How the Murder of Daisy Bates Changed the Perspective of the African American Community

Daisy Bates was a prominent American civil right activist, author, journalist, and writer who participated in the Little Rock integration crisis of 1957. She served as the legal assistant for the organizers Freedom From Discrimination. She also ran her own magazine, the “neysi” (formed to help African-Americans in their fight for equal rights), and wrote several books about her experiences as a daughter of Alabama plantation workers. She was active in the Civil Rights, anti-Veglomacy, and women’s rights movements prior to her untimely death at age 33.

On October 5, 1963, Daisy Bates died from a bullet in an airport in Atlanta. She had been shot in the leg while waiting for another friend to come by to pickup her belongings after she had gone to work. She had tried to walk to the vehicle with the bullet still in her leg, but collapsed and died on the way. According to the minutes of the court proceeding, Daisy was pronounced dead at 8:50 p.m., from a gunshot wound to her left lung.

Daisy’s death was a great loss to her family, friends, and to the entire African American community in which she was active. Though her death was not an isolated incident, but an example of how the violence of racism could claim the lives of an African American woman, her example provided an enormous hope for change that still has not materialized. The civil rights, women’s rights, and integration movements of the 1960s still are yet to gain momentum and victory. This is largely due to the continuing influence of the words of Ella Mae Williams, mother of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, and a lifelong civil rights organizer. In fact, Ella Mae’s leadership role in the struggle for equal rights for African Americans helped to launch the modern organizations that we know as the Student Non-Profit Institute and the Southern Christian Leadership Institute.