Spotless white dress, fashionable hair, and cat-eyed sunglasses: Elizabeth Eckford took her time preparing for that morning. September 4th, 1957. It was the day Little Rock Central High was supposed to meet its first Black students. The Little Rock Nine.
Elizabeth was alone. Her family didn’t own a phone, so she never got the call when the other eight changed their plans for that morning. She woke up, put on her dress, and braced herself for her first day at a brand new school. A school that never welcomed anyone who looked like her. But Elizabeth wanted to be a lawyer, so she gave up the comfort of her old school and agreed to be part of that first integration.
The white students were not ready to integrate without a fight. And their family and friends gathered to support them. You can tell some of them don’t take this seriously, like the boy with his collar draped open shamelessly. And the girl on the far left, squinting to block out the sun so she doesn’t miss a moment of Elizabeth’s misery. Central High isn’t actually going to integrate, their faces say. They’re smirking.
Some faces are more vicious. Behind Elizabeth, Hazel Bryan snarls. Her face is twisted up so tightly that you can almost hear the slur she was shooting. Next to Hazel is Sammie Dean, who had the luck of turning her head at this moment. She’s looking at her father, probably searching for his approval after yelling something vulgar at Elizabeth. For them, it’s a family affair.
But Elizabeth clutched her books and walked on. She couldn’t retaliate, or the mob would act on their threats. Maybe Elizabeth let out a sigh of relief, relaxed her pursed face for a moment when she saw the state’s National Guardsmen at the school entrances. It wouldn’t have lasted long though, as she realized they were blocking her from entering. Even the law was on their side.
“Two, four, six, eight, we ain’t gonna integrate!”
The mob’s voices, unifying as if they were cheering for their home team, surrounded Elizabeth. She didn’t belong here. And the crowd kept chanting and cursing and closing in on her until she was no longer searching for a school entrance. She was searching for an escape.
No one was there to help her. Not her eight fellow students, not a single face in the crowd. Not even the photographer, who snapped the photo and kept doing his job. There was no intervention, as if this was supposed to be the natural order of things. Elizabeth finally found her way to the bus stop.
"Drag her over to this tree!"
Elizabeth sat on the bench and waited. She was probably praying that she would see her mom and dad again. In this place, she wasn’t human.