“It seemed a kind face, [and then] … she spat at me.”
Little Rock, Arkansas, September 4, 1957
BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION
Linda Brown was a third-grade student from Topeka, Kansas. She had to walk five long blocks to her school every day, even though she lived much closer to a segregated school for whites only. Linda’s father sued the city government to let her go to the all-white school. The case was combined with several similar cases around the country, and it was argued all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. Lawyers from the NAACP represented Linda and the other black students. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that segregated schools did not give black students an equal chance for a good education. Some school systems integrated smoothly, but other communities took more than ten years to open their schoolhouse doors to children of all races.
Elizabeth Eckford was a fifteen-year-old tenth grader in the fall of 1957. She was one of the Little Rock Nine—the first black students to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
On the morning of September 4, 1957, Elizabeth Eckford got up early and pressed the new black-and-white checkered dress her mother had made her for the first day of school. As she was ironing, her little brother turned on the TV. The reporter was wondering if the nine black students knew that there was a mob waiting for them in front of Little Rock Central High School. Well, at least now she did.
Elizabeth sat down and waited for the adults who were supposed to pick her up and take the six girls and three boys to school. Eight o’clock came. Then 8:15. No one showed up. Since her family had no phone, she had no way of knowing that the adults had changed the pickup plans. Finally, Elizabeth grabbed her notebook and started out the front door toward the bus stop. Her mother called her back into the living room. Together they knelt in prayer. And then Elizabeth left.
The bus let her off a block from Central High. She could see hundreds of white people gathered across the street from her school, restrained by a police barricade. When they spotted her, they started toward her but the police held them back. Soldiers surrounded the giant redbrick school. She assumed they were there to help her get inside. As television cameras recorded her every step, she made it to the nearest corner of the school and tried to push through the soldiers to the building. The soldiers refused to let her through. They wouldn’t even tell her why.
She tried the main entrance, farther down the block. This time the soldiers moved closer together and crossed their rifles in her face. Then she realized they were there to keep her out. With nowhere to go, she stepped back into the street and the mob surged toward her. This time the Little Rock police let them go. Clutching her notebook, she tried to keep moving forward toward the bus stop as she was engulfed by the hateful crowd. Some were screaming,
“Lynch her!” At one point she looked into the eyes of an old woman. “It seemed a kind face,” Elizabeth remembered, “[and then] … she spat at me.”
Elizabeth made it to a bench by a bus stop and sat down. The crowd closed in. And then, mercifully, the bus pulled up and a sympathetic white woman took her by the arm, led her in, and sat down beside her. The doors closed against the angry faces and the bus pulled away.
For the next three weeks the Arkansas National Guard, under orders from Governor Orval Faubus, kept the nine black students out of school. Finally, a judge ordered the governor to remove the guardsmen from Central High. President Dwight Eisenhower sent one thousand federal troops to Little Rock to protect the six girls and three boys. Each day, the students were picked up by U.S. soldiers who stayed with them until they went in through a side door.
The girl in a white dress yelling at Elizabeth Eckford is Hazel Bryan Massery. Like Elizabeth, she was fifteen on that day. The words on her tongue were “Go home, nigger.” This photograph made Hazel feel ashamed, and she called Elizabeth five years later to apologize. In 1997, she told a reporter, “I grew up in a segregated society and I thought that was the way it was and that’s the way it should be … I don’t want to pass this on to another generation.”
But there were no troops to protect them when they got inside. “Once we got into the school, it was very dark,” recalled Melba Pattillo Beals, another of the nine. “It was like a deep dark castle. And my eyesight had to adjust to the fact that there were people all around me … There has never been in my life any stark terror or fear akin to that.” All year long they were taunted and tripped, ignored and called names. “We’d be showering in the gym and someone would turn your shower into scalding … you’d be walking out to the volleyball court and someone would break a bottle and trip you on the bottle. I still have scars on my right knee. After a while I started saying to myself, ‘Am I less than human?’ ‘Why did they do this to me?’”
HAVE THINGS CHANGED AT CENTRAL HIGH?
In 1997, forty years after the Little Rock Nine integrated Central High, African Americans made up 60 percent of the students. And Central’s student body president was Fatima McKendra, the first African-American female ever in that role. But there were still deep racial divisions, at school and throughout Little Rock. One high school junior told a reporter, “In our geology class, we get to sit wherever we want. On one side of the room the black people sit, and on the other side the white people sit … It just happens.”
Their parents were terrified. People threatened to kill Elizabeth Eckford’s father at work. But the Little Rock Nine didn’t quit school, even though some whites refused to attend classes with them. Every one of them finished the year at Central High. Ernest Green, the group’s only senior, became the first black student to receive a diploma there.
She went to college in Illinois and then returned to Arkansas, where she worked as a substitute teacher in the Little Rock public school system. Like all members of the Little Rock Nine, Elizabeth received the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal in 1997. It is the highest award given to a civilian by the U.S. Congress.