Sunday, October 09, 2011 5:19:37 PM
Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan: the story behind the photograph that shamed America
Elizabeth and Hazel, September 4, 1957
Photo: Will Counts Collection, Indiana University Archives
Will Counts’s iconic photograph of Elizabeth Ann Eckford after she was denied entrance to Little Rock Central High School; September 4, 1957.
Photo by Will Counts; courtesy of the Arkansas History Commission
[ http://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=721 ]
A photograph taken by Will Counts of Elizabeth Eckford attempting to enter Little Rock School on 4th September, 1957. The girl shouting is Hazel Massery.
Elizabeth Eckford is depicted in this photograph taken by Will Counts in 1957. It is one of the top 100 photographs of the 20th century, according to the Associated Press. Hazel Massery is the Caucasian girl seen yelling as Eckford attempted to enter the school on her first day. Grace Lorch on the right side of the photo, was Eckford's escort and rescued her from the mob.
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Eckford ]
Reconsiliation; Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan and reunited for Will Counts's poster
Photo: WILL COUNTS
One was trying to go to school; the other didn’t want her there. Together, Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan starred in one of the most memorable photographs of the Civil Rights era. But their story had only just begun.
By David Margolick
12:01AM BST 09 Oct 2011
On her first morning of school, September 4 1957, Elizabeth Eckford’s primary concern was looking nice. Her mother had done her hair the night before; an elaborate two-hour ritual, with a hot iron and a hotter stove, of straightening and curling. Then there were her clothes. People in black Little Rock knew that the Eckford girls were expert seamstresses; practically everything they wore they made themselves, and not from the basic patterns of McCall’s but from the more complicated ones in Vogue. It was a practice borne of tradition, pride, and necessity: homemade was cheaper, and it spared black children the humiliation of having to ask to try things on in the segregated department stores downtown.
In the fall of 1957, Elizabeth was among the nine black students who had enlisted, then been selected, to enter Little Rock Central High School.
Central was the first high school in a major southern city set to be desegregated since the United States Supreme Court had ruled three years earlier in Brown vs Board of Education that separate and ostensibly equal education was unconstitutional. Inspired both by Thurgood Marshall, who had argued the case of plaintiff Oliver L Brown, and Clarence Darrow, Elizabeth wanted to become a lawyer, and she thought Central would help her realise that dream.
On the television as Elizabeth ate her breakfast, a newsman described large crowds gathering around Central. It was all her mother, Birdie, needed to hear. “Turn that thing off!” she shouted. Should anyone say something nasty at her, she counselled Elizabeth, pretend not to hear them. Or better yet, be nice, and put them to shame.
Lots of white people lined Park Street as Elizabeth headed towards the school. As she passed the Mobil station and came nearer, she could see the white students filtering unimpeded past the soldiers. To her, it was a sign that everything was all right. But as she herself approached, three Guardsmen, two with rifles, held out their arms, directing her to her left, to the far side of Park.
A crowd had started to form behind Elizabeth, and her knees began to shake. She continued down Park. For an instant, she faced the school: it just looked so big! She steadied herself, then walked up to another soldier. He didn’t move.
When she tried to squeeze past him, he raised his carbine. Other soldiers moved over to assist him. When she tried to get in around them, they moved to block her way. They glared at her.
Now, as Elizabeth continued walking south down Park, more and more of the people lining the street fell in behind her. Some were Central students, others adults. They started shouting at her. The primitive television cameras, for all their bulkiness, had no sound equipment. But the reporters on the scene scribbled down what they heard: “Lynch her! Lynch her!” “No nigger bitch is going to get in our school!” “Go home, nigger!” Looking for a friendly face, Elizabeth turned to an old white woman. The woman spat on her.
Three young girls, barely into their teens, fell in directly behind Elizabeth. They were clearly together, and clearly students; two of them, like Elizabeth, carried books. They wanted to be at the very centre of things. And they wanted to get really close to Elizabeth – close enough to let her know that they didn’t want her in their school. “Two, four, six, eight! We don’t want to integrate!” they chanted.
One girl, Hazel Bryan, looked livid, her face poisoned with hate. As Benjamin Fine of The New York Times later described her, she was “screaming, just hysterical, just like one of these Elvis Presley hysterical deals, where these kids are fainting with hysteria”. Her eyes narrowed, her brow furrowed, her teeth clenched, Hazel shouted: “Go home, nigger! Go back to A-”. Click. “-frica!” Will Counts, a photographer for the Arkansas Democrat, had his picture.
When it comes down to it, Counts’s famous photograph of Elizabeth Eckford is really more of Hazel Bryan: it is on Hazel that the eyes land, and linger.
Despite the tricky lighting, her face is perfectly exposed: the early morning September sun shines on her like a spotlight. It hits her from the side, painting her face in a stark chiaroscuro that makes it look more demonic still. She’s caught mid-vowel, with her mouth gapingly, ferociously open. At that instant, and in perpetuity, Hazel Bryan, always the performer, has the stage completely to herself.
Others played their own small parts in the picture, but “the mouth” she later said, “was mine”. And dressing that morning as she had, trying to look all grown up and sexed up, she had masked how young she really was. She was only 15, but she would always be seen, and judged, as an adult.
The next morning, Elizabeth and Hazel landed on millions of doorsteps.
Elizabeth became, as Ted Poston of the New York Post put it, “probably the most widely known high school student in the whole United States”, with the unidentified white girl to her running a close second.
Attention, and commentary, came from abroad as well. “One Girl Runs Gauntlet of Hate”, shouted a headline in the Daily Express in London.
