August 22, 1980

Civil rights leader L. C. Bates suffered a heart attack and died in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Bates was the founder of the Arkansas State Press, which waged a weekly statewide battle against the constraints of the Jim Crow era of segregation until the paper’s demise in 1959. He was a member of the executive committee of the Little Rock chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and, along with his wife Daisy, helped lead the fight that resulted in the admittance of the first black students to Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957.