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The Arkansas Times and Little Rock Public Radio.

Hello again, everyone.

Thanks very much for being with us.

Before she was celebrated, she was vilified.

She was Daisy Bates, the rock of Little Rock.

She was sometimes called, especially by the nine black students for whom she was a spiritual godmother, a source of constant courage and granite resolve.

Those nine young pupils who endured the tumult, the terror of the 1957 central high desegregation crisis.

Those nine would forever credit Daisy Bates as the force that helped them keep the faith because hers never wavered.

Once shunned by much of the state's white establishment and condemned in the Arkansas Capitol.

Next week, Mrs. Bates will be enshrined in the nation's capitol and honored as an American icon.

And then later in the year, a ceremony is being planned for a singer songwriter whose influence was felt around the world truly global.

Johnny Cash grew up picking cotton in East Arkansas before moving on.

Statutes of Mrs. Bates and Mr. Cash will represent the state, among other designees, in the U.S. Capitol.

Attending next week's ceremony will be a pair of Arkansans who were instrumental in the process, and they join us now.

Jane Broadway is the chair of the National Statuary Hall Steering Committee, and Charles King is president of the Daisy Bates House Museum Foundation Board, the board of directors, and he also served on the committee.

Gentlemen, thanks very much for coming in joining us.

Thank you for having us.

Why don't you walk us through this?

How did this get?

Every state gets get some statue right here in the nation's capital.

We had to came time to replace them.

So let's So the decision was made anyway.

It was time.

A little more a little history to it.

In 1864, Congress passed a law that allowed every state to have two statues to represent their state in the United States Capitol.

Our statues that were removed a few weeks ago because they were so heavy, we had to move them out early.

Uriah Rose was installed in 1917 and James Clark was installed in 1921.

So both of our current statues had been in there for over a century.

Yeah.

Let's pause for a sec.

You and your IRA, um, Rose and Senator James Clark.

Correct.

These were figures from Arkansas as well.

Two centuries ago, actually really founded the Rose Law Firm and the American Bar Association.

And Clark was a senator and a governor as well.

And so in 2019, fast forward the Arkansas General Assembly.

Who is the the authority who can make the change in terms of who represents Arkansas in the United States Capitol and Statuary Hall.

Senator David Wallace they Wallace from East Arkansas and represented Jeff Wardlaw from Warren sponsored a bill Act 1068 of 2019 that designated that Daisy Bates and Johnny Cash would replace Rose and Clark in the United States Capitol.

And so that's what set in motion the process that Charles and I have been involved with for now almost the last five years.

This had to have it's Judge Charles King.

This had to have it's it's it's intellectual.

It had to be an impetus for this.

I mean, the time seemed to be right to do it.

What made this the time to do it actually was 19, I think 29.

2019?

Yes, absolutely.

That brought that about.

The timing is is correct.

As Shane said, both statues had been in Washington over 100 years.

And while they may have been representative of their time, they're not representative of this time.

I don't think it's any secret that one was a secessionist and the other was a segregationist.

So that's not Arkansas anymore.

I think that Johnny Cash and Daisy Bates represents a perfect blend of what people should expect from Arkansas that is talented, intelligent people who represent the state well.

One thing I'll add to that, to give credit to the General Assembly, they took this action before Congress passed a resolution urging states to replace their statues of anyone who was installed that had been a part of the Civil War era.

And so there is Senator Hester and several others that had the thought and the idea of we need to look at doing this.

Senator Wallace took the lead on getting it done.

They actually had a committee of the whole in the Senate and discussed who that should be.

All right.

And so it ended up with these two individuals, and I think they made the right choice.

Well, there was some discussion, too, over that.

Yeah, it was.

Well, you have a lot of Arkansans you could pick from.

Yeah, I would tell you that.

I think that Mrs. Bates in particular, who will be the first one enshrined in Washington next week, was a perfect person in that her life really epitomizes so much change, not just in Arkansas, but in the whole world.

When we think about our education system today, that still has some challenges.

It moved forward so many steps based on the actions of one woman from Arkansas who has changed the world.

Yeah.

A footnote here we had hoped and had planned to have on this panel, Janice Kearney Rice, who adds, I think it's about 20 years that she was a lifelong she had known Mrs. Bates.

Yes.

And I think for about 20 years that she worked for Mrs. Bates or, you know, at the paper or at the Daisy Bates course was newspaper publisher, an entrepreneur as well.

She actually authored Mrs. Bates biography and made.

Yeah.

And then went on to work in the White House.

Anyway, Janice.

Unavoidably detained so she couldn't be joining us.

But we hope that on a subsequent program she'll be able to do that.

She would be great to have.

Yeah, she had a lot of personal memories of it, but I guess most of us.

A lot of us anyway.

Anyway, do your best memory.

