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On the morning of March 5, 1959, Luvenia Long was listening to
gospel music when a news bulletin interrupted her radio program.
Fire had engulfed the Arkansas Negro Boys Industrial School in
Wrightsville, thirteen miles outside of Little Rock. Her son
Lindsey had been confined there since January 14, after a judge for
juveniles found him guilty of stealing from a neighborhood store
owner. To her horror, Lindsey was not among the forty-eight boys
who had clawed their way through the windows of the dormitory to
safety. Instead, he was among the twenty-one boys between the ages
of thirteen and seventeen who burned to death. Black Boys Burning
presents a focused explanation of how systemic poverty perpetuated
by white supremacy sealed the fate of those students. A careful
telling of the history of the school and fire, the book provides
readers a fresh understanding of the broad implications of white
supremacy. Grif Stockley's research adds to an evolving
understanding of the Jim Crow South, Arkansas's history, the
lawyers who capitalized on this tragedy, and the African American
victims. In hindsight, the disaster at Wrightsville could have been
predicted. Immediately after the fire, an unsigned editorial in the
Arkansas Democrat noted long-term deterioration, including the
wiring, of the buildings. After the Central High School
desegregation crisis in 1957, the boys' deaths eighteen months
later were once again an embarrassment to Arkansas. The fire and
its circumstances should have provoked southerners to investigate
the realities of their ""separate but equal institutions.""
However, white supremacy ruled the investigations, and the grand
jury declared the event to be an anomaly.
Daisy Bates (1914-1999) is renowned as the mentor of the Little
Rock Nine, the first African Americans to attend Central High
School in Little Rock, Arkansas. For guiding the Nine through one
of the most tumultuous civil rights crises of the 1950s, she was
selected as Woman of the Year in Education by the Associated Press
in 1957 and was the only woman invited to speak at the Lincoln
Memorial ceremony in the March on Washington in 1963. But her
importance as a historical figure has been overlooked by scholars
of the civil rights movement.
"Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas" chronicles
her life and political advocacy before, during, and well after the
Central High School crisis. An orphan from the Arkansas mill town
of Huttig, she eventually rose to the zenith of civil rights
action. In 1952, she was elected president of the NAACP in Arkansas
and traveled the country speaking on political issues. During the
1960s, she worked as a field organizer for presidents John F.
Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson to get out the black vote. Even after
a series of strokes, she continued to orchestrate self-help and
economic initiatives in Arkansas.
Using interviews, archival records, contemporary news-paper
accounts, and other materials, author Grif Stockley reconstructs
Bates's life and career, revealing her to be a complex, contrary
leader of the civil rights movement. Ultimately, Daisy Bates paints
a vivid portrait of an ardent, overlooked advocate of social
justice.
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