CNN Interviews Elizabeth Eckford:
Eckford:
Central High in 1957 'was not ... a normal
environment'
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On September 4, 1957,
Elizabeth Eckford is escorted to a bus after
being turned away from entering Central High
School. |
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(CNN) -- Elizabeth Eckford recently
sat down with CNN and recalled the events of the
1957-58 school year, when she and eight other
African-American teenage students were chosen to
attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas,
as part of that city's court-ordered directive to
desegregate its schools.
CNN:
Why did your parents let you go to Central High
School?
ECKFORD:
After much persistence on my part. And my older
sister constantly talking to them. We're talkers, we
are. We were from a really, really strict,
old-fashioned environment. We weren't allowed to
argue with our parents, but we were always
encouraged to discuss things. And my sister could
not be worn down. She just kept asking, and I kept
asking. And that was unusual for me. Usually, when
my parents said no, I would just accept that. Mother
didn't say no this time. She said, "We'll see." And
so I kept asking, which is really, really, really
different than what my parents were accustomed to me
being.
And actually, the decision wasn't
made until August (1957).
CNN:
Why were you so persistent?
ECKFORD:
Even though we were a working-class family I'd
always been told that I ought to, should, and would
go to college. And, in a segregated environment I
knew that ... what was available to white students
was more than, and better than what was available in
a Negro school.
See, the dual school system, was
never, it was separate, but it was never equal.
CNN:
Can you describe September 1957, when you initially
tried to enter the school and were eventually
permitted in? What was the atmosphere like for you
in Little Rock, as you approached the school?
ECKFORD:
On the first day at Central High School, September
4, 1957, I rode by myself. And after having been
turned away by the National Guard three times, I
stepped into the street.
I walked two blocks from the bus stop
and the crowd surged forward and they were right on
my heels so I had to go to where I knew there was
another bus drop. To a teenager, it seemed like a
really, really large school. I felt that at least
I'd see some familiar faces because a lot of my
neighbors went to that school.
And so, the crowd became angry. They
were taunting me and they were following me. That's
what you see in the pictures from that day. When the
crowd first surged forward, I actually looked into
the crowd for help (laughs), because I was
accustomed to looking to adults.
My mother, unfortunately ... local
radio was very irresponsible, there were fantastic
reports that I'd been injured, and I was not
physically injured. I went to the Negro School for
Deaf and Blind where mother worked in a laundry
room, and ... she'd been told some awful things. So
when I walked in she was praying.
My dad had heard some awful things.
And he had gone out ... looking for me. My mother
was in the basement of the school, in the laundry
room. Her back was to me, I could tell she was
praying.
My mother was extremely
overprotective. So how in the world is it she
allowed me to go back to the school? I didn't tell
my folks what was happening on a daily basis. I knew
my mother wouldn't let me stay if she had known, but
she had to have known. It was not only unpleasant,
but it was difficult. Really, really difficult. I'm
now aware of what an awful price my mother had to
have paid.
CNN:
And that first day at Central, when you and the
other students were finally allowed in the school?
ECKFORD:
There was a period of uncertainty where the
president of the United States was talking to the
(Arkansas) governor, trying to convince him to
remove the guardsmen, which the governor put there
as a barrier. The guardsmen kept the demonstrators
off the school grounds. They admitted white students
through their ranks but they kept us away, the Negro
students.
So there was uncertainty. It was
after an injunction [that] the governor withdrew the
National Guard. And the local police set up
barricades and tried to maintain order outside the
school.
We slipped in a side door of that
two-block wide school on September 23. After perhaps
an hour and a half, two hours before the crowd
outside realized we were in the school and before
most of the students heard that we were there. We
went in the school ... students were already in
class. We had been registered during summer by the
counselors.
So that, when they found out we were
in school, some students panicked so badly, there
were some that actually jumped from second-floor
windows.
