was a small girl in Chicago by becoming the first African-American woman to fly in to space.

Graduating in 1977 with a dual degree in chemical engineering and African-American Studies, Jemison faced racism from professors as a Black woman taking up engineering.

tah dah

Obit of the Day: Artist Elizabeth Catlett

When Elizabeth Catlett began making art, African American artists were expected to reflect a Euro-centric style. Ms. Catlett, however, ignored conventions and spent her career producing sculptures and prints that celebrated black culture - its men, women, and heroes - that so many other artists ignored.

Elizabeth Catlett began as a high school teacher after graduating from Howard University. (She was admitted to Carnegie Mellon’s Carnegie Institute of Technology but they withdrew their offer when they learned she was black.) She eventually found her way to the University of Iowa in the hopes of learning from the legendary Grant Wood. She earned her M.F.A. and while there first sculpted portraits of black women and children from wood.

Ms. Catlett ended up in Mexico in 1946 on a fellowship - and never left. It was while in Mexico that she created her most memorable works. In 1962, she renounced her U.S. citizenship and was declared by the U.S. State Department to be an “undesirable alien.” It did not hinder her career. In 1958, she was named the head of the sculpture department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s School of Fine Arts; also becoming the university’s first female professor of sculpture. 

Her works have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Museum of Prague and the High Museum in Atlanta. (Personal note: OOTD saw her works for the first time at the Art Institute in 2006 and fell in love with her prints, which is why those are the images I selected.)

Elizabeth Catlett died at the age of 96.

Images:

Left - “Sojourner Truth” from The Negro Woman, 1946-1947, linoleum cut

Center - “Malcolm X Speaks for Us,” 1969, linoleum cut and composition

Right - “Harriet Tubman” from The Negro Woman, 1956-1947, linoleum cut

For women’s day, I wanted to commerorate amazing African women who’s contributions to society have gone virtually unnoticed by the larger media. (from left to right).

Wangari Muta Mary Jo Maathai (1 April 1940 – 25 September 2011) was a Kenyan environmental and political activist. She was educated in the United States at Mount St. Scholastica and the University of Pittsburgh, as well as the University of Nairobi in Kenya. In the 1970s, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental NGO focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women’s rights. In 1986, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, and in 2004, she became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for “her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.” Maathai was an elected member of Parliament and served as assistant minister for Environment and Natural Resources in the government of President Mwai Kibaki between January 2003 and November 2005. Furthermore she was an Honorary Councillor of the World Future Council. 

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (born 29 October 1938) is the 24th and current President of Liberia. She served as Minister of Finance under President William Tolbert from 1979 until the 1980 coup d’État, after which she left Liberia and held senior positions at various financial institutions. She placed a very distant second in the 1997 presidential election. Later, she was elected President in the 2005 presidential election and took office on 16 January 2006. She successfully ran for re-election in 2011. Sirleaf is the first and currently the only elected female head of state in Africa.

Graça Machel, (17 October 1945) is a Mozambican politician and humanitarian. She is the third wife of former South African president Nelson Mandela and the widow of Mozambican president Samora Machel. She is an international advocate for women’s and children’s rights and in 1997 was made a British dame for her humanitarian work. attend University of Lisbon in Portugal, where she first became involved in independence issues. In that university, she earned a scholarship from Romance Languages. She is fluent in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and English, as well as her native Tsonga. She returned to Mozambique in 1973, joined the Mozambican Liberation Front(FRELIMO) and became a schoolteacher. Following Mozambique’s independence in 1975, Machel was appointed Minister for Education and Culture. She married Samora Machel the same year. Following her retirement from the Mozambique ministry, Machel was appointed as the expert in charge of producing the groundbreaking United Nations report on the impact of armed conflict on children.