The Arkansas Gazette marvelled at how the events had united in their outrage the newspapers of the Vatican, the Kremlin and a country whose leader had snubbed Jesse Owens only 20 years earlier. The story and picture led off the Little Rock coverage in Paris Match.
Long-distance telephone calls for Elizabeth came into her grandfather’s store from Chicago, Detroit, New York, even Oklahoma. Though all of The Nine got letters, Elizabeth got far and away the most, as many as 50 a day.
Because she’d rarely been identified by name, Hazel got little mail. A few letters, all from the North, all critical, were sent to her care of Central. Hazel read them, found their critical tone surprising, then gave them little mind.
Hazel’s parents, though, found her sudden notoriety sufficiently alarming to pull her out of Central. As linked as she became to the Little Rock Nine, then, Hazel did not in fact spend a single day inside Central with any of them.
The initial reports from inside were encouraging. “The teachers are very nice. Nothing went wrong, there were no catcalls. I especially enjoyed my history and English classes,” Elizabeth reported after that first day.
“Everything will be all right, for the majority of the white students themselves are all right.” Soon, though, there were disquieting signs. On October 1, while walking down the hall, Elizabeth was struck from behind with a pencil. In gym class the next day, someone threw a rock at her. When a soldier asked who, the white students just laughed.
Elizabeth suffered disproportionately. Apart from being the most vulnerable, she was also the most symbolically potent: if only they could drive out the girl who had come to epitomise the Nine, the segregationists may have hoped, the others would quickly follow, and the whole integrationist edifice would crumble.
Elizabeth had to be coaxed into participating in the 40th anniversary celebrations in 1997, even though they promised to be the most glorious yet: President Bill Clinton would preside. Elizabeth gradually became involved, meeting planners of the visitor centre the National Park Service planned to open in the old Mobil station near the school.
Also involved in the commemorations was Elizabeth Jacoway of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, who was writing a history of the schools crisis. Jacoway had interviewed dozens of participants, including Elizabeth (in 1994) and Hazel (in 1996). Having pondered Hazel’s face for decades, Jacoway had been expecting an uneducated hick and was surprised by how articulate and remorseful she was.
In the years after Little Rock, Hazel had become increasingly political, branching out into peace activism and social work. One programme focused on self-esteem for teenagers. She took black teenagers who rarely had left Little Rock on field trips, climbing Pinnacle Mountain and picking strawberries. And, putting her course work in child psychology to use, she counselled young unwed mothers, many of them black, on parenting skills.
All this do-gooding with blacks, her husband, Antoine, joked, was really her way of atoning for the picture. And maybe he was right. Her whole outlook towards black people had changed. At the Barnes & Noble in Little Rock, she perused the sections on black history. She read David Shipler’s study of black-white relations in America, A Country of Strangers, a book Elizabeth herself had helped inspire.
Someone had suggested that an entire wall of the new visitor centre be devoted to the photograph. But Jacoway had another idea: subordinating the original photograph to a contemporary picture of Elizabeth and Hazel together – one symbolising the racial progress Little Rock had made. Will Counts was thinking similar thoughts. Newly retired from a professorship at Indiana University, the photographer had returned to Arkansas to chronicle the changes at Central since 1957.
When Elizabeth cut the ribbon at the dedication of the new visitor centre on September 20, Counts looked on. Afterward, Jacoway gave him Hazel’s number. Later that day, he spoke to both women. They agreed to meet.
For a moment, the two women faced one another. Still imagining Hazel as a blonde, Elizabeth was taken a bit aback to behold a brunette. “Hi, I’ve always wanted to meet you,” Elizabeth told her. “You’re mighty brave to face the cameras again,” she told Hazel as the three visitors entered the house. Hazel found the remark puzzling: Elizabeth seemed to be warning her of risks she couldn’t foresee.
Counts had already scouted possible locations to shoot the pair. He was thinking not so much about making great art, but about making a point, about the power of human beings to grow, and to forgive. And these two women actually looked comfortable with each other; they weren’t just putting on a show. Watching it was, for him, a near-religious experience, one of the most thrilling moments in his life.
When the anniversary commemorations ended in late September of 1997, Elizabeth and Hazel prepared to go their very separate ways. But, as time passed, Hazel realised that she wasn’t quite ready to let go.
In mid-November, Hazel invited Elizabeth and two of her sister Anna’s grandchildren to her house. Then, later that month, came the poster signing.
A large crowd showed up. As for the poster itself, Hazel thought the original picture was too small: as much as she hated it, she believed it couldn’t and shouldn’t be hidden. Elizabeth had a different problem with it: she thought the title – “Reconciliation” — overstated; there was a big difference between that and forgiveness.
Their encounters gradually became more frequent, almost routine. Over the next several months, they went to a home and garden show, and bought daylilies and irises together. They shopped for fabrics together. They heard Maya Angelou read poetry together.
The two enrolled in a seminar on racial healing offered by Little Rock’s racial and cultural diversity commission. Discussing race relations in a group of 20 every Monday night for 12 weeks was a revelation to each: Elizabeth had never realised how paralysed by anger and hate she had been, and hoped to leech some of that rage. It seemed to work, and she came to look forward to each session.
As for Hazel, she was naive about how bitter some blacks were; here was a problem one couldn’t simply wish away, or eliminate with soothing words. She was also amazed by how little race history she knew: after one class, Elizabeth mentioned Strange Fruit, the anti-lynching song Billie Holiday had made famous, and, much to Elizabeth’s astonishment, Hazel knew nothing about either the song or the subject. The picture itself was never discussed. But their classmates were tickled to be sitting alongside two such famous antagonists and, week by week, watching them bond.
