Little Rock Crisis 35When judge Davies again ordered desegregation to continue, the board
advised the black students to go to Central High on 4 September without
their parents to prevent a racial explosion. An explosion came anyway. Daisy
Bates and several ministers escorted eight of the students to the school in
police cars, only to be stopped in their tracks by guardsmen. The ninth
student – 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford – was not notified of the arrange-
ments and faced the mob alone. As she alighted from a bus wearing a white
dress and dark glasses, an angry throng screamed, ‘Here comes one of the
niggers! Lynch her! Lynch her!’ Elizabeth expected the guardsmen to protect
her, but instead, they used bayonets to block her path. After an old woman
spat on her, a trembling Elizabeth sat on a bus stop bench nearby and sobbed
openly. Fortunately, two whites came to her defense. Benjamin Fine, a New
York Timesreporter, consoled her, and Grace Lorch, an NAACP member
whose husband taught at the all-black Philander Smith College, shamed the
jeering crowd into backing away. ‘Don’t you see she’s scared?’ Lorch cried.
‘She’s just a little girl.’ Elizabeth had nightmares for weeks that the mob was
about to kill her.
In barring the Little Rock Nine, Faubus threw down the gauntlet before
president Eisenhower. Faubus had good reason to believe Eisenhower would
let Arkansas have its way in race relations because the president steered clear
of school desegregation problems in Alabama, Tennessee, and Texas. Just two
months before the Central High crisis, Eisenhower said that he foresaw no
possibility of using federal troops to compel desegregation [Doc. 4, p. 142].
Having won four former Confederate states in the 1952 election and five in
1956, Eisenhower was determined to avoid antagonizing white southerners
who were turning to the Republican party. As a party worker recognized,
‘This isn’t South Africa. The white man outnumbers the Negro 9 to 1 in this
country.’
To defuse the most serious domestic crisis of his presidency, Eisenhower
worked behind the scenes. He sent FBI agents to investigate, spoke by tele-
phone to Little Rock mayor Woodrow Wilson Mann, and met with Faubus
on 14 September in Newport, Rhode Island, where the president was vaca-
tioning. The attorney general warned Eisenhower that Faubus was a double-
crosser, but the president did not heed the warning. For two hours, Faubus
vacillated between wanting to end the crisis and ranting about federal plots
against him. When Eisenhower rejected a lengthy delay in desegregating
Central High, Faubus seemed to cave in and issued a statement conceding
that Brownwas ‘the law of the land and must be obeyed.’
Back in Arkansas, an obdurate Faubus reneged on his promise, keeping
the guardsmen in place. When judge Davies ordered the governor to remove
the guardsmen, Faubus replaced them with out-manned city policemen and
promised to do ‘everything in my power’ to maintain order at the school. It