Birtukan Mideksa (born 1975) is an Ethiopian politician and former judge. She is the leader of the opposition Unity for Democracy and Justice (UDJ) party. she joined Addis Ababa University where she graduated from Law School with a Bachelors Degree in Law. She practiced law at the 3rd district of the federal judiciary. She joined the Rainbow Ethiopia: Movement for Democracy and Social Justice party and later Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) after a coalition of four parties. After election or 2005, her party won over a third of the seats. As a result, Birtukan was convicted of attempting to overthrow the constitutional order and sentenced to life in prison. She was pardoned and later founded UDJ (Unity for Democracy and Justice) with the same principles followed by CUD.

Hafsat Abiola (born 1974 in Lagos) is a Nigerian human rights activist, founder of the Kudirat Initiative for Democracy (KIND), which seeks to strengthen civil society in Nigeria. Abiola graduated from Phillips Academy in 1992 and Harvard College in 1996 and later received an honorary doctorate from Haverford College. Abiola is the founder of China-Africa Bridge, which promotes mutually beneficial cross-cultural collaboration between China and Africa. In 2000, Abiola was honored as one of the Global Leaders of Tomorrow at the World Economic Forum. In 2003, she was elected as a Fellow of the Ashoka: Innovators for the Public. In 2006 she was nominated to be a founding councilor at the World Future Council. Also in, 2006 she raised funds by organizing performances of The Vagina Monologues in Nigeria. Since May 2008 she is also a Councilor at the World Future Council among 49 other well known personalities.

STFU RACISTS CELEBRATES BLACK HISTORY MONTH

I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves. Harriet Tubman

Araminta “Minty” Ross, daughter of Ben and Harriet, was born a slave in Maryland in the early 1820s. The Brodess family were the masters of Minty and her family, and Minty saw her sisters sold away to other owners, though Minty’s mother threatened to split anyone’s head open if they tried to sell away Minty’s brother Moses. After Mr. Brodess’ death, and Mrs. Brodess’ remarriage to Anthony Thompson, Minty and her family were overseen by Mrs. Brodess’ son Edward, and Minty’s father was overseen by Mr. Thompson.

Minty was often lent out to other families and suffered not only from homesickness, but frequent illnesses and severe whippings. During her travels one day, she crossed paths with an enraged slavemaster and his escaped slave. The white man asked Minty to restrain the slave, but she refused. The white man threw a weight intending to hit his slave, but it hit Minty in the head. She suffered from seizures and headaches for the rest of her life. The head trauma invoked vivid dreams and hallucinations, which she attributed to God talking to her.

Minty’s father Ben was freed, as dictated by a deceased previous owner’s will, at age 45. Later in life, Minty investigated the legality of her family’s slave status, and found that her mother was supposed to be free after turning 45, and any children born after the parents turned 45 were also supposed to be considered free. In her mid-20s, Minty married John Tubman, a free black man, putting her and any future children’s status in even more question. She grew ill again, and Edward Brodess was working on selling her when he suddenly died. Despite the threat of the Ross family being broken up and sold to different owners, John did not want to move North, where his wife would be free.

At this point, Minty decided to use her mother’s first name instead of her own, and took on John’s surname. So in 1849, after a failed escaped with her two brothers (who had second thoughts and turned themselves and their reluctant sister in), the woman now known as “Harriet Tubman” left her husband (who threatened to turn her in) and escaped slavery, traveling through woods and marshes, and making use of a network of abolitionists and free blacks (including former slaves) known as The Underground Railroad.

She evaded slave catchers, who made their living tracking fugitive slaves, and arrived safely in Philadelphia in 1850, where she joined The Underground Railroad as a Conductor, sworn to an oath of silence. She was given the nickname “Moses,” and for the next several years, aided slaves in escaping from the South to the North, including her parents, brothers, sisters-in-law, and nieces and nephews. Harriet tried to rescue her estranged husband, but he had taken a new wife, raising a new family until his murder by a white man years later.

Harriet was good friends with John Brown, who called her “General Tubman,” and she was involved in the plot to steal arms from Harper’s Ferry. There are questions as to her lack of involvement on the day of the raid - she may have been ill, working on a mission for the Underground Railroad, or even avoiding it altogether, having decided (along with her and Brown’s mutual friend Frederick Douglass) that Brown’s plan was unviable. They spoke well of each other in life, and Harriet spoke well of Brown after his execution.

