The Impact of Upstanders Who Supported the Little Rock Nine

Photographers, journalists, and television reporters from all over the country flocked to Little Rock, Arkansas, to cover the integration crisis unfolding at Central High School. The media’s coverage of the crisis had a strong impact on Americans across the nation. David Halberstam, a young journalist in the 1950s, later reflected on the significance of the photographs published during the Little Rock integration crisis:

Film was so powerful that a reporter was well advised to get out of the way and let the pictures do the talking. Certainly, that was true in Little Rock. The images were so forceful that . . . it was hard for people watching at home not to take sides: There they were, sitting in their living rooms in front of their own television sets watching orderly black children behaving with great dignity, trying to obtain nothing more than a decent education. ¹

The photographs also rallied public support for the civil rights movement. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) experienced an increase in donations following the media’s coverage of the crisis and the photos that appeared in newspapers across the nation. Historian Elizabeth Jacoway explains why Americans across the country offered support to the NAACP:

A September 19 press release out of the national office had announced that contributions had increased because of Little Rock, and that Elizabeth Eckford had become a symbol for many people of what was at stake in the emerging civil rights movement. One powerful letter to Elizabeth quoted in this release read, “You have made the people of America take sides.” Another letter a week later read, “The picture in the newspaper of that poor girl holding her head high and brave while being followed and spat upon and called ugly names by supposed Americans reminded me of Nathan Hale. ² And I cried.” A third read, “I don’t know the specifications used by the Carnegie Committee in making their annual heroism awards, but I would like to nominate for consideration these First Children of the Land.” ³

The images that the media captured also had a strong impact on the nation’s Black community. Twenty-five-year-old Roger Wilkins had just earned a law degree and was about to join a New York law firm when he saw the photograph of Elizabeth Eckford. The photo made him realize that he should confront Southern segregation instead, and he went on to lead a life dedicated to civil rights activism. ⁴ John Lewis, civil rights leader and former Georgia congressman, was in college at the time. In his autobiography, he wrote: 

It was that sense of mission, of involvement, of awareness that others were putting themselves on the line for the cause—the high school showdown in Little Rock, Arkansas, was happening the fall of my freshman year—that moved me to do my part. I remember praying for those brave children in Little Rock as I gathered the courage to go to the president’s office at American Baptist and tell him I wanted to start an on-campus chapter of the NAACP. ⁵

The photograph of Eckford walking through the crowd of segregationists hung on the wall of Lewis’s office during his time in the US House of Representatives. “We all walked through that crowd with her,” he recalled years later. ⁶

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• 1David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard, 1993), 681–82.
• 2Nathan Hale fought and died for the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. His famous last words were, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”
• 3Elizabeth Jacoway, Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation (New York: Free Press, 2007), 183.
• 4David Margolick, Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 91.
• 5John Lewis, Walking with the Wind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 75.
• 6Margolick, Elizabeth and Hazel, 91.