On this day in 1957, the Arkansas National Guard stood at the doors of Little Rock Central High School, sent by Governor Orval Faubus, and nine enrolled students were turned away. It was, in the language of the courts, a collision between a state and a federal order; three weeks later President Eisenhower sent soldiers of his own, and the nine went in.
The part I keep is smaller. The nine had arranged to travel together that morning. Elizabeth Eckford, fifteen, did not get the word in time, and so she came alone, on the bus, in a dress she had made herself. When she could not get through, she went back to the bus stop and sat down to wait, with a crowd behind her. A white woman named Grace Lorch, a stranger, sat beside her, spoke to her, and stayed until the bus came. That is nearly all Mrs Lorch did. It was not nothing.
The photograph below is from those days: a crowd on the steps of a columned capitol, children among the adults, a state policeman standing between the people and two men at the microphones. Most of the faces in it belong to onlookers. History, as usual, was being made by a very small number of people and watched by a great many.
Marguerite, that autumn a group of Little Rock ministers called the city to a day of prayer for schools and peace, and churches across denominations opened their doors on a weekday morning for it. It changed no court order, but people who had nothing else to offer came and knelt, which was also not nothing.
Marguerite, a footnote from the following year: in Cooper v. Aaron the Supreme Court took the unusual step of having the opinion signed by all nine justices individually, rather than issued in the usual single name. A small change of typography meant to say that there was no gap to slip through.