In the summer of 1956 we left Little Rock for Fayetteville.
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During the year in Fayetteville I kept in close contact with the Little Rock branch of the NAACP. The federal courts finally ruled in our case, not quite as we had hoped, with a broad ruling mandating the desegregation of the Little Rock schools, but in a much more limited way, ordering the admission of nine black students to Little Rock Central High School at the beginning of the school year in September 1957. Although the White Citizens Councils threatened violence and the Attorney General of Georgia traveled to Little Rock to urge noncompliance, we expected everything to go smoothly. I flew to Little Rock once more two weeks before the opening of school for a planning meeting. We drove to Little Rock over the Labor Day weekend to say goodbye to friends on our way to New Orleans, where we had accepted positions at Dillard University. No one expected trouble. The headline of the Arkansas Gazette on Labor Day was “Little Rock Quiet on Eve of Opening of Integrated Schools.” Our last stop was at the Bates’. Their house was barricaded. Bullets had been shot through windows and we met in their basement with our children, who did not understand why we could not meet upstairs. That evening, Labor Day, the day before the schools were to open in Little Rock on Tuesday, September 3, we arrived in New Orleans. We were totally surprised and shocked when we heard on the radio the next morning that Governor Faubus had called out the National Guard to bar the nine students from entering the school.
What happened hit us very deeply. Eight of the students had arrived at the school together; they were unable to reach the ninth student, Elizabeth Eckford, who had no telephone and went by herself. When she arrived outside the school she was surrounded by a threatening mob. Grace Lorch, Lee s wife, who had come to observe, went into the crowd to rescue Elizabeth Eckford, and took her to the nearest bus stop, where she was now surrounded by a host of reporters. Grace then brought Elizabeth home. The next day the story appeared in newspapers throughout the country.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 80