Quietly, though, some considered the rapprochement, however lovely in principle, a triumph of sentimentality, wishful thinking, and marketing over reality. They wondered how deep it went and how long it could last. In some segments of her own community, Elizabeth stood accused of whitewashing reality. “I have been surprised by the vitriol that some young blacks approach me with,” she told the BBC. “They feel like I’m saying that what happened, it’s all over with and there are no repercussions. They feel like I’m wiping away the past.”
Almost from the outset, Hazel encountered hostility from whites. Some doubted her sincerity; more resented it. Soon, and most seriously, tensions developed with Elizabeth. Novelty and companionability, excitement and relief had propelled them along for a time.
But strains soon surfaced. The source was Elizabeth, and it was predictable, for she had always been the harder sell. Her usual wariness, vigilance, and perfectionism could be kept at bay only so long. As the two shared more time and platforms, Elizabeth spotted what she perceived to be discrepancies, inconsistencies and evasions, in Hazel’s story.
The fissure was painfully apparent that March, 18 months into their relationship, when they met Linda Monk, a lawyer turned writer who hoped to write a book about the women. She recorded some of their sessions, and those taped conversations captured how Elizabeth’s mood had changed.
“After you saw [Counts’s] pictures in the paper, you don’t remember how you felt or what people close to you talked about?” she asked Hazel incredulously at one point. ‘‘There wasn’t much conversation about it, really,’’ replied Hazel. What she’d done that morning had been so banal — “just hamming up and being recognised – getting attention” – that it hadn’t been worth remembering, she insisted. Maybe she had a block. But Elizabeth wasn’t buying it.
Elizabeth had forgiven Hazel, but that forgiveness, she concluded, had been obtained under false pretences: Hazel hadn’t fully owned up to her past. For her part, Hazel felt under assault. “It’s very hard for me to sit there and listen to you, Elizabeth,” she said weakly. “It’s very hard for me… and if there’s anything I could give you… if I could take it back… if I could…” She began to sob.
In the spring of 1999 I travelled to Little Rock and arranged to meet Elizabeth and Hazel at a barbecue. Afterwards we went to Hazel’s house and talked some more. It was, I thought, a friendly chat. Elizabeth did not let on that she and Hazel were having problems; the two of them were “very close”, she said. They talked a lot, she went on, maybe once a week. Hazel was more forthright about where things stood between them, but still oblique. “I think she still… at times we have a little… well, the honeymoon is over and now we’re getting to take out the garbage,” she said.
Early in 2000 Cathy Collins, the sociologist who had conducted the racial healing seminar Elizabeth and Hazel had attended, invited them for catfish at a local restaurant. Collins planned to write her dissertation on the two of them, and wanted to discuss the project. She had picked up no bad vibes that evening, but Elizabeth had: Hazel seemed very much on edge. Her instincts were sound. Hazel had had enough. They would no longer see each other. Quietly, unceremoniously, their great experiment in racial rapprochement was over.
The “reconciliation” poster was popular enough to warrant another printing. Elizabeth let them go ahead; it was her way of supporting the place. Now, though, she insisted that it carry a caveat, one she devised herself. Soon, a small sticker, resembling the surgeon general’s warning on cigarette packs, appeared in the upper right hand corner. It was gold, and relatively inconspicuous, particularly against Central’s ochre bricks: “True reconciliation can occur only when we honestly acknowledge our painful, but shared, past.” – Elizabeth Eckford.
The message puzzled Hazel, who had not been consulted about either the reprinting or the disclaimer. As far as she was concerned, ‘‘acknowledging the painful but shared past’’ was just what she had been trying to do. She’d have liked to have had her own sticker, one that said, ‘‘True reconciliation can occur only when we honestly let go of resentment and hatred, and move forward.’’ The poster continued to hang in the office of Central’s principal, Nancy Rousseau, though more as an ideal than a reflection of reality.
“I just had hoped that I could show this picture and say, ‘This happened, and that happened, and now…’ and there is no ‘now’,” she said. “And that makes me sad. It makes me sad for them, it makes me sad for the future students at our school, and for the history books, because I’d like a happy ending. And we don’t have that.”
‘Elizabeth and Hazel’ by David Margolick (Yale University Press, £18.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £16.99 plus £1.25p p and p; 0844 871 1516; books.telegraph.co.uk [ http://books.telegraph.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780300141931 ]
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Related Articles
Jefferson Thomas
07 Sep 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/law-obituaries/7987562/little-rock-nine-us-anti-segregation-law-central-high-school-arkansas-national-guard-101st-airborne.html
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© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2011 (emphasis in original)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/8813134/Elizabeth-Eckford-and-Hazel-Bryan-the-story-behind-the-photograph-that-shamed-America.html
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Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit
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Billie Holiday Strange Fruit Lyrics
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Fruit
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Strange Fruit - The Film
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/strangefruit/film.html
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Through a Lens, Darkly
Elizabeth Eckford, followed and taunted by an angry crowd after she was denied entrance to Little Rock Central High School, September 4, 1957. The girl in the light dress behind her is Hazel Bryan.
Will Counts Collection/Indiana University Archives.
During the historic 1957 desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, 26-year-old journalist Will Counts took a photograph that gave an iconic face to the passions at the center of the civil-rights movement—two faces, actually: those of 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford on her first day of school, and her most recognizable tormentor, Hazel Bryan. The story of how these two women struggled to reconcile and move on from the event is a remarkable journey through the last half-century of race relations in America.
by David Margolick
September 24, 2007
It was a school night, and Elizabeth Eckford was too excited to sleep. The next morning, September 4, 1957, was her first day of classes, and one last time she ironed the pleated white skirt she'd made for the occasion. It was made of piqué cotton; when she'd run out of material, she'd trimmed it with navy-blue-and-white gingham. Then she put aside her new bobby socks and white buck loafers. Around 7:30 a.m. the following day, she boarded a bus bound for Little Rock Central High School.