Well, I had the honor and pleasure of meeting Mrs. Bates in the latter years of her life.

She was somewhat the age had begun to take effect, but Mrs. Bates was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame the very first year, and I had the responsibility the last 2 to 3 years that she attended to personally be the one to pick her up.

And I would have conversations with her to the extent that we could.

And it was just an awesome surrounding that.

I will never forget her aura and her persona still stands very strong in my memory.

She had had a cerebral hemorrhage, a stroke or two, and that and that inhibited her speech somewhat.

It was very frustrating to her, but she persevered.

She did.

She still stood proud.

She welcomed people into the house and.

Absolutely.

And talk.

One memory that I would share, I think it was the 50th anniversary.

We're getting ready for the 50th anniversary.

The central high thing.

President Clinton was coming and I think was talking He was governor.

And I went to Mrs. Bates house just to say hello or maybe get some material for a column or whatever.

And then, of course, she came in and he had a rather expansive back lawn, deep back lawn slowly.

And there was somebody back there on a riding lawn mower, lawn mower cutting her grass.

And I looked close to the window and the guy had fatigues on or was running.

And I said, Mrs. Baker and she went on to explain that the governor had sent the National Guard to clean.

Yes.

To take care of her lawn on that day in anticipation of all this ceremony.

I thought, now this is the most delicious irony that I'm likely to experience this week.

I would I would tell you that that home in itself, the large backyard, is part of what Mrs. Bates wanted as part of her legacy.

She asked that her home become a museum so that people from around the world could get an opportunity to experience what happened at 1207 West 28th Street in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957.

So that's our job with the board, is that we maintain the home as a house museum.

Well, it was worth mentioning, too, that it was a little iffy, a little dangerous living in that home 60, 70 years ago.

It was one of the stories that people who visit the home will hear is of the large picture window, which is you can't miss it when you come to the house, which on several occasions bricks were thrown through, rocks were thrown through.

We have records of at least three of which the last brick thrown through her house had a note attached to it that said the next time it will be a bomb.

And that's in addition to crosses that were burned in her front yard.

And we have all the documentation to show that through all of these things, Mrs. Bates never wavered.

She was determined that the world was going to change.

We've got the legislation through.

All right.

Now, the selection process, I mean, somebody has got to actually sculpt these two figures.

How do we do that?

So we initially once we finally did the steering committee and they kept Arts and Grounds Commission Secretary of state's office, Governor Hutchison, Secretary Thurston got an interest in their office and became involved.

We put out an RFQ around the country to every artist sculpting list that we could find.

And we had a lot of artist respond.

I think there were about 30 to 35 who submitted an RFQ.

Our committee whittled those down to a list, and this was during the pandemic.

So we requests for bids here.

Yeah.

Yeah, a little bit.

Yeah.

And so we narrowed that list down, had to do interviews by Zoom because of the pandemic, and then narrowed it down to two finalist for both for both Johnny Cash and for Daisy Bates.

And then we set Spread Apart.

I remember that day in the governor's conference room because they had brought in that massive table in the governor's conference room.

We were spaced out and all of the finalists and we had finalist, I mean, some of the greatest sculptors in the world, including the one I always say is we also had the guy who does the bust for the NFL Hall of Fame who submitted.

And so we had just some really tough choices to make in terms of the artists.

And so we we had them all.

They came in with a three foot, what's called a market of what the statue would actually look like.

They presented described it.

And the thing that impressed me the most about both of the artists we selected, Benjamin Victor is the artist, her Daisy Bates that we selected.

He is the youngest person to ever have a statue in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, and this will be his fourth.

So he has the most of any sculptor in the world.

And in the United States Capitol.

The thing that impressed I think Charles would say this too impressed us the most about him is how he immersed himself into learning anything and everything he could about Daisy Bates.

He went to the home.

He he not only came to the home, but once he had gotten pretty much nearly complete.

And he brought a life sized clay model to Little Rock.

One of the ladies on our board, who was very familiar with Mrs. Bates and Mrs. Bates, was a very classy lady.

She was impeccably dressed at all times, as you well know.

She made a very silent comment about the shoes that the sculpture had put on Mrs. Bates.

She said, Those are not the type heels that Mrs. Bates wore without saying the thing.

Benjamin went back and change those heels.

So you will see there will be a clay model that he did initially that will have a different shoe.

Yeah.

And what will be the shoe that will be unveiled on Wednesday because of that change?

So he he immersed himself.

He went to Central High.

He went to the home.

He met with the foundation board, read every book about her.

What a daisy in his bones.

Exactly.

Exactly, exactly.

And and, you know, he and Kevin.

Chrissy, Kevin.

Chrissy is doing the statue of Johnny Cash.

I've said all along they have more talent in their pinky finger than any of us have in our whole bodies.

It's been amazing to watch them transform from a photo.

We basically gave them a photo that the foundation picked, Right.

