Daisy Bates coordinates and accompanies the nine Black students in their first attempt to enter Little Rock Central High School.
On September 4, 1957, Daisy Bates coordinated the first attempt by the Little Rock Nine — Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Jefferson Thomas, Terrence Roberts, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Minnijean Brown, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Thelma Mothershed, and Melba Pattillo Beals — to enter the previously all-white Little Rock Central High School.
Bates had spent weeks personally selecting, preparing, and counseling the nine students chosen to integrate the school under the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. On this pivotal morning, the students arrived to find the school surrounded by the Arkansas National Guard, deployed by Governor Orval Faubus explicitly to block their entry, in direct defiance of federal desegregation orders.
One student, Elizabeth Eckford, arrived separately and was famously photographed being confronted by an angry white mob while National Guard troops refused her entry — an image that shocked the nation and world. Bates, who had organized carpools for the other eight students, worked to manage the chaotic and dangerous situation as a media and legal firestorm erupted.
This event marked the beginning of the public phase of the Little Rock Crisis, a defining confrontation between federal authority and state resistance to desegregation, with Bates serving as the students' primary advisor, protector, and spokesperson throughout the ordeal that followed.