Daisy Bates dies in Little Rock, Arkansas, at age 84, after decades as a civil rights leader, journalist, and desegregation advocate.
Daisy Bates died on November 4, 1999, in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the age of 84, just one week before what would have been her 85th birthday.
By the time of her death, Bates had lived to see her once-controversial civil rights work embraced by the very state institutions that had once opposed her: she had received an honorary doctorate from the University of Arkansas, an annual state day of recognition in her name (Daisy Gatson Bates Day), and in 1996, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, presented to her by President Bill Clinton.
Bates was given a state funeral in Arkansas, an extraordinary honor reflecting her transformation from a persecuted activist — whose newspaper was driven out of business and whose family faced death threats and violence in the 1950s and 1960s — into one of the most celebrated figures in Arkansas and American civil rights history.
Her death marked the passing of one of the last major surviving adult leaders directly involved in orchestrating the integration of Little Rock Central High School, a pivotal early victory in the enforcement of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Her legacy endures through her memoir The Long Shadow of Little Rock, the annual state holiday bearing her name, the National Historic Landmark status of her former home, and her enduring recognition as the guiding force and "first lady" of the Little Rock Nine and Arkansas's civil rights movement.