The end of Harriet’s stint with the Underground Railroad coincided with Lincoln’s election as President, the secession of the South, and the start of the Civil War. She was living in Canada, but returned to the States to serve as a Union army nurse, taking care of starved, injured, recently freed blacks as the Union advanced into Southern territory. Shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation, Harriet became the ringleader of a network of Union spies, with the purpose of freeing slaves and recruiting them for the Union army. Her most high profile mission was a raid along the Combahee River, which freed hundreds of slaves, and where Harriet was the first woman to lead an armed assault in the Civil War.

After the conclusion of the war and the surrender of the Confederacy, Harriet filed with the government for compensation for her services - they refused to reimburse her. On her way to Auburn, New York to take care of her parents in their home, she was assaulted by a train conductor and passengers after refusing to move to a smoking car. Years later, hard up for money, she was the victim of a cash-for-gold swindle, borrowing two grand from a friend and meeting with two men who claimed to have a $5,000 gold cache. They assaulted and chloroformed her, bound and gagged her, and took the money.

Despite her fame and being celebrated in popular biographies that were published after the Civil War, Harriet continued to struggle financially. Receiving little compensation for her humanitarian work, and no compensation for her government work, Harriet took in boarders to her and her parents’ home to help stay afloat. One of them was a black Union veteran and bricklayer named Nelson Davis. Harriet and Nelson fell for each other, marrying in 1869, adopting a baby daughter and staying together until Nelson’s death in 1888. (Nelson was 22 years younger, making Harriet one of the first cougars in American history).

Harriet campaigned for women’s suffrage into the 20th century, was finally compensated by the government in 1899, and became involved with the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. She deeded 25 acres to the church for the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged, though she fought with the church when they tried to charge residents $100 for entry- she meant for the home to house people without money.

One of her final acts of badassery before her death from pneumonia in 1913 was a surgery in the late 1890s. Still feeling the effects of her lifelong head trauma, Harriet had a doctor saw open her skull and adjust her brain.

Let me put that out there again.

Sawed-open skull. No anasthesia. Biting a bullet, like the soldiers she’d seen have limbs amputated during the Civil War.

Daisy Bates (1914 - 1999)

The driving force behind Daisy Bates activism was the rape and murder of her mother by three white men. Her mothers body was found by some young men who were fishing on the lake where the body was tossed.

Just over 50 years ago, a rock shattered the picture window of a light-brick house in Little Rock, Ark.

A note was tied to it that read: “Stone this time. Dynamite next.”

The house belonged to Daisy and L.C. Bates.

The couple led efforts to end segregation in Arkansas — on buses, in libraries and in the public schools.

On Monday, the nation will mark 50 years since black students integrated Central High School in Little Rock.

“Mrs. Bates was the person for the moment,” says Annie Abrams, a friend of Daisy Bates who was one of many black residents active at the time of the crisis.

“Daisy Bates was the poster child of black resistance. She was a quarterback, the coach. We were the players,” says Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine, the group of students who integrated Central High School.

“She was conditioned to know that the civil rights movement was moving forward,” Sybil Jordan Hampton, one of the first African American students to graduate from Central High, says. Daisy Bates helped drive the movement in Little Rock.

Challenging Authority Bates and her husband, L.C., were a team: She was the president of the Arkansas NAACP; he was its regional director. He was the publisher of the largest black newspaper in the state; she was his star reporter.

“The reason they were larger than life … Daisy and L.C. were always challenging whatever the prevailing attitude of white authority, of segregation, of restrictions of Jim Crow,” Green says

The story began in 1954 when the Supreme Court called for an end to segregated schools. Daisy Bates and the NAACP took the Little Rock school board to court. At the time, Green was attending Dunbar High School, the all-black in Little Rock. “Daisy was in the papers indicating that she was going to challenge the Little Rock School Board to adhere to the ‘54 decision. So the reason that they put together this plan was because Daisy forced them to put the plan together.”