Other black schoolchildren were due at Central that historic day, but Elizabeth would be the first to arrive. The world would soon know all about the Little Rock Nine. But when Elizabeth Eckford tried to enter Central, and thereby become the first black student to integrate a major southern high school, she was really the Little Rock One. The painfully shy 15-year-old daughter of a hyper-protective mother reluctant to challenge age-old racial mores, she was the unlikeliest trailblazer of all. But as dramatic as the moment was, it really mattered only because Elizabeth wandered into the path of Will Counts's camera.
Few pictures capture an epoch. But in the contorted, hate-filled face of a young white girl named Hazel Bryan standing behind Elizabeth, screaming epithets at her, Counts encapsulated the rage of the Jim Crow South. And even behind her large sunglasses—her eyes were as sensitive as the rest of her—Elizabeth embodied something else: the dignity, and determination, and wisdom, and stoicism, with which black Americans tried to change their lot. It's all there in one picture, in a way white America could readily understand when it landed on its front stoops. It has reverberated ever since, and resonates still as the 50th anniversary of the events in Little Rock is marked this month.
Study any great photograph, and you will always find more things to see, and learn. For instance, there are the bystanders—out of focus, perhaps, but clear enough to reveal their indifference to or pleasure in another person's pain. But the picture belongs to Elizabeth and Hazel, and for them it set off a drama that has never really ended. Bound together in fame and misfortune, they have tried, separately and together, to escape the frame. After a brief and well-photographed pseudo-reconciliation 10 years ago, the two are once more incommunicado, living only a few miles, and a cultural chasm, apart. While Elizabeth has spent the past decade coming out of a shell, Hazel has spent it going in.
Elizabeth Eckford sits at home with her schoolbooks after being turned away from Central High by National Guardsmen on September 4, 1957.
© Bettmann/Corbis.
In the next few days, all of the well-practiced and increasingly elaborate rituals that have developed around the Little Rock Nine will be re-enacted, bigger and better than ever. Bill Clinton, who as an 11-year-old boy 50 miles down the road in Hot Springs watched the drama in Little Rock unfold—and who credits Elizabeth and the other eight with liberating him from racial prejudice—will be there, and so will Hillary. But there will be no photograph of Elizabeth and Hazel this time around. Now, as it was 50 years ago, they symbolize America's racial divide.
What the local black newspaper wrote about Elizabeth in September 1957—that her fateful walk to school would leave an impression on her that "only death will erase"—has proven to be prophetic. The eight others quickly moved on. They left the South and, in a couple of instances, the country. Four of them married whites. They have had successful careers and families. Elizabeth, by contrast, has never strayed all that far from Little Rock, psychologically or physically. She lives in the house she left on the morning of September 4, 1957. And she has struggled with the legacy of Little Rock in a way the others haven't. Keen and unsentimental, and at times undiplomatic, she alone says she would not do it again, though she's pleased she did it once. The others regard Elizabeth as the most vulnerable among them, and have always looked out for her. But they know, too, that as stationary as she appears, it is she who's come the furthest.
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As southern states went 50 years ago, Arkansas was racially open-minded. Its governor in 1957, Orval Faubus, had been elected three years earlier as a moderate. Little Rock (population 100,000 at the time) was considered one of the most progressive cities in the region. Five days after the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 ruling ordering school integration, the local school board pledged to comply. But beneath the city's tolerant façade, Jim Crow was alive and well. When perhaps the most famous black reporter in the country, Ethel Payne of the Chicago Defender, came to town to cover the school crisis, for instance, she couldn't find a place to eat. "The crummiest corner on the map," she called Little Rock.
For all its professed good intentions, the school board moved tentatively and begrudgingly, taking three years to enroll only a token number of blacks in one school: Little Rock Central High School, the most prestigious in the state. Administrators looked for black students strong enough to survive the ordeal but placid enough not to make trouble. The superintendent told Elizabeth she'd have to be like Jackie Robinson, turning the other cheek, never talking or fighting back. Improbably—mistakenly, really—sensitive, brooding Elizabeth somehow made the cut. And even more improbably, her worrywart mother agreed to let her go. There'd be only eight others, in a student population of roughly 2,000.
Among Little Rock's black community, the Eckfords were known for their intelligence and seriousness. They thought of themselves as special—as "something on a stick," Elizabeth's mother once said. The patriarch was Elizabeth's grandfather Oscar Eckford Sr., a large and formidable man—his wife, and even some white people, used "Mr." when addressing him—who ran a small grocery store. From him, Elizabeth always understood she would go to college, even though it was never clear how they'd pay. Elizabeth's father, Oscar Jr., worked nights at the train station and weekends cleaning white peoples' houses; her mother, Birdie, did the laundry at the Arkansas School for the Blind and Deaf Negro, five blocks from the modest home the Eckfords bought in 1949 and moved into on Elizabeth's eighth birthday, later that year. Birdie Eckford's job allowed her to look out for her badly handicapped son, one of her six children, who went to school there. Elizabeth's grandfather was the only man she knew who spoke to white people without fear, but her mother had her Uncle Tom ways. "I have never had trouble with white people," she once said. "I always gave in, if necessary." The Eckfords had no phone but did have a television, the better to keep the children in Birdie's sights. "The Queen of No," Elizabeth still calls her mother, 15 years after her death.
