Five days after the Brown decision, and more than a year before the High Court offered its ambiguous order for southern schools to desegregate “with all deliberate speed,” the Little Rock School Board pledged to comply with the decision. It was in some ways a forward-looking commitment, befitting what the local superintendent of schools, Virgil Blossom, called “a friendly, open-handed town where the easy comradeship of the West and the hustling spirit of the Middle West blended with the traditions of the Old South,” one garnering considerable attention, and applause: “a likely model for other cities,” U.S. News and World Report declared in 1956. But Blossom, a pragmatist with political ambitions, feared getting too far ahead of public opinion. It took him three years to decide to enroll only a token number of blacks in only three grades at only one school: Central High School. In May 1957 school administrators set out to find the black trailblazers: children who were simultaneously old enough to attend Central, close enough to get there easily, smart enough to cut it academically, strong enough to survive the ordeal, mild enough to make no waves, and stoic enough not to fight back. And, collectively, scarce enough to minimize white objections.
Black students at Dunbar and Horace Mann were asked that spring whether they wanted to participate in the great experiment. Of the roughly two hundred who were eligible, only eighty or so volunteered. Elizabeth was not among them; she couldn’t decide anything so momentous so quickly. That was fine with her folks. Though the Eckfords felt black pride—“There’s a Negro on television! There’s a Negro on television!” someone would shout when Nat King Cole or Harry Belafonte or Ella Fitzgerald appeared on the screen—Elizabeth’s parents were hardly activists. What most concerned Oscar Eckford, Jr., was making a living, and getting by. When a white woman approached, he instinctively crossed to the other side of the street. If anything, Elizabeth’s mother was even more deferential. Her entire career in political activism consisted of collecting signatures once to have streetlights installed in the neighborhood. “I have never had trouble with white people,” she told one reporter. “I always gave in, if necessary.” They’d have been perfectly content had Elizabeth stayed put, continuing her studies at Horace Mann.
At Blossom’s request, the principals of Horace Mann and Dunbar (which had become a junior high school) winnowed down the candidates to a couple dozen. The superintendent interviewed them all, filtering out those whom he felt might cause problems—one girl, for instance, was too pretty—and scaring away others by telling them everything they could not do. Even were they to be greeted warmly, Central’s pioneering black students would not enjoy a traditional high school experience. To mollify white fears of “race mixing,” they were to be barred from all extracurricular activities: they could not act in school plays, sing in the school choir, go to the prom. “You know, this whole problem [of school desegregation] could be solved if they’d give us a Negro student who could run the 100 in 9.8 and also throw a decent forward pass,” a white student told the New York Post. But under Blossom’s plan, that could not happen: blacks couldn’t play on Central’s teams (including the famous football Tigers) either.
For weeks, Elizabeth weighed whether to add her name to the list. Were she to stay at Horace Mann, her path would be clear, and circumscribed: she would surely wind up at Philander Smith, then go on to teach history to black students in some Podunk town. Central offered more courses, like speech, that could help her become a lawyer. It also had a far better library. While it had always been off-limits to her, it was also oddly familiar: she passed it all the time en route to her grandfather’s store; summers, she played on its tennis courts, which were integrated long before its classrooms were. As for the ban on extracurricular activities, that posed no problem for her: she was shy by nature and “The Queen of No” was actually happier with her home. On the other hand, she knew her parents might suffer retaliation—both could lose their jobs—were she to enroll.
Sometime that summer, Elizabeth made up her mind: she wanted to go. Birdie Eckford demurred, hoping her daughter would forget about it. Several weeks passed, and Elizabeth, showing a persistence with her mother that was unusual for her, brought it up again. Wasn’t it time, she asked, for her mother to speak to the principal of Horace Mann, LeRoy Christophe? Anna lobbied for her. So did her grandfather. “Maybe Papa felt that he and I didn’t do nothing, so maybe Elizabeth would,” her father later said. Christophe told Elizabeth’s mother that the list was already complete, and that they’d have to go see Blossom himself. When they did, he kept them waiting until all the whites had left the office. An owlish, jowly man, Blossom satisfied himself that Elizabeth had no ties to the local NAACP, which had sued the school board the year before to speed up desegregation, proposing its own slate of students; Blossom wanted none of them. He cautioned Elizabeth that she would have to emulate the black baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson, ignoring all provocations. Elizabeth found Blossom intimidating and patronizing. But a week later, he got back to them: sensitive, brooding, fragile Elizabeth had, improbably, made the cut. Even more improbably, her worrywart mother went along, not even wavering as the mood in Little Rock darkened.
