Walking Through the Valley Alone

On the morning of September 4, 1957, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford put on the black-and-white dress her mother had sewn for the first day of school and walked toward Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. She was one of nine Black students chosen to integrate the all-white school, but Elizabeth never received the message to meet the others. She arrived alone.

A mob of hundreds pressed in around her — screaming, spitting, hurling racial slurs. Behind her, the face of Hazel Bryan twisted in hatred, captured forever in Will Counts' now-iconic photograph. Arkansas National Guardsmen, deployed by Governor Orval Faubus, blocked Elizabeth's path — not to protect her, but to bar her entry. She turned and walked the gauntlet back, her face steady behind dark sunglasses, until she reached a bus stop bench and sat down trembling. There, a white reporter named Benjamin Fine sat beside her and whispered, "Don't let them see you cry."

Elizabeth walked through a valley shadowed by hatred that day. Yet she kept walking.

The psalmist wrote, "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me." Notice the word through. Not around. Not away from. Through. God does not always remove the hostile crowd, but He walks every step of that valley with us — and the valley, no matter how dark, has an other side.