A 10th grader at the segregated Horace Mann High School in the spring of 1957, Elizabeth read habitually and got good grades. She especially loved history. She was essentially a loner, prone to sitting and daydreaming on the big rock in her backyard for hours at a time, thinking that wherever she was, she didn't quite belong. No one had yet diagnosed her as depressed, but there was a history of the condition in her family.
Inspired by the example of Thurgood Marshall, who'd just argued the Brown case before the Supreme Court, she wanted to become a lawyer. She preferred Central not out of some burning desire to mix with whites, but because it offered courses that Horace Mann didn't. While underfunded, Little Rock's black schools had a distinguished tradition, teaching black pride before the term existed and black history before there were any texts. So whatever benefits Central conferred on its first black students would come at a cost: the loss of friends, community, and teachers who cared, as well as the chance to participate in extracurricular activities, since the school board, fearing white outrage over racial mixing, had barred the nine black students from them.
Eckford being turned away by the Arkansas National Guard, September 4, 1957.
Will Counts Collection/Indiana University Archives.
As the new school year loomed, segregationist groups and fundamentalist clergy mobilized. On the night of September 1, 1957, Faubus stationed the Arkansas National Guard around Central, ostensibly to prevent violence, but really to keep the black students out. On September 3, a federal judge ordered that desegregation proceed, and late that night, the director of the Arkansas chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., Daisy Bates, instructed the black parents to bring their children to her home the following morning. From there, the students, accompanied by a few ministers—white and black—would proceed to Central as a group. But the Eckfords didn't have a phone, so Bates never notified them.
Growing up in the segregated South, Elizabeth had little experience with whites, good or bad. While her parents were apprehensive that first morning, what mattered most to her was looking nice, and in that, she had an edge. Everyone knew that the Eckford girls were expert seamstresses; practically everything they wore, they made, and not using the rudimentary patterns from McCall's or Simplicity, but following the more complicated ones from Vogue. After making sure everyone looked right and had their pencils and notebooks and lunch money, Mrs. Eckford gathered her children around her, and together they read aloud the 27th Psalm.
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell.
Though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear:
Though war should rise against me, in this will I be confident.
Then Elizabeth left the house and, four blocks away, boarded the bus heading downtown.
Fifteen minutes later, at the corner of 12th and Park Avenue, two blocks from Central, she hopped off. She'd often walked by Central—it was on the way to her grandfather's store—and instantly she sensed something was awry: more parked cars than usual, the murmur of a crowd. Then the jeeps and half-tracks came into view, along with the soldiers ringing the school. She saw some white children pass quietly through the line, a sign that everything was al right. But the first two soldiers she approached rebuffed her. A mob of several hundred protesters that had gathered across the street quickly caught sight of her. "They're coming!" someone shouted. "The niggers are coming!" Elizabeth walked down the street a bit, then approached a different group of soldiers. This time they closed ranks and crossed rifles. "Don't let her in!" someone shouted.
Elizabeth's knees started to shake. She walked toward Central's main entrance and tried a third time; again, the soldiers blocked her way, but this time told her to cross the street. Now the crowd fell in behind her, shouting: "Lynch her! Lynch her!" "No nigger bitch is going to get in our school! Get out of here!" "Go back to where you came from!" Looking for a friendly face, she turned to an old woman, who spat on her. Before long, some 250 whites were at her heels. She knew she couldn't go back the way she'd come. But if she could only get to the bus stop a block ahead, she thought, she would be safe. She wanted to run, but thought she might fall down. Recording it all was 26-year-old Will Counts of the Arkansas Democrat. He felt sorry for Elizabeth, but he had a job to do; he just hoped he had enough film. "Lynch her!" someone shouted. "Send that nigger back to the jungle!"
One white girl in the throng stood out: she was "screaming, just hysterical," as Benjamin Fine of The New York Times later put it. It was Hazel Bryan. Unlike many in the crowd, rednecks from the sticks, Hazel was a student at Central—like Elizabeth, about to begin her junior year. Her father was a disabled vet; her mother made lightbulbs for Westinghouse. Hazel's dress was fashionable and a bit too tight, as if to show off her figure. Her good looks brought her lots of boys and a certain license, and she'd always been a bit of a performer. Her racial attitudes mirrored her parents': her father would not let black clerks wait on him, for instance, and when banks started hiring black tellers, he found himself another line.
Marching alongside Hazel, chanting "Two, four, six, eight—we don't want to integrate!" were two friends, Mary Ann Burleson and Sammie Dean Parker. Sammie Dean, immediately to Hazel's right in the picture and wearing a dark dress, was one of the ringleaders of the segregationist students; Mary Ann, the girl carrying the purse at the far left, was largely along for the ride. Each of them was having herself a grand old time. But to Hazel—her friends called her "Kitty"—this was serious business, and her mood, and look, were dark. An alien federal government was foisting blacks into her secure, comfortable schoolgirl world, and she was outraged. While Mary Ann stared ahead amiably and Sammie Dean Parker turned momentarily toward her father, thereby protecting herself from ignominy and posterity, Hazel, her eyes narrowed, her brow furrowed, her teeth clenched as if about to bite, shrieked: "Go home, nigger! Go back to Africa!" Click. Will Counts had his picture.