That the family picked in terms of what era of Daisy Bates, an era of Johnny Cash they wanted depicted and how they took from that and developed a seven foot statue that's on a three foot pedestal.

Mm hmm.

It has been truly amazing to watch.

There's more to come.

I mean, you've selected a sculpture, and now the work starts, and.

And the sculptors have done their research.

Now they go back to the studio.

Yeah, they started out with a clay model.

Just.

Just doing it by clay.

Off of that three foot model.

And it took.

And Benjamin is in Boise, Idaho.

Benjamin wanted to do a residency here, and so we brought him down to the Wingate Center for Art and Design at UCLA.

And he spent a week?

Yes.

He brought an eight foot, eight foot statue of Mrs. Bates here in Clay.

And so we brought in the students from Daisy Bates Elementary.

They got to come and see him work.

And students, art students from across the state get to come in and see him work.

And so you finally get to the clay model.

And there's several one thing we didn't know about because there's there's no playbook here.

The last statues, nobody was around for winging it.

They were winging it the whole way.

So you're working with the architect of the Capitol and you're working with the Joint Committee of Congress on the library.

There is actually a committee of House members and Senate members who had to sign off on the design, on the photo, on the clay model and on the engineering packet, because apparently some other state at one time had one that was so heavy that it put a dimple in the floor of the United States Capitol.

Wow.

So now it has to you had to show how much the statue is going away.

And for instance, the statue of Uriah Rose on its base was £14,000.

Mrs. Bates will be about £2,000.

That's the difference between marble and bronze, right.

I'll tell you, Steve, that one of the other unique things about the placement of this statue, Shane mentioned earlier, that she would be right next to here some more irony come.

Yes, Jefferson Davis.

But Mrs. Bates will be only the third African American to be in Statuary Hall.

The other two are both females.

It's Mary McLeod Bethune, who was the founder of the Dome Cookman University in Florida, educator and educator and Rosa Parks, whom everybody is familiar with.

And they she will be directly across from Rosa Parks, who she was friends with in life.

So it's just really historic when you think of the fact that they will be across from each other for the next 100 years for the world to see where from here Now, I mean.

Well, Mr. Cassius statue will be later.

Yes.

Mean it is going to take longer.

No, he.

He's ready.

It's interesting, Steve.

All of this is done and coordinated by the speaker of the House, his office.

So Speaker Johnson's office coordinates this, and so we've been working in concert with them.

Once we got the final approval.

So you take the clay model and then it goes off to be bronzed.

And so there's a whole other process that has to go through to you get the bronze statue, and then it has to be placed on a pedestal where it has the name says Arkansas.

D.C. got some Bates dates, birth and death.

And it has we actually these statues will actually have quotes on them on both sides of the statue.

The front part will be just biographical information.

So once we got the final approvals, then we started working with with the Speaker's office about setting the dates.

And that's that was one thing You're dealing with the congressional schedule.

We're likely to be up there next week while there is actually a vote going on about the speaker's job in the midst in the midst of all the irony.

So there's so much irony going into this week, so decision.

So they've been great to work with.

And we went through a transition of a speaker.

We were working with Speaker McCarthy's office and fortunately the young lady, her name is actually Dana planning.

She is the planning person in the speaker's office.

When the change went over from the new speaker, they were going around talking to all the staff and say, what do you do?

What do you do?

What do you do?

And so they got to her and she said she does that Congressional Gold Medal of Honor ceremonies and Statuary Hall and they said, we didn't know we did that.

Why don't you just stay here?

And so fortunately for us, we were already working with her on dates and we'd gone back to a ton of dates.

I was fortunate last year to go into Braga's ceremony and observe.

We have a person that Benjamin has worked with on all of his statutes.

Her name is Katie Bross.

She works with a firm called Akin Gump in D.C. And so she's been through this process.

And without Katie, we would be wandering around in the woods, Right, Because she has done this twice and she has been there every step of the way and or else there's probably no way we're having this conversation and we're going to do the unveiling next week.

And so we were finally able to get the dates that work for the speaker that also worked for the minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, Senator Schumer and Senator McConnell.

All of the leadership had to sign off on the date for the ceremony.

And we were told at the beginning of the process, at most you're going to have is about 30 days notice of when the unveiling is going to be so that you're trying to get list together.

You're trying to reserve a place to have a reception, you're trying to get travel arrangements made hotel where the whole hotel area is.

So it's been it's been an interesting process to be a part of who can go, who will be there, who can go, is it you can't accommodate everybody.

Right.

So we will have there, obviously, our congressional delegation, Governor Sanders, former Governor Hutchison, who was very involved in helping us raise the funds to do it, Secretary of State John Thurston, his staff Michael and Kenneth and Jamie and Kelly have all been instrumental in helping us every step of the way, too.

