There was one other thing everyone noticed about Elizabeth, or at least she thought they did: her smile was crooked. The Crumpton twins had welcomed her into her new neighborhood by throwing rocks at her and calling her “Buck Teeth.” White children, she knew from the sitcoms on television, could fix their teeth with braces, but that wasn’t an option for her. She didn’t like looking at herself in the mirror and sometimes covered her mouth when she spoke. It made her even shyer than she naturally was.
Though her mother let her join the pep team in ninth grade, Elizabeth was essentially a loner. Classmates knew they’d never see her at dances or “socials.” Their parents were strict, too, but they, unlike Elizabeth, had learned how to get around the rules. To them, Elizabeth was eccentric—a homebody, a square. Her first date Anna had to arrange for her, picking the boy and helping make her dress. When she was comfortable with someone, like Minnijean Brown, who was in her class and lived for a time next door, she could be clever and wickedly funny. More often, people couldn’t coax full sentences from her, and even when they could, they sometimes couldn’t hear the end. Elizabeth would raise her hand in class and then, once all eyes were on her, wonder why on earth she had. Though she’d occasionally blow her bus money on doughnuts, she was slight. No one had yet diagnosed her as depressed, but it ran in her family.
The Eckfords regularly attended the Allen Temple African Methodist Episcopal Church, nine blocks from their home. Elizabeth welcomed the diversion; it was one of her only avenues out of the house and, when the children went by themselves, a chance to get away from her mother. But religion provided her little comfort: it all seemed very illogical to her. You’ll get over that, her mother had cockily predicted, but she never really had. For hours at a time she’d daydream on the big rock in her backyard, pretending she was sitting by a campfire somewhere far away, realizing that wherever she found herself, she didn’t quite belong.
And yet, much to the amazement of those who knew her, in the fall of 1957 Elizabeth was among the nine black students who had enlisted, then been selected, to enter Little Rock Central High School. Central was the first high school in a major southern city set to be desegregated since the United States Supreme Court had ruled three years earlier in Brown vs. Board of Education that separate and ostensibly equal education was unconstitutional. Inspired both by Thurgood Marshall, who had argued Brown, and Clarence Darrow (she’d watched the Spencer Tracy version of him in Inherit the Wind), Elizabeth wanted to become a lawyer, and she thought Central would help her realize that dream. She knew that in the Jim Crow South, the best of everything went to the white schools, and Central was far and away the best high school in Arkansas. Even more miraculously still, her overprotective mother had gone along with her decision.
For months, in a campaign of growing vituperation, white groups had mobilized to keep the black students out of Central. Three nights earlier the governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, had announced that to maintain peace and order when the school opened, he was surrounding it with members of the state’s National Guard. To Elizabeth, that was reassuring; soldiers would be there to protect her. Besides, there would be some familiar faces on hand: not just a few of the other black students, like Minnijean, but some white children for whose parents her mother had worked, or who lived nearby. Elizabeth had had scant exposure to white people, and knew too little about them even to be scared. Most worrisome to her was having to find her way around the place; Central was enormous, far larger than any of the black schools she’d attended.
But on that first morning of school, her primary concern was looking nice. Her mother had done her hair the night before—an elaborate two-hour ritual, with a hot iron and a hotter stove, of straightening and curling. Then there were her clothes. People in black Little Rock knew that the Eckford girls were expert seamstresses; practically everything they wore they made themselves, and not from the basic patterns of McCall’s but from the more complicated ones in Vogue. It was a practice borne of tradition, pride, and necessity: homemade was cheaper, and it spared black children the humiliation of having to ask to try things on in the segregated department stores downtown. Huddled over the pedaloperated Singer in their living room—the largest open space in their crowded home—the Eckford girls made themselves outfits for Christmas, Easter, and always, the beginning of school.
Calm as Elizabeth was that morning, her mother was her usual apprehensive self. The night before, she’d urged Elizabeth to turn to her Bible, and Elizabeth had picked the 4th Psalm: “Answer when I call, my saving God. In my troubles, you cleared a way.” On the television as Elizabeth ate her breakfast, a newsman described large crowds gathering around Central. It was all Birdie needed to hear. “Turn that thing off!” she shouted from the kitchen. Should anyone say something nasty at her, she counseled Elizabeth, pretend not to hear them. Or better yet, be nice, and put them to shame. Elizabeth’s father, who worked nights and would normally have been asleep, was up and agitated too, even though the police chief had personally assured him there’d be no trouble. He paced the room, holding his pipe, chomping on an unlit cigar.
After making sure everyone looked right and that they all had their pencils and notebooks and lunch money, Birdie Eckford gathered her children around her in the living room. Then, together, they recited the 27th Psalm.
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell.
Though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear: Though war should rise against me, in this will I be confident.
She instructed Elizabeth to say it to herself, over and over again, at the school. If she did just that, her mother said, she had nothing to fear.
Around 7:30, Elizabeth, carrying a green notebook, left the house with Anna, one year older than she, who had elected to stay at Horace Mann, the black high school to which Elizabeth had gone the previous year. The day was bright and sunny, still more summer than fall, and Elizabeth put on her sunglasses, dark orbs in a clear plastic frame that were a little too big for her face; her eyes were extremely sensitive to light. Together, she and Anna walked to 16th and Peyton, only two blocks away but already into a white neighborhood, with concrete streets, and boarded the War Memorial bus. For a few years now, Elizabeth had been able to sit wherever she wanted. (But the old folkways persisted: whether out of habit, or fear, older blacks still clustered toward the rear, while mischievous black children planted themselves alongside elderly white women who, much to their delight, would leap up as if nudged with red-hot pokers.) The ride to Central cost twenty-five cents and took only about fifteen minutes. Little Rock was little: very different worlds were very close together.
The bus went down to Lewis, then took a left to 13th, where it headed east, through a white working-class neighborhood. At South Pine was the all-white Robert E. Lee Elementary School, and across the street, the Lee Theatre, where Elizabeth sometimes watched movies, though only from the balcony. On the bridge over the Missouri Pacific tracks just beyond Woodrow, she felt her first fears. She was approaching Central: the football stadium was visible to her right. She got off at Dennison, then walked up to Park, where she turned. Up the hill, on Park and 14th, was a Mobil station; beyond that, on the other side of the street and stretching for two blocks, lay Central. Instantly, she sensed something amiss: there were more parked cars than usual, and she heard the muffled murmur of a crowd. Then the military Jeeps and half-tracks came into view, and then the soldiers.
To Benjamin Fine of the New York Times, who had been there since 4:30 that morning, the crowd had at first seemed cheerful, even festive. “If anyone had a popcorn concession, they could have had a picnic,” he later recalled. Some of the white girls flirted with the National Guardsmen, many of them scarcely older than they, some Central graduates themselves. A few boys waved Confederate flags; a man played “Dixie” on his cornet. But not everything was so upbeat. “They don’t want to be in your school, they want to be in your bedroom!” a minister shouted through a bullhorn. Standing shoulder to shoulder, the ragtag group of soldiers encircled the school. Across the street, bystanders gathered; a young newsman with NBC, John Chancellor, counted ninety-two of them by around the time Elizabeth left home. Suddenly, a commotion: “They’re coming!” someone shouted. “The niggers are coming!” The “they” was really just a “she”: Elizabeth, a black face in a cloudlike splotch of white in the bronzed, late summer streetscape, was approaching. Shortly, the world would learn all about the “Little Rock Nine.”1 At this moment she was the Little Rock One.