The Long Shadow of Little Rock: A Memoir.

BATES, Daisy.

$2,500.00

Item Number: 146037

New York: David McKay Company, 1962.

First edition, early printing of this powerful work by the NAACP activist behind the successful integration of Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Octavo, original cloth, illustrated. Presentation copy, inscribed and signed twice by the author on the front free endpaper, “Best Wishes Daisy Bates, God Bless you Daisy Bates 6-8-63.” Near fine in a very good dust jacket. Foreword by Eleanor Roosevelt. Books signed and inscribed by Bates are rare.

At an event honoring Daisy Bates as 1990’s Distinguished Citizen then-governor Bill Clinton called her "the most distinguished Arkansas citizen of all time." Her classic account of the 1957 Little Rock School Crisis, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, couldn't be found on most bookstore shelves in 1962 and was banned throughout the South. In 1988, after the University of Arkansas Press reprinted it, it won an American Book Award. On September 3, 1957, Gov. Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to surround all-white Central High School and prevent the entry of nine black students, challenging the Supreme Court's 1954 order to integrate all public schools. On September 25, Daisy Bates, an official of the NAACP in Arkansas, led the nine children into the school with the help of federal troops sent by President Eisenhower–the first time in eighty-one years that a president had dispatched troops to the South to protect the constitutional rights of black Americans.