The men of the Arkansas National Guard continued to ring the school, watching idly as Elizabeth walked by. Since she was no longer physically trying to enter Central, she was of little consequence to them. But others continued to watch her. “Here she is this little girl, this tender little thing, walking with this whole mob baying at her like a pack of wolves seeking to destroy a little lamb,” Benjamin Fine of the New York Times later recalled. Buddy Lonesome of the St. Louis Argus, a black weekly, was also looking on. “The mob of twisted whites, galvanized into vengeful action by the inaction of the heroic state militia, was not willing that the young school girl should get off so easily,” he wrote. “Elizabeth Eckford had walked into the wolf’s lair, and now that they felt she was fair game, the drooling wolves took off after their prey. The hate mongers, who look exactly like other, normal white men and women, took off down the street after the girl.”
Elizabeth’s goal remained the bus stop on 16th and Park. She was scared, especially after someone shouted “Push her!” But if she let herself go, she feared she’d begin to cry, something she didn’t want to do in front of so many people. She worried that if she said or did anything unusual, the crowd might turn even uglier. There were more shouts: “Go home, nigger! You will never get into this school! We don’t want you here!” “Go back where you came from!” But she looked placid, unflappable, as if she wasn’t hearing anything. At one point a major in the Guard wearing command pilot wings held up his hands and forced the mob to back off a bit. Another soldier, holding his billy club at both ends, stared vacantly into space. John Chancellor was among the many reporters looking on. “He wanted a story, a good story,” David Halberstam later wrote, “but this was something beyond a good story, a potential tragedy so terrible that he had hoped it really wasn’t happening. He was terribly frightened for her, frightened for himself and frightened about what this told him about his country.” Chancellor’s cameraman got it all on film.
By the time she reached the bus stop, Elizabeth felt as if she couldn’t walk another step. She sat down at the edge of the empty bench and, for the first time, began to cry. The catcalls continued, largely from grown-ups; the school bell had rung, and most of the students had gone inside. “Drag her over to this tree!” someone shouted. Some reporters drifted back to the school, where by now the seven other black students had been rebuffed en masse, with little of the pain or menace Elizabeth encountered.1 (The other black girls, one reporter noted, didn’t appear nervous; one even smiled.)
Some thirty or forty people milled around the bench. No one made any move to harm Elizabeth, but there was lots of laughing and jeering. The country might just as well be handed over to the Communists, one man shouted repeatedly. Someone, perhaps a plainclothes policeman, moved the crowd away. A few newsmen—Jerry Dhonau and Ray Moseley of the Arkansas Gazette, Paul Welch of Life—created an informal cordon around Elizabeth, though she thought they were only trying to overhear whatever she might be saying.2 A reporter for Time tried to interview her. “No comment,” she told him. “I’m minding my own business.” Then a black man—one of the very few in the crowd—offered to escort her away. It was L. C. Bates, Daisy’s husband, whom Elizabeth recognized from his pictures in the State Press. Given the explosiveness of the situation, and the conspicuousness of any black face in that immaculately segregated crowd, it was remarkable that Bates had even shown up; the day before, when he had also made an appearance, he admitted that he’d been “scared as hell.”3 Even more remarkable, as he furtively showed Elizabeth, he was carrying a gun, tucked into his pants pocket. It frightened her; she wanted it—and him—nowhere near her. He offered to escort her out of there, but Elizabeth knew that her mother would never approve of her going off with a strange man, however honorable his intentions.
Elizabeth at the bus stop, September 4, 1957 (Lloyd Dinkins/Commercial Appeal)
Benjamin Fine sat down alongside her, introduced himself, and asked for her name. “I’m not here to hurt you,” he added. “Nothing’s going to happen. You’ll be alright, honey.” Then Fine, the father of three young daughters himself, put his arm around Elizabeth. “Don’t let them see you cry,” he urged. That gesture—the act of a white man touching a black girl—appeared to ignite the crowd, already smoldering over the presence of the Yankee press. “Then the scream went up: ‘There he is! The nigger lover! He’s from the Times! Throw him out! Let’s lynch him! Let’s cut his nuts out! We’ll fix him!’” Fine recalled afterward. Years later, a woman interviewing Fine asked him whether, by seeking to comfort Elizabeth that day, he had crossed some ethical line. “A reporter has to be a human being, my dear,” he replied.
Robert Schakne of CBS also approached Elizabeth. Television news was in its infancy, a strange hybrid of newsreels and radio; its ground rules had yet to develop. Schakne could see that Elizabeth was petrified, but he pressed ahead. “Can you tell us who you are?” he asked, as gently as a gruff-looking and -sounding man wielding a microphone could. Elizabeth said nothing. Schakne looked back uncertainly toward his crew—“Rolling,” his cameraman piped in—and tried again. “Can you tell me your name, please? Are you going to go to school here at Central High?” Again, Elizabeth remained silent. “You don’t care to say anything, is that right?” It was.4
Terrence Roberts also appeared and urged Elizabeth to leave with him. Terrence, the young man Elizabeth had fancied at Dunbar, was dignified and polite. (One of his ancestors had clearly been a tribal chieftain or something like that in Africa, Mrs. Huckaby theorized.) But he lived closer to Central than Elizabeth did and, she figured, would accompany her only partway home, turning off on Howard Street. Better to stay put, she thought: this way, if something were to happen to her, at least someone would see it.
One of those who’d accompanied Elizabeth on her walk that morning had been the Rev. Colbert Cartwright of the Pulaski Heights Christian Church, one of Little Rock’s wealthiest white congregations. He had wanted to express his solidarity with the black students, but didn’t know quite how: he’d considered joining the black pastors accompanying the children, but feared that might seem paternalistic. So as Elizabeth had made her way down Park, he had resolved to be a witness, following slightly behind her, taking notes. When the screams flew at Elizabeth—“epithets I had never heard before or since,” he later recalled—he too had been impressed by the “calm dignity with which she made her lonesome pilgrimage.”
When he reached the bench, Cartwright saw a lone white woman sit down alongside Elizabeth. “What struck me with force was the fact that neither segregationist nor integrationist preachers had bothered to help,” he wrote. “Her only help came from this single woman who was generally regarded as an intellectual Communist. Who was neighbor unto that girl?” Actually, the woman’s name was Grace Lorch, and no one who had ever encountered (and either admired or reviled) her and her husband in prior years and locales would have been surprised to see her on that bench, alongside that black girl, in Little Rock.