From the January 12, 2012 edition of The Wayne Herald:
Majestic featuring free civil rights movie Sunday
The Majestic Theater and the Baha'is of Northeast Nebraska will host a special Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration with a unique showing of Daisy Bates: First Lady of Little Rock.
Daisy Bates was a complex, unconventional, and largely forgotten heroine fo the Civil Rights movement of the early 1950s and 60s. She most famously led the effort to desegregate all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957.
Bates thought she was the daughter of Orle and Susie Smith, but some neighborhood kids taunting her, leaked the town secret and told her that her mother had been sexually assaulted and murdered by three local White men. The crime went uninvestigated and unpublished, and haunted Daisy all her life.
Daisy married L.C. Bates, a much older man, in 1947. They moved to Little Rock, where they acted on L.C.'s dream and started a Black newspaper, The Arkansas State Press. The paper started publishing stories about violations of the Supreme Court's desegregation rulings, and helped the Little Rock Nine as they attmepted to enroll in Little Rock Central High School. It was Daisy's job to notify all the students and their families that they were delaying the enrollment a day, but was unable to contact one girl whose family did not have a phone. She was the only one who arrived that day - alone - to enroll. Daisy said she felt guilty about that her whole life.
This intriguing and little-known woman is the subject of the Majestic Theater's free Community Theater series of one-of-a-kind documentaries.
It will play this Sunday, Jan. 15, at 7 p.m. Following will be refreshments and a short discussion led by the Baha'is of Northeast Nebraska.
