When Jackie Robinson broke into major league baseball, a decade before blacks entered Central High School, he was spiked on the base paths, shunned by some of his own teammates, taunted mercilessly from the opposing dugout. Yet he had managed to maintain his composure so admirably that when the black students were told how to carry themselves inside Central, his example was invariably cited. But when the recently retired Robinson spoke to seven of the Nine by phone on October 18, he insisted that he was in awe of them. He had had the backing of the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the president of the National League, and the commissioner of baseball; the Nine, by contrast, had been largely on their own. “I think it makes my job look like nothing—what I had to go through,” he told them.
Elizabeth missed the call, having been home with the flu.1 But Mrs. Huckaby’s disciplinary files give some sense of what she encountered that fall when she was in school, and it was a litany Jackie Robinson would have recognized. October 28: Elizabeth shoved in hall. November 20: Elizabeth jostled in gym. November 21: Elizabeth hit with paper clip. In fact, most incidents went unrecorded, especially once Elizabeth, convinced it did no good, stopped reporting them. The Guardsmen who had taken over for the paratroopers were instructed to intervene only in the most egregious cases. Once, after she was body-slammed, timid Elizabeth actually grabbed her assailant. “Tell me you didn’t see that!” she shouted at the nearby soldier. He ordered her to let the girl go. The Guardsmen’s ranks gradually thinned. But as meager as their protection was, the head of the segregationist Mothers League cautioned that there would be bloodshed were they taken away. (Self-serving scare tactics, perhaps, but the mildly pro-integration Gazette warned of the same thing.)
In late October, the parents of the Nine met with Blossom to complain about the situation. Meanwhile, some of the black students devised ways to cope with, or at least to cushion, the pain: laughing off their tormentors, as did Minnijean Brown and Jefferson Thomas; gritting their teeth, like Carlotta Walls; verbally sparring with harassers (or silently reciting poetry), like Terrence Roberts.2 Ernest Green’s maturity and stature seemed to help him endure. And with her heart problems, Thelma Mothershed appeared to be off limits; killing one of the Nine was surely bad strategically. Elizabeth had no such defenses. Indeed, maybe her fame made her more of a target. She seemed to take, and absorb, every blow.
Fearful of rallying those who wanted to scuttle the experiment, Bates and the NAACP played down the difficulties inside the school. On November 25 the black students gathered at the Bates home for an early Thanksgiving. More than the turkey was stuffed that day: the small dining room was crammed with reporters and photographers invited to look on as the Little Rock Nine feigned normality, and thanks. The evening’s theme wasn’t just gratitude but patriotism: each of the black students had to explain why, in spite of everything, he or she preferred life in America to the Soviet Union. “Elizabeth Eckford started a statement and then dropped the microphone, apparently distraught,” reported the Democrat. “‘That’s all,’ she said, and left.”
December 10: Elizabeth kicked in gym class. Tells Mrs. Huckaby such kicks “happened all the time.” December 18: Elizabeth punched and hit by books. Beyond the individual indignities—having a dead fly tossed onto your cafeteria tray, say, or hearing someone mutter, “Remember the Till boy”—there were group insults, too, like seeing “Nigger, go home!” soaped onto the bathroom mirrors. Far from penalizing the worst offenders, Matthews tried appeasing, and even empathizing with, them. In an embittered unpublished memoir, Central’s vice principal, J. O. Powell, himself a graduate of the school, described a typical Matthews “dressing-down.” “You’re not going to solve this thing by punching niggers,” he would tell the latest miscreant. “This thing is bigger than you and me and Congress and the Governor and everybody else, and it’s not going to be solved any time soon. We don’t like it any more than you do. But it’s here…. Now you just quit causing trouble and stay out of the vice principal’s office or I’m going to have to do something about you. You start thinking about your education and quit worrying about integration and niggers.” To the black students, Matthews was someone who did nothing, though always with a smile. “Grinning Chicken Jess,” they called him.
Despite the brave public front, Daisy Bates was candid with her colleagues. “Conditions are yet pretty rough in the school,” she wrote Roy Wilkins on December 17—rough enough, in fact, for her to ask that FBI agents be sent there. That, it turned out, was also the date of what soon became a celebrated episode in the school cafeteria. Not surprisingly, it involved Minnijean Brown; confident and combative, she, more than the eight other black students, acted as if she belonged at Central, which only roused the troublemakers more. After some boys attempted to trip her while she carried a tray of food to her table, she dumped a bowl of chili on one of them. The black women working the lunch line broke out in applause, but Minnijean was summarily suspended. Elizabeth happily yielded the distinction of being the most famous of the Nine; what mattered far more to her was that Minnijean was her closest friend at Central, someone who understood, and protected, her. And now she’d be gone a while.