September Nineteen Fifty-Seven, Elizabeth Eckford Walks Alone
Near Little Rock, Arkansas
On the morning of September fourth, nineteen fifty-seven, a fifteen-year-old girl named Elizabeth Eckford put on a new dress her mother had made for her, gathered her school supplies, and walked toward Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. She did not know that the other eight Black students who were supposed to enter the school with her had received a telephone call the night before changing the meeting plan. She did not have a telephone.
She walked alone. What met her was a line of Arkansas National Guardsmen, called out by Governor Orval Faubus on the pretext of maintaining order. Behind the soldiers was a crowd of white adults and teenagers who had gathered to block the integration of the school.
The guardsmen turned Elizabeth away from the entrance. She walked along the line looking for a way in, and the crowd followed her, shouting, surging. She sat down finally at a bus stop bench, her sunglasses hiding her face, holding her notebook on her lap while the crowd pressed around her.
A journalist named Benjamin Fine sat beside her and said, Don't let them see you cry. A white woman named Grace Lorch pushed through the crowd and stayed with her until a bus came. A photographer named Will Counts captured the moment.
In the image, Elizabeth Eckford walks with her face composed and her notebook at her side while behind her a fifteen-year-old girl named Hazel Bryan shouts, her face contorted. The photograph became one of the most recognized images of the civil rights era. Central High School had been ordered to desegregate by federal court under the mandate of the Supreme Court's Brown v.
Board of Education decision of nineteen fifty-four. Governor Faubus chose to defy the order. For three weeks he used the National Guard to prevent the students, who became known as the Little Rock Nine, from entering the school.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower ultimately concluded that the open defiance of a federal court order was something no president could permit. On September twenty-fourth, he federalized the Arkansas National Guard and dispatched the twelve-hundred-man Airborne Battle Group of the hundred and first Airborne Division to Little Rock.
The following morning, the Little Rock Nine entered Central High School under military escort. They remained there under threat for the rest of the school year. Minnijean Brown was expelled in February after responding to provocation.
The other eight completed the year. Ernest Green, the oldest of the nine, graduated in May nineteen fifty-eight, the first Black graduate of Central High. Martin Luther King Jr.
attended the ceremony.
