A man she had never known, Ben Fine, the education reporter for The New York Times, who was there to write his story on how Little Rock had stayed so calm, came over and put his arm around her and tried to comfort her. “Don’t let them see you cry,” he said. An elderly white woman (the wife of a white professor at a black college) came over and also offered her solace and tried to face the crowd down. The woman, despite the howls of the mob, managed to get Elizabeth on a bus and out of the combat zone.