And they need to be mentioned.

And so you'll have a lot of elected officials, you'll have a lot of special guests in addition to the unveiling and, of course, will be in Washington, D.C.

But the Daisy Bates Museum Board will also host a local simulcast on Wednesday.

It will start at 2:00 here in Little Rock, 10:00, 1:00 Little Rock time.

But the actual unveiling is DC Time three livestream Livestream.

We'll have a local program with local people participating, talking about Daisy and their experiences with her.

Mrs. Bass She wanted to be called Mr. Bates, not Daisy.

I'm sorry about her life and times, and it will be held at the Second Baptist Church, which is located at 1709.

John Barrow in Little Rock.

And we're inviting the community to come out and experience the unveiling through simulcasts and local programing at the ceremony will also have Ernest Green, one of the members of the Little Rock Nine, and we know at least him as of this taping.

There may be more, but there will be a lot of members of the Bates Foundation and people have been instrumental.

The donors and everyone who have been involved in this whole process will have about 250 people in the room will have a reception on Tuesday night at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

And so we'll have a program there.

All the ones who are in town and people who live in D.C. will be able to walk around the museum and we'll have a short program there.

And then the unveiling is at 3 p.m. Eastern.

So if you are here in Arkansas, you'll be able to watch it on C-SPAN.

It will be carried live and you will also be able to watch it on the Speaker of the House website.

They will be streaming it as well.

We're told that in the ceremony I went to, the ceremony will last about 45 minutes and they have everybody kind of scripted, even, I think the pastor absolutely.

So So there will be a he's been warned.

Yeah he's been warned.

Yeah.

So there is there is a choir made up of alumni from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff and Philander Smith University that will sing the national anthem will be saying by an Arkansan name is technically is really D.C. Washington, who lives in Washington, D.C. And so D.C. is very excited to sing the anthem.

What kind of feedback have you gotten to the selection of both individuals?

It's been all positive.

I will tell you that all people that I have had the pleasure of talking with have spoken so positive that they could not think of two greater people than Mrs. Daisy Bates and Johnny Cash to represent Arkansas in our nation's capital.

And we agree with them.

So another exciting aspect of this is we've been working with Arkansas PBS.

There is a documentary that will be produced about this.

Nathan Wallace is our producer and he's he's been following Benjamin and Kevin throughout this whole process.

And so the feedback that we've received when they talk to individuals and do interviews has really been exciting to hear.

And I think the thing I was asked yesterday, what am I going to be most excited about?

I kind of went through and I think Charles and I had this discussion because we had to be involved in the submissions.

We actually had to look at the final product.

And so I kind of debated, do I want to see it before it's unveiled or do I want to wait till the unveiling?

But we we had to see it before, so it got submitted.

So I think the thing I'm most excited about on Wednesday is to pull that cord.

Absolutely.

And see everybody else's reaction to what I've already seen, what Benjamin has done, what Kevin has done and will unveil in September, hopefully, I think everyone is going to be excited about what they see.

And the thing that excites me even more is the Capitol has nearly 4 million visitors a year, and so you're going to have all of these people who are going to hear the Arkansas story of these two iconic individuals.

And the people who actually are most excited are the Capitol tour guides.

So they came up to me at the rescue ceremony.

They found out I was from Arkansas and they're like, We're excited to get your statues because we love having new statues to be able to tell new stories to the millions of visitors who come through here each and every year.

So it's an exciting moment.

Charles, Kate and Steve.

I think that's what's even more important is that while this moment is Mrs. Bates moment, there are so many unsung heroes that we never hear about.

We've heard for years about the nine.

We don't hear a lot about their parents.

We don't hear about those people who guarded Mrs. and Mr. Bates home when they were threatened with various acts.

Let's say his name, Elsie Bell, Sea Bass, absent Julie, they don't talk about when Mrs. Bates was in their elder years at the Christian Ministerial Alliance of Little Rock, cared for her on a daily basis and maintained her home for, You know, one of the ironies is that one of the people that organizations that will be participating with us is the lumber mill out of haddock, Arkansas.

As a child, when Mrs. Bates father was run out of haddock, he worked at the lumber mill now called West Fraser.

But they are still with us today, supporting the efforts to enshrine Mrs. Bates in the minds of as many people as possible.

So we just feel that while it's about Mrs. Bates, there are so many unsung heroes, and I just wanted to make the fact known that the Nan's parents, the neighbors, the friends, the church organization and all the other community played a part in it, and she so gracefully accepted that help.

But she was the one out front and she was the target for so many things.

Gentlemen, good work.

Thank you.

I've got to end it there because we're just simply out of time.

Yeah, Come soon, we will.

All right.

That does it for us for this week.

And as always, we thank you for watching and we'll see you next week.

Support for Arkansas Week provided by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, The Arkansas Times and Little Rock Public Radio.