AFRO BRIEFS - Bates’ Home to Become Museum

Bates’ Home to Become Museum

Little Rock Nine Historic Site Designation

By AFRO Staff


(November 28, 2009) - The contributions of the nine students who integrated Little Rock Central High School in 1957 are well documented. But there is another place in the community as important to the history of desegregation as the school itself, one that locals hope to turn into a museum.

The students, dubbed the “Little Rock Nine,” often took shelter at the former home of Daisy and L.C. Bates just down the street from the school. The home has already been designated an historic site, but local volunteers want to open it to the public as a museum, according to an Associated Press report.

“It was kind of like a war room in a sense,” Little Rock Nine member Carlotta Walls LaNier told the AP, “It was a place that we gathered and got ready to go to school and where we would come back to. It was a place of nurturing and a place of debriefing where we could at least have a laugh or two from that day."

The L.C. and Daisy Bates Museum Foundation and the Christian Ministerial Alliance have made $75,000 in repairs to the home, including roof repairs and returning the interior, including furniture, to what it looked like in the 1950s, according to the AP.

But approximately $80,000 of additional funding is needed to finish renovations, build exhibits, and complete their plans for a museum which will offer tours and keeping regular hours with a full-time staff.