Throughout the summer, a group of segregationists, including several prominent local churchmen, campaigned to halt the Blossom plan. Cheering them on were racial hard-liners throughout the South, who feared that if desegregation, even in so diluted a form, proceeded in Little Rock, their own communities would inevitably follow suit. Advertisements and fliers conjured up black boys and white girls dancing together and kissing in school plays, and warned of venereal disease contracted from communal toilets. A newly formed Mothers League of Central High School sued the Little Rock School Board. Convinced that political survival lay in supporting the hard-liners, Faubus spoke out on their behalf, citing dubious reports that both whites and blacks were stockpiling weapons. Exacerbating race prejudice was class resentment. Little Rock’s elite would not fully participate in the plan; just as blacks were entering Central, the brand new Hall High School—nicknamed Cadillac High—was opening in wealthy Pulaski Heights, and, like the neighborhood, it would be lily-white. Thus the whites bearing the brunt of the change were, by and large, poorer and less educated: mixed in for them with traditional race prejudice was a more undifferentiated kind of rage. The hate descending upon Little Rock in the summer of 1957 reminded Blossom of what he’d read about Germany in 1933.
Quite understandably, some of the black students who’d signed up for Central got cold feet. Soon, only nine of them remained, to enter a student body of approximately two thousand. No man is an island, perhaps, but nine black boys and girls were about to become an archipelago in an ocean of whites. “There’s strength in numbers, especially when you’re having trouble,” Thurgood Marshall told a reporter. “One student is horrible and nine or ten is bad.”
Little Rock’s black community was small and interconnected, and in addition to Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth had ties to several of the pioneering black students. She’d had a crush on the selfassured, highly intelligent Terrence Roberts in junior high, and had seen Carlotta Walls, who was energetic and athletic and had long, thick braids, around the neighborhood. Her mother had once lived with people close to Ernest Green, and Elizabeth knew Ernest, the only senior in the group, as a highly social sort who liked jazz. Thelma Mothershed she’d met through her family. Only Melba Patillo, Jefferson Thomas, and Gloria Ray were complete strangers to her. Collectively, they were what Blossom had wanted: well-mannered children from good families, the off-spring of schoolteachers and postal workers and others in the small black middle class, or those with middle-class aspirations. Most were genuine Jackie Robinson types, sufficiently tough and talented to withstand the inevitable abuse. But anyone in the know could see how hasty and haphazard the process had been. Why pick Thelma, a tiny, fragile girl with a heart defect? Or the proud and pugnacious Minnijean? Or, for that matter, Elizabeth? With her sensitivity and intelligence, she would surely feel whatever punishment was to be meted out more keenly and convey her pain more compellingly should she ever find her voice.
Underfunded as they were, Little Rock’s black schools had a proud tradition, teaching black pride before the term existed and black history before there were any texts. They represented community and continuity: some of Elizabeth’s teachers had also taught her parents. It was a point of pride that many of them had better credentials—that is, more graduate degrees—than their counterparts in the white schools. The schools provided a refuge from the racism outside. Whatever benefits Central conferred, then, would come at a cost. The very institutions—schools, churches, stores—that insulated Elizabeth from whites left her largely ignorant about them. When she got to Central, she actually had trouble understanding some of the children: their accents were too foreign. White people were stick figures to her, exotics whom she scrutinized only to stay safe. Her ignorance extended to the virulence and depth of white antipathy. Part of what would prove so terrifying to her was that it was so unfamiliar, so unexpected.
Blossom had directed the black parents to send their children to the first day of school at Central without them. Having adults around, the authorities reasoned, would only inflame things more. Would the soldiers dare block the black students? To the black parents, that seemed hard to believe. In fact, unbeknownst to them, their orders that day were, as one of the Guardsmen present later recalled, quite explicit: “No niggers in the building.” That soldier, a Central graduate himself, knew the school had many black employees—janitors, boiler operators, cafeteria workers, the folks who really kept the place going—and asked his superior officer whether exceptions would be made for them. “No niggers in the building,” the officer reiterated.1
The local NAACP decided that the black students should not come to school that first day, pending a decision in the segregationists’ latest court challenge. But on September 3, Federal Judge Ronald Davies, on loan from North Dakota, ordered that the process proceed. Late that night, the principals of Dunbar and Horace Mann informed the nine black students that they would be going to Central the next day. Daisy Bates, who had taken charge of the group, also called the families. The students should not come individually to Central, as Blossom had requested; it would be too dangerous. Instead, they were to assemble at her home. From there they would proceed to a spot near the school, where they’d meet with a small group of local ministers, including the few white pastors she’d been able to enlist. The clergymen would then escort the black students to the school. But the Eckfords did not have a phone. As Bates later wrote, she knew that Elizabeth’s father worked nights at the train station; she’d have driven down there to tell him the plan had she not been so dog tired. It could wait till morning. But when morning came, she forgot.2