"This little girl, this tender little thing, walking with this whole mob baying at her like a pack of wolves" was how Benjamin Fine later described the scene. Once she reached the bus stop, Elizabeth sat herself down at the edge of the empty bench, as if not wanting to take up too much space. "Drag her over to this tree!" someone shouted. A small group of reporters—Jerry Dhonau and Ray Moseley of the Arkansas Gazette, Paul Welch of Life—formed an informal protective cordon around her; it was all that they, as professionals, felt they could do. But Fine sat himself next to Elizabeth and, at a time and place in which whites simply didn't do such things, put his arm around her, then lifted her chin. "Don't let them see you cry," he said. The move inflamed the crowd, made Fine a target for the rest of his stay in Little Rock, and probably hastened his departure from the paper. Years later, he was asked if he'd stepped beyond his assigned role. "A reporter has to be a human being," he replied.
Moments after Fine had sat with Elizabeth, Robert Schakne of CBS News approached her with a microphone, and stuck it in her face. Television news was still new, and the rules were not yet clear. "Can you tell us who you are?" he asked. "Can you tell me your name, please? Are you going to go to school here at Central High?" Elizabeth said nothing. As the camera rolled, Hazel, still looking cross, passed by Elizabeth and, perhaps for the first time that day, actually saw her face.
By now, the other eight black students had been rebuffed en masse, and dispersed. One of them, Terrence Roberts, spotted Elizabeth, and offered to walk her home. But he would have accompanied her only part of the way, and she worried what could happen once he'd left her. Daisy Bates's husband also offered assistance, pulling back his jacket to show Elizabeth the gun he was wearing beneath his belt. But her mother would never have approved of her going off with a strange man. Then a white woman named Grace Lorch, wife of a professor at the local black college, tried to help, taking Elizabeth with her to the drugstore across the street to call for a cab. When they reached it, the owner locked the door in their faces. After 35 minutes the bus finally came and, through a barrage of abuse, the two boarded. (The Lorches were old radicals—Grace's husband, Lee, had lost his job at City College in New York for agitating to integrate Stuyvesant Town, the massive housing complex on New York's East Side—and one Arkansas official later charged that Grace's "Communist masters" had directed her to protect Elizabeth that day.) As for Elizabeth, she hadn't wanted Grace Lorch's help—her admonishments to the crowd (she told them that one day they'd all be ashamed of themselves) had only riled it up more—and she was relieved when, after a brief time, Lorch got off the bus.
There are times, as Elizabeth puts it, when you just know you need your mama. She went directly to the basement of her mother's school, where the laundry was located. Elizabeth found her looking out the window; simply from her posture, she could tell she'd been praying. When her mother turned, she could see she'd been crying too. Elizabeth wanted to say she was all right, but neither of them could speak. Instead, they embraced, then headed home. Meantime, Elizabeth's father had gone looking for her, carrying a .45-caliber revolver along with the only three bullets he could find.
The afternoon Democrat soon hit the streets, with Counts's picture at the bottom of the front page. Elizabeth's last name was misspelled (as it was beneath a similar picture by United Press photographer Johnny Jenkins in the Gazette the next morning). Hazel was unidentified, the editors apparently regarding her simply as a generic segregationist white kid. "Read the awful story," the vice principal for girls at Central, Elizabeth Huckaby, wrote in her diary that night. "Saw the awful pictures—the dignity of the rejected Negro girl, the obscenity of the faces of her tormentors."
Around the same time, the Nine gathered at the Bates home. It was the first time Elizabeth had ever met Daisy Bates. Segregationists, reporters, and Faubus were to accuse her of sending Elizabeth into the mob deliberately, to garner sympathetic publicity. Now Elizabeth let her have it, too. "Why did you forget me?" she asked, with what Bates, who died in 1999, later called "cold hatred in her eyes." To this day, Elizabeth believes that Bates, now lionized by everyone (a major street near Central High School has been named for her), saw the black students as little more than foot soldiers in a cause, and left them woefully unprepared for their ordeal.
For two and a half weeks, as lawyers, judges, and politicians wrangled over their fate, the Little Rock Nine stayed home. Meantime, the image of Elizabeth and Hazel flashed around the world. A century from now, Langston Hughes wrote in the Chicago Defender, this "one lone little Negro girl" would matter more than all the other allegedly more important players in the drama. Soviet Russia relished the black eye the photograph gave the United States. (Later, Radio Moscow reported that Elizabeth had been murdered.) The world press praised Elizabeth and condemned her attackers. It was no small feat, the Arkansas Gazette editorialized, to bring together L'Osservatore Romano (the Vatican paper), Pravda, and newspapers in Germany, whose leader had snubbed Jesse Owens only 20 years before. Also in the Gazette, a farmer named Davis Fitzhugh took out an ad, in which he reprinted the photograph, with a message: "If you live in Arkansas, Study This Picture and Know Shame."
Elizabeth received long-distance calls, and as many as 50 letters a day, from all over the world. One, from a 16-year-old in Japan, was addressed simply to "Miss Elizabeth Eckford, Littol Rocke, USA." A few sympathetic whites left cash for her at her grandfather's store. On her birthday in October, a white man came to her home and gave her a new wristwatch, a gift from his dying wife. To a few reporters, Elizabeth told her story, "punctuated with sobs." "Elizabeth Ann Eckford, 15, is the most sensitive of the children," a reporter from NBC told a radio audience. "She's also the prettiest girl. She's pensive, the kind of person who loves deeply and can be hurt deeply." Checks flooded into the N.A.A.C.P. With all this visibility came repercussions. Someone threw a brick through the window of her grandfather's store. And something descended on Elizabeth that has never fully lifted. Afterward, says another of the Nine, Jefferson Thomas, "she walked with her head down, as if she wanted to make sure the floor didn't open up beneath her."
