DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
30 August 2007
Elizabeth Eckford
Fifty years ago, black youngsters’ struggles to attend Little Rock’s Central High School during the 1957-1958 school year propelled the civil rights movement forward in the United States. (See “After Facing Mobs 50 Years Ago, Nine Go Home to Honors.”) The Little Rock Nine’s story is really nine stories.
A photograph of Elizabeth Eckford, taken the first day the Little Rock Nine attempted to enter Central High School, has become a symbol of the civil rights struggle. The photo, taken by Will Counts of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, depicts hostile whites surrounding Eckford, who looks straight ahead of her as she walks. Behind her, Hazel Bryan Massery jeers. “Hazel, she apologized in 1963 on the phone,” Eckford said. “And in 1997, a photographer brought us together. She absolutely needed forgiveness.”
It took Eckford until 1996 to speak publicly about Central. The first time she did so, it was to a group of school children. She cried.
Even today, rather than repeat her account of that first day, Eckford refers questioners to what she told Daisy Bates, the president of the Arkansas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for her book The Long Shadow of Little Rock:
“For a moment all I could hear was the shuffling of their feet. Then someone shouted, ‘Here she comes, get ready!’ I moved away from the crowd on the sidewalk and into the street. If the mob came at me I could then cross back over so the guards could protect me.
“The crowd moved in closer and then began to follow me, calling me names. I still wasn’t afraid. Just a little bit nervous. Then my knees started to shake all of a sudden and I wondered whether I could make it to the center entrance a block away. It was the longest block I ever walked in my whole life.
After trying several different school entrances and being stopped by the raised bayonets of National Guardsmen, Eckford went over to a bench at a bus stop. Terrence Roberts, another member of the Little Rock Nine, found her there and asked her if she would like to walk with him back to his home. “She was in shock,” he recalls. In the end, a white newspaper reporter from New York and a white woman from Little Rock helped Eckford get on a bus, which took her to safety.
After the Little Rock schools were shut down during the 1958-1959 school year to avoid integration, Eckford earned the equivalent of a high school diploma, joined the Army and took some college courses. She raised two boys and today works as a probation officer for the state of Arkansas.
Josh McHughes -- a white, Little Rock attorney who had been a star of Central’s championship football team in 1957-1958 -- recalls passing Eckford in the hallway every day of their junior year. “That terrified look never did go away, from the first day to the last day of the year,” he said. “She would have no reason to remember me. I was just another white face. She was wanting to get down the hall and get away from me.”
Today, McHughes sees Eckford at the courthouse where she works and where he sometimes has business. Recently, he rode the elevator a few floors with her. They talked about which court they were working in, about the hot weather -- “visiting like two normal people,” McHughes said. He thinks sometime he might talk to her about their time together at Central. “I just haven’t really thought of what I would say,” he said. “Maybe I will someday.”
Eckford is comfortable talking to students about her experiences. Those talks have strengthened her, she said. She advises them to not be silent observers of bullying and to invest themselves in education.
Eckford is quick to say that there were friendly overtures from some white students at Central. In fact, she has stayed friendly with two from her speech class -- Ann Williams Wideman and Ken Reinhardt Jr. -- who paid a price (social snubs, punches and threatening phone calls) for befriending her. Eckford has reserved for each a place at her table for the gala dinner planned during the 50th anniversary.
See Black History Month.
Film excerpt of Little Rock Nine in 1957 (1:19)
In her own words