Recruiting Students to Go First The plan could work only if there were students — children really — willing to be the first to possibly face violence and defy the segregationists. Daisy Bates helped recruit them, bright kids the school board couldn’t turn down. “I’ve known Ms. Bates since I was probably two years old and I was a paper carrier for their newspaper from the time I was six,” says Hampton. She was one of the children considered, though she wasn’t selected as one of the original nine.

“I remember that she talked to my parents at an NAACP meeting,” Hampton says. “And she told my parents that she felt that my brother and I both would be good candidates. And she said to my parents that she hoped that she would have their support in our stepping forward.”

Daisy Bates did win some parents over — even as the school board was pressuring them to keep their children at the all-black high school.

Star Quality “You really needed a woman to go and talk with families and to give the assurance that the students were going to have a touch point of comfort,” Hampton says. “But she also was a very beautiful woman and the national press and other people found it just wonderful to have this star-quality black woman.”

Bates wore high heels and stylish dresses, and her friend Annie Abrams recalls her as one of the most glamorous, sophisticated black women in town.

Bates had no children of her own, but she was “hungry for children and children were attracted to her because she was a Lena Horne in our town.” It was unusual, in an era when black leaders were almost always men, for a black woman to take a leading role — especially in a drama that was playing out on the national stage.

‘Blood Will Run in the Streets’ The showdown came in the fall of 1957. Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus vowed “blood will run in the streets” if black students tried to enter Central High.

On the first day of school, Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to turn the students away. Some two weeks passed and the nation waited to see what President Eisenhower would do.

Sending in the Troops Minniejean Brown Trickey and Ernest Greene, two of the Little Rock Nine, remember the scene inside Daisy Bates’ house.

“The house was buzzing with media and people in and out,” Trickey says. “Things were happening. I mean, [civil rights lawyer] Thurgood Marshall was his amazing self. He explained things to us at a certain point and there were quite a few great minds there who were passing on information and laughing, talking.”

Green adds, “What I remember at Ms. Bates’ house is that you had all of this drama going on, but we were still teenagers. We were worried about how we were going to look getting into the jeep. Why couldn’t we have two jeeps, instead of one. And Daisy said: ‘Look, this is a very important moment. The fact that the president of the United States has sent the United States Army here to escort you into school means that this government is finally serious about school desegregation.’”

Eisenhower had acted, sending in the 101st Airborne to escort five boys and four girls to high school.

The next days and weeks, Daisy Bates’ house was still headquarters for the Little Rock Nine.

By week’s end, Central High had been integrated. Green — the only senior in the group — graduated the following spring. Martin Luther King Jr. attended the graduation ceremony. Daisy Bates could not. Her face and name were better-known in the city than King’s, and her presence might have stirred violence.

A Complicated Legacy Fifty years later, her legacy is complicated. Trickey, one of the Little Rock Nine, says that Bates, who wrote a book in 1962, took too much credit for her role in the drama. “Actually I think she has in her writing expanded what her role was with us,” Trickey says. “And part of that is unfortunate because she emerged as the spokesperson for the Little Rock Nine. And our parents, by and large, were silenced. “I’ll tell you one thing: it was my dad who lost his job,” Trickey says. “It was my mother who got the terror calls. It was my mother who was frightened for my life, and they were the heroes of this.” Central High graduate Sybil Jordan Hampton thinks Daisy Bates was also heroic. “Mrs. Bates was an extraordinarily complex woman,” Jordan says. “An incident thrust her into the forefront of a movement. And I always have felt that Mrs. Bates was a tragic figure.” Fifty years on, the woman who had been at the center of the Little Rock movement is barely remembered. Her home, where it all happened, was nearly lost after her husband passed away and money was tight.

Daisy Bates died in 1999. She became the first — and still only — African-American to lie in state in the Arkansas Capitol, the same building once occupied by Gov. Faubus. On that same day, the Little Rock Nine were honored at the White House by Bill Clinton, the president from Arkansas.

by Juan Williams

http://www.itvs.org/films/daisy-bates