The initial reports from inside were encouraging. “They [the white students] were so wonderful,” Melba Patillo told one reporter. “They treated us so good. Nothing I can say describes just how happy I am.”1 A picture taken during the morning of the first day of classes—in the midst of a “fire drill” that was actually a bomb scare—showed Elizabeth chatting, apparently casually and comfortably, with two white girls from her history class. (In fact, anticipating problems when the soldiers were not around, Elizabeth was asking one of them, Priscilla Thompson, to describe the layout of the lunch room and the gymnasium for her.) The photograph ran throughout the country the following day, counteracting a bit the pictures from three weeks earlier, and corroborating what the black students themselves said. “The teachers are very nice. Nothing went wrong, there were no catcalls. I especially enjoyed my history and English classes,” Elizabeth reported after that first day. “Everything will be all right, for the majority of the white students themselves are all right.” “This nervous town has simmered down to a slow beat,” Bill Patten wrote a few days into the new era in the New York Age. “Nine Negro boys and girls have been attending classes at Central High School for a week and the walls haven’t crumbled nor has the color rubbed off on any of the students they chanced to meet.”
Soon, though, there were disquieting signs. On October 1, while walking down the hall, Elizabeth was struck from behind with a pencil. In gym class the next day, someone threw a rock at her. When a soldier asked who, the white students just laughed. All this bore watching, but suddenly, there was something else for the world to see. On October 4—the day Little Rock’s papers described Central students hanging a black body in effigy—up went Sputnik. Something that humbled and terrified most Americans left Mrs. Huckaby, for one, feeling relieved. “We’ll be glad to take second billing for a while,” she wrote her brother. Not so fast, the Soviets seemed to reply. On October 9, while stating the times the first man-made satellite would be visible from the world’s largest cities, Radio Moscow amended its list, announcing that it would pass over Little Rock, and Central High School, at 9:36 the following night. Standing on the very street where Elizabeth had just felt the grim present, one could now gaze skyward—and see the future.
By the time people stopped looking up and resumed looking across, things had changed dramatically at Central—for the worse. While hardly enthusiastic about integration, most students were willing to tolerate it. But lurking in the shadows was a hard core—estimates ranged from fifty to two hundred—of sadistic segregationists, either freelance, precocious bigots or pawns of grownup diehards, bent on wreaking as much havoc as they could. The question was whether anyone—administrators and teachers, the soldiers, the police, the community, their fellow students—would rein them in.
Under intense political pressure, Eisenhower withdrew the paratroopers as quickly as he could, sending them back in only whenever conditions worsened. For the most part, the protection of the black students fell to the same Arkansas National Guardsmen who had previously kept them out. It was a job for which they had little training or inclination; many hated desegregation as ardently as the protestors. (Some were kids, still in or barely out of high school themselves, who could occasionally be spotted walking arm-in-arm with Central girls.) Whenever trouble occurred, they seemed to be somewhere else or looking the other way. So, too, were most school officials. Some of them—notably, Central’s principal, Jess Matthews—were lukewarm themselves about having the black students around, and resented enforcing what meddlesome outsiders had foisted on them. Matthews had done nothing to prepare students (or teachers) for what was happening, let alone inspire them to rise to the occasion.
In fact, he stood in the way. During the summer, some members of the incoming student council had arranged a formal welcome for the black pioneers, thereby signaling to one and all that whatever their reservations about integration might be, they would uphold the law. The date was set—Friday, August 30—and invitations were printed. But after all the turmoil in the days before—the segregationist Mothers League had been formed; the desegregation plan had been challenged in court; the superintendent’s daughter had been threatened—Matthews nixed the idea at the last moment. Later attempts to revive the plan were also thwarted. Similarly, nothing had come of the principal’s notion, one he’d broached during practice one day, of having the football players help maintain order around the school once desegregation started. The black students would be on their own; none of Central’s student leaders would ever get to know any of them or feel much of a stake in their well-being.
Like everyone else, the president of the student body, Ralph Brodie, had seen the picture of Elizabeth and Hazel. It embarrassed him, of course, but he hadn’t thought of it for more than a minute or two. A new school year was beginning; there were students to motivate, teams to launch, and, as it turned out, aggressive northern reporters with agendas to talk to. When Mike Wallace, then a young television reporter as well as a columnist for the New York Post, telephoned Central on September 3 in search of a big man on campus to interview, it was Brodie—a defensive back and backup quarterback in football, a letterman in basketball, and a three-time state track champion in high and low hurdles and relays, in addition to governor at Arkansas Boys State—who quite naturally was summoned. As Mrs. Huckaby hovered over him, Brodie, seventeen years old, sat behind the principal’s desk, fielding the reporter’s inquiries. Three questions or so in, he distinctly felt that Wallace was setting him up—trying to coax him into saying something stupid, and thereby confirming for his citified readers that all Arkansans were rednecks.
Was he alarmed by the situation? No. How long would it last? It’s up to Governor Faubus. Did he think the Negro students could come to school tomorrow? Sir, it’s the law. We are going to have to face it sometime. Would you mind sitting next to a Negro? No. Would there be much resistance to integration? I don’t believe there’ll be any at all. Do you have Negro friends? No, sir. Had he done any soul-searching about segregation? Not particularly. Would it make a difference to him to see a white girl dating a Negro boy? I believe it would. Why? I was just brought up that way. Do you think Negroes are equal to whites? That is a matter of opinion. What’s yours? If they have had the same benefits and advantages, I think they’re equally as smart. Should southerners live by the law of the land? I don’t see why we shouldn’t. We’ve been living under it all our lives.
It lasted just a few minutes, and after Wallace had hung up, Brodie turned to Mrs. Huckaby. “That man was trying to make us all look bad!” he cried out. To Brodie, Wallace was like many of the reporters who had descended on Central. At night he’d watch their reports on television, and what they described scarcely resembled what he’d seen at the school earlier in the day. After his interview with Wallace was reprinted in the Gazette, out-of-town reporters began badgering Brodie for quotes—all, he was convinced, to buttress their biased portrayals. It got so bad that he and his father had to ask the local prosecutor to keep the press away from him and, for as long as Brodie needed it, the prosecutor did. Brodie himself did the rest: twenty years passed before he granted another interview. Barely into the new school year, then, Brodie already believed Central’s whites had not been allowed to show their good character, and that the northern press wouldn’t have believed them even if they had. They were feelings that would last a lifetime.