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“Let Our Voices Speak Loud and Clear”: Daisy Bates’s Leadership in Civil Rights and Black Press History

Toft Roelsgaard, Natascha
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5309-8414
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1546938379618986

Abstract Details

2019, Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, Journalism (Communication).
This thesis examines the advocacy and journalistic work of civil rights activist and newspaper publisher Daisy Bates. It explores her ability to negotiate her black womanhood, while navigating the discriminatory practices in the South in the 1940s and 1950s. Bates and her husband founded the Arkansas State Press in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1941, which echoed the sentiments of the civil rights movement at the time. As this thesis demonstrates, Bates’s journalistic advocacy mirrored the practices of northern black publications, while defying the traditions of southern race relations. Her journalistic style, characterized by militant sarcasm and provocation of both whites and blacks, came to cement her as a trailblazing black journalist in a region heavily shaped by blacks’ oppression. More than being a black woman in times of white male preeminence, Bates defied the double burden of racism and sexism as she wrote stories that attacked white supremacy and accounted for racial injustice in the South. Through an assessment of her journalistic work, this thesis applies a historical research method to restore Bates’s place in black press history and situate her within black feminist thought, as a radical frontrunner for women of color in the South in the twentieth century.
Michael Sweeney (Committee Chair)
Aimee Edmondson (Committee Member)
Marilyn Greenwald (Committee Member)
148 p.
African Americans; Black History; Gender Studies; History; Journalism; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Womens Studies
Daisy Bates; Arkansas State Press; civil rights; black press history; black feminist thought; women in the civil rights movement; women journalism; southern race relations

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Toft Roelsgaard, N. (2019). “Let Our Voices Speak Loud and Clear”: Daisy Bates’s Leadership in Civil Rights and Black Press History [Master's thesis, Ohio University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1546938379618986

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Toft Roelsgaard, Natascha. “Let Our Voices Speak Loud and Clear”: Daisy Bates’s Leadership in Civil Rights and Black Press History. 2019. Ohio University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1546938379618986.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Toft Roelsgaard, Natascha. "“Let Our Voices Speak Loud and Clear”: Daisy Bates’s Leadership in Civil Rights and Black Press History." Master's thesis, Ohio University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1546938379618986

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ohiou1546938379618986
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© 2019, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Ohio University and OhioLINK.