As for Hazel, Mary Ann Burleson recalls, she was "rather pleased with herself"—so much so that two days later, she was in front of Central again, telling reporters that no way would she attend an integrated Central High School. "Whites should have rights, too!" she barked at a television camera, as Mary Ann and Sammie Dean looked on with approval. "Nigras aren't the only ones that have a right!" At first, Mrs. Huckaby couldn't place the screaming white girl in the picture, but she later remembered her from the previous winter: Hazel had played hooky to be with her boyfriend, and had failed some courses. The school notified her parents; her father said he did not want to beat her, but sometimes couldn't help himself. Hazel subsequently swallowed some poison, and was briefly hospitalized; Mrs. Huckaby sent a teacher to check on her. The story even made the papers.
Now Hazel was in them again, far more prominently, and the irate vice principal hauled her into her office. Hatred destroyed haters, the older woman said. Hazel only shrugged; "breath wasted," Mrs. Huckaby later wrote. And she was right: the following Monday, Hazel was at Central again, telling newsmen that had God really wanted whites and blacks to be together, "he would have made us all the same color." "The boys and girls pictured in the newspapers are hardly typical and certainly not our leading students," Mrs. Huckaby wrote her brother in New York. "The girl (with mouth open) behind the Negro girl is a badly disorganized child, with violence accepted in the home, and with a poor emotional history." Hazel's parents promptly pulled her out of Central and put her in a rural high school closer to her home. America had seen its last of Hazel Bryan for the next 40 years—except, that is, for the picture, which popped up whenever Little Rock in the 1950s, or the civil-rights movement or race hatred, was recalled.
The spectacle in Little Rock, and federal impotence over what amounted to an insurrection, proved a national embarrassment. Even the perpetually sunny, uncontroversial Louis Armstrong was moved to protest, declaring that the country could go to hell and that President Eisenhower had "no guts," and threatening to cancel a State Department–sponsored goodwill tour to the Soviet Union. (He called Faubus a "no-good motherfucker," which ended up in print as "uneducated plowboy.") "When I see on television and read about a crowd in Arkansas spitting on a little colored girl, I think I have a right to get sore," he explained.
Again, a federal judge ordered Faubus to stop interfering and admit the black children. Again, a date was set: September 23. Again, Daisy Bates notified the black families. By now, the Eckfords had gotten themselves a telephone, but dreading a conversation with them—how could she ask Elizabeth's mother to send her daughter back into the mob?—Bates kept moving them to the bottom of her list. Once more, though, Birdie Eckford agreed to let Elizabeth go, and when the black children assembled at the Bateses' home the next morning, she was among the first to arrive.
Reporter L. Alex Wilson being attacked by a mob, September 23, 1957.
Will Counts Collection/Indiana University Archives.
This time, the Nine got into Central, partly because the rioters had been too busy assaulting a group of black newsmen to notice. (The reporter they focused on, L. Alex Wilson of the Memphis Tri-State Defender, refused to run away, even after being hit over the head by a brick: Elizabeth Eckford hadn't run, he later wrote; how could he? Within three years he died from a case of Parkinson's disease that may well have been brought on by the beating. No one was ever prosecuted.) When the crowd realized what had happened, they threatened to storm the school, and the black students were hastily smuggled out to safety. The chaos led Eisenhower belatedly to send in the 101st Airborne Division, which two days later escorted the Little Rock Nine into Central High School. This time, they stayed.
In all the documentaries over the years, it is invariably at this moment, when Elizabeth and the other eight ascend Central's stately stairs and walk through its grand wooden doors, that the music swells and the credits begin to roll: the story is over. In fact, the world only stopped watching. Within a few weeks Sputnik went up, and everyone had an excuse to look elsewhere. But for the Little Rock Nine, the mob didn't so much disperse as move inside the building. And the more the world looked away, the worse things got.
Students enter Little Rock Central High School under the protection of federal troops.
Will Counts Collection/Indiana University Archives.
Within two weeks, whatever pockets of goodwill the black students initially encountered had evaporated. Instead, a distinct minority of segregationist students—estimates vary between 50 and 200—set the tone, intimidating all the others (few labels were more noxious than "nigger lover") into silence. Their campaign of unremitting but largely clandestine harassment was abetted by school officials who, fearful of making things even worse, ignored all but the most flagrant offenders. The black students, already scattered, became almost entirely isolated, none more than Elizabeth. In classes, she was made to sit by herself, always at the back, often with no one nearby. In the corridors, there was always a space around her. Even the few white children she knew steered clear: Please don't let them know you know me, their eyes seemed to plead. Only during the last class of the day—speech—did she encounter any friendly faces: two, fellow students named Ken Reinhardt and Ann Williams. "I can still see how she looked that [first] day," Ann Williams Wedaman recalls. "Nobody needs to be that lonely." A few other students did speak to her, it was true, but only to hear what "it" sounded like.
Less than a week into school, Mrs. Huckaby later wrote, Elizabeth came into her office "red-eyed, her handkerchief in a damp ball in her hands." The harassment was so bad that she wanted to go home early. But things only got worse, as the disciplinary files, in the collection of Mrs. Huckaby's papers at the University of Arkansas, reveal. Sometime in October: Elizabeth hit with a shower of sharpened pencils. October 28: Elizabeth shoved in hall. November 20: Elizabeth jostled in gym. November 21: Elizabeth hit with paper clip. December 10: Elizabeth kicked. December 18: Elizabeth punched. January 10: Elizabeth shoved on the stairs. January 14: Elizabeth knocked flat. January 22: Elizabeth spat upon. January 29: Elizabeth attacked with spitballs. January 31: Elizabeth asks grandfather to take her home after girls serenade her with humiliating songs in gym class. February 4: Elizabeth has soda bottle thrown at her. February 14: Elizabeth attacked with rock-filled snowballs. March 7: Elizabeth hit by egg. March 12: Elizabeth hit by tomato. "She said that except for some broken glass thrown at her during lunch, she really had had a wonderful day," Mrs. Huckaby wrote at one point, apparently with a straight face.
