1957 by Eric Burns

Author:Eric Burns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2021-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

It was not exploitation, as some people charged. It was, rather, television journalism at its finest. Even Schakne, acting on the spur of the moment, had had the best of intentions.

Finally it happened. The other eight students and their clerical escort showed up, horrified to learn that there had been a mistake, that no one had remembered to call Elizabeth, and she had been there now for ten minutes or more by herself. They could not imagine what she had gone through. They tumbled over one another to reach her.

But it did not matter anymore; Elizabeth’s friends finally had found her, and she nestled herself into their midst. They surrounded her with hugs and tears and apologies, anything to acknowledge what must have been her terrible suffering.

After a few minutes, the nine students and accompanying men of the cloth proceeded without confidence to the blockade called the National Guard, which had not budged from the Central High front doors since Elizabeth first appeared.

Nor would they budge now. Impervious to the prayers for their white souls spoken by both black and white preachers standing only a few feet in front of them, the Guard made sure the group could go no farther. No blacks would cross their line. After a few minutes, the students and their entourage turned a sad about-face and, for the morning, at least, gave up the battle. There would be no education for the students this day, nor for many to come.

How much of the preceding Faubus learned, and how quickly he learned it, is not certain. For the first few nights of the school year, he had left the turmoil behind him—geographically, at least. He and his wife had departed for the bonhomie and bourbon of the Southern Governors’ Conference in Sea Island, Georgia, a sojourn previously scheduled, but one whose timing could not have been better.

Faubus did, however, hear at least the broad strokes of the story at his retreat, and commented for public consumption about the city he temporarily had left behind. “The trouble with Little Rock,” he told reporters, “vindicates my good judgment.”

But the conference lasted only a few days. At which point, Faubus was forced to return to the place where that good judgment of his was playing itself out, and where he found himself faced with a continuing standoff, one from which he would not back down. The governor kept shipping in National Guard reinforcements, and ABC, CBS, and NBC kept sending in reinforcements of their own, new shifts of correspondents and crews, sound men and producers. They were joined by more from the United States, but from London and other foreign capitals as well. Which is to say that the worse things got in Little Rock, the more people who knew about them, and as commentators both in the United States and abroad began to point out, the racial attitudes of Arkansas were coming to stand for those of the entire country. It was a cruel disservice to the United

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