The crowd became infuriated. There
were three black reporters outside among those, what
started out on the first day (September 4, 1957) as
100 or less people out there, by September 23rd had
grown to at least 1,000. Angry people who now were a
true mob when they found out we were in school.
And there was a melee. They were
beating the press. They beat three black reporters.
Two of them ran, one refused to. So, the most
dramatic pictures from the Crisis -- as what we
refer to of our time here -- are pictures of that
one lone black reporter being beaten repeatedly;
kicked and throttled, knocked down.
And, I really think it was those
photographs, the impact of those photographs
internationally, during a time of the Cold War,
when, the actuality of some of what America didn't
talk about, was shown to the world, that that is
what made the president act, take federal control of
the Arkansas National Guard, and send paratroopers
to Little Rock. And they dispelled the mob. They
escorted us into school ... on September 25.
There's this paradoxical photograph I
remember from that time. It's a picture of a convoy,
a military convoy coming across the Broadway Bridge
from North Little Rock to Little Rock. And in the
background is this large billboard that says, "Who
will build Arkansas if our own people do not?"
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Central High students gather
in front of the school on September 4, 1957. |
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CNN:
And the atmosphere at school for you that first
year?
ECKFORD:
You know about the Plague of the Three Monkeys? Hear
no evil, see no evil and do no evil? All of the
students who said, that we see nowadays, that say
they went to school there? Say, "Wasn't me, wasn't
me. I wasn't one of those attacking you." (shaking
head)
We were physically assaulted every
day. The principal's rule was that, no matter what
was reported, he wouldn't act on any reports if a
teacher didn't corroborate what we said happened.
So, in essence, students had free reign to attack us
every day. It was a coordinated group of about 55
students who attacked us out of 1,900 students at
the school.
A lot of people think, "We didn't
know what was going on." People around me that I saw
didn't react to what they saw or what they had to
have heard. They turned their backs. It was
impossible to have a friend. This was not anything
like a normal environment. Anybody that would talk
to us got a lot of pressure.
There's two students I want to talk
about that persisted in talking to me in speech
class. Actually I was a very, very shy person, but I
felt comfortable, felt that I belonged in that one
class. At the end of the day, two people treated me
like a human being. (starts to cry). And when they
just ... they persisted in talking to me every day
like any other student. They didn't ask me something
to see what "it" sounded like. They just talked to
me.
I didn't know what happened to them.
I knew something had to be happening to them. I
didn't find out until 1996 what had happened to
them. There was a boy and there was a girl. The boy
was a senior, and there's a graduation picture of
him standing next to Ernest Green (one of the Little
Rock Nine) and a bunch of students in the background
looking at them and talking about them, just 'cause
he was standing near Ernest Green.
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Eckford: "Anybody that would
talk to us got a lot of pressure." |
But I found out in '96, because I had
talked about these students over the years. In the
'60s I started naming them. So, they had heard about
me, and what it meant to me.
One girl named Ann Williams I found
out didn't live in Little Rock. She said her family
lived on a farm outside the city, and that her
father had to hire armed guards for their home.
And the other student is Ken
Reinhardt. Ken was harassed. He'd been knocked down,
one time, he said, right in front of the gym teacher
and the gym teacher did nothing.
There have been one or two students
who've acknowledged seeing in the boy's gym, in the
shower room, that the Negro boys were hit with hot,
wet, knotted towels. Broken glass on the shower room
floor.
I remember the few times we were
scalded in the shower room. I didn't hear a peep
from either girl on either side of me. We had open
stalls in the shower. So they'd been warned.
Anyway, school ended May 28, 1958.
CNN:
Can you recall the last day of school for you that
year?
ECKFORD:
I don't even know if I was there the last day. We
had finals to do back then, and they were scheduled
on a different day, so we only came to school on a
day we had to take a test. But what ever that last
day was, it was wonderful that that was the last
day, because it was hard going to school each day.
It was hard, going back every day. It
was hard, trying to stay there all day. |
