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the fear she felt like shocks of electricity coming in surges through herviscera to her sinews to the nerve endings in her skin, she reached within herself for a dignity that seemed to belong to a foreign code of conduct, foreign to the world she was then experiencing. It was a dignity that somehow her parents had planted in her. For fifteen years they had nurtured it. Elizabeth sat down on the bench at the bus stop and went digging for it deep inside herself. The crowd moved in closer to her and she heard someone shout, ‘Drag her over to this tree! Let’s take care of that nigger.’
    ‘Dad!’
    Adam Zignelik hadn’t been born when this happened, when some young men in the crowd who had followed her back to the bus stop and were now behind Elizabeth Eckford started calling, ‘Lynch her! No nigger bitch is going to get into our school. We gotta lynch her! Lynch her! Lynch her!’ Jake Zignelik had been born but he wasn’t there. Who was there for Elizabeth Eckford at the bench at the bus stop near the tree in Little Rock, Arkansas, on the morning of 4 September 1957? Thousands of people were there. Was there anyone else there for her?
    Television news cameras were there. Radio journalists were there. Daisy Bates was the president of the Arkansas state branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP) and editor-in-chief of the black newspaper, the
Arkansas State Press
, and her husband, L. C. Bates, was the newspaper’s publisher. They hadn’t been able to sleep the night before because of the cars tearing up and down past their home with the horns honking and the passengers calling out, ‘Daisy, Daisy, did you hear the news? The Coons won’t be going to Central!’ Daisy and L. C. Bates were in the car that morning on their way, expecting to be meeting nine black children, when they heard the radio announcer on the car radio.
    ‘A Negro girl is being mobbed at Central High …’
    Daisy Bates realised the girl had to be Elizabeth, the girl who lived with her parents and her little brother in a house without a telephone. Elizabeth hadn’t known the plan. No one had told her. They stopped the car suddenly and L. C. Bates jumped out and started running to find her. Daisy would drive there. But they were only two people, they were black and they were blocks away.
    Thousands of people were already near the bench at the bus stop by the tree before L. C. Bates could get there. Jake Zignelik wasn’t there. Adam Zignelik, who saw it all shortly before 4.30 am that Monday morning, hadn’t been born yet. Was there anybody else there?
    Benjamin Fine was an education writer for
The New York Times
and he was there. He manoeuvred himself behind Elizabeth, behind the bench at the bus stop. Then he pushed a little further forward. He managed to get beside Elizabeth and to sit next to her. He put his arm around her. He raised her chin just slightly and said, ‘Don’t let them see you cry.’ Grace Lorch was there, a white woman married to a white man who taught at a local black college. She made her way to Elizabeth and spoke kindly to her but in Elizabeth’s terror the kindness did not register. Grace Lorch took Elizabeth through the jeering crowd to a nearby drugstore in an attempt to call a cab. But the door of the drugstore was slammed shut in their faces. Grace Lorch took her to the bus and the two of them rode the bus to the segregated school where Birdee Eckford taught blind and deaf children how to wash and iron their own clothes.
    After this, crowds were always mobs for Elizabeth Eckford and when she would see the mob in her room at night she would scream. When they heard this scream her brother would wake and her parents would come to her. But sometimes when she screamed no sound came out, just as it didn’t for Adam Zignelik shortly before 4.30 am one Monday morning some fifty years later in the Morningside Heights apartment rented from Columbia University, where he – the son