Jefferson Thomas and Elizabeth Eckford during lunch period at Little Rock Central High School, October 1957.
© Bettmann/Corbis.
The list could have been much longer: Elizabeth gradually stopped reporting problems, because they were so chronic, and because complaining about them did no good. In history class, for instance, a boy with bad skin and a protruding Adam's apple sat behind her muttering "nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger" daily, while classmates looked the other way. The boy, Charles Sawrie, looks back on it all with shame. "It was all kind of stupid," he says. "I just wanted to get a name for myself. I don't remember anything about her except she was black and my job was to make it as rough for the blacks as I could." For Sawrie, the problem was one of class as well as race: for all the abuse these black children were taking, some people actually cared about them, as they did not for poor white kids like himself. Elizabeth sensed as much; she says she actually felt sorry for him.
Most of her tormentors, though, were girls, suggesting the attacks were coordinated. They were also disciplined. The girls left another of the Nine, Thelma Mothershed, who had a serious heart ailment, alone: they didn't want to kill the black students, only drive them out. The local National Guardsmen were either indifferent or even sympathetic to the bigots, and Elizabeth didn't seek their help. "Elizabeth is more anxious to be independent than safe," Mrs. Huckaby wrote. Instead, she fended for herself: a houseful of seamstresses had plenty of straight pins, and she stuck them around the edges of her binder, turning it into a shield. That didn't help in gym class, where supervision was the spottiest; white girls would put broken glass on the shower-room floor, and scald her by flushing all the toilets simultaneously. (The girls showering nearby had evidently been forewarned, and knew when to step aside.)
Worse even than those who harassed her were the vastly larger number of students who ignored her altogether. Then there was Miss Emily Penton's history class, in which she got to hear that slavery actually civilized blacks, that the black officeholders during Reconstruction were "ignoramuses," that the Ku Klux Klan was founded to defend white womanhood. A stern woman with a pince-nez who had taught at Central since it opened, Miss Penton refused even to touch Elizabeth. When there was money to collect, she made her put the coins down on her desk. (When Elizabeth complained about her, she was informed that Miss Penton not only was a graduate of the University of Chicago but also was very much respected in the community.)
Elizabeth could not turn to Daisy Bates and the N.A.A.C.P., which, she felt, had its own agenda. She could not turn to her mother, who would have yanked her out of Central had she known what was happening. Or to her father, who to this day is largely unsympathetic. "Just a little pushing and shoving" is how he once characterized what his daughter had endured. (When Elizabeth and I visited him, he told her that black America was at war at the time; she was, he said, a soldier doing her duty. Besides, he never saw any marks on her.) She couldn't talk to the other black students; none were in her classes, and away from Central, school was the last thing they wanted to discuss. She could not talk to friends; the few she had had steered clear. She couldn't talk to the local press, which either sympathized with the segregationists or ducked the story. That spring a white student told Stan Opotowsky of the New York Post that the nine blacks appeared "in a state of shock." "They jump when you speak," she said. "The other day I smiled and said hello to Elizabeth Eckford and she looked so startled. She looked as though she were waiting for me to say something bad after I said hello."
In January, there were press reports that Elizabeth was withdrawing. But she persevered—she felt she could not let the others down—and she finished the year. Then the Little Rock Nine took a fund-raising tour for the N.A.A.C.P. There were awards in Chicago and Cleveland, and a visit to New York, where they met Dag Hammarskjöld, Ralph Bunche, and Lena Horne. Elizabeth collected all their autographs; it was her way of connecting with people. In Washington, they toured the White House and posed outside the Supreme Court with Thurgood Marshall. Her Central experience had extinguished any desire Elizabeth had had to become a lawyer, but Marshall—funny, profane, the only man gutsy enough to talk back to Daisy Bates—well, he was a different story. "I had a crush on him, I sure did," she says with a laugh.
At summer's end, her mother lost her job—retaliation, surely, for her daughter's role in the Little Rock drama. And then, in the final paroxysm of the segregationists, all of Little Rock's public high schools were closed the 1958–59 year. A tutor taught Elizabeth, leaving her a few credits short of graduating. Like all the others of the Little Rock Nine, she would flee the South, moving in the summer of 1959 to St. Louis. There she got the remaining credits, and there she made the first of several suicide attempts, with over-the-counter sleeping pills. She then continued her education, enrolling first at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, then at Central State University, in Wilberforce, Ohio. Again, she tried killing herself, though in more novel ways: hitchhiking far from campus, for instance, half hoping someone would pick her up and murder her.
Elizabeth, now 21, was visiting Little Rock in the summer of 1963 when she got a most surprising message. Someone had called whom she'd never heard of before. Her name was Hazel Bryan.
At 16, Hazel had married a schoolmate, Antoine Massery, then dropped out. But Hazel, by now the mother of two and living off a gravel road in South Little Rock, had an intellectually curious, independent streak: she chafed at the regimentation and racial intolerance of her church, for instance, and was eventually kicked out of it. Seeing Martin Luther King and the civil-rights protesters on television made her think of Elizabeth, and what she'd done to her six years earlier. Never mentioning it to her husband, she called the first Eckford in the phone book—Elizabeth's grandfather—and left several messages for her. Finally, Elizabeth got back to her. "I just told her who I was—I was the girl in that picture that was yelling at her, that I was sorry, that it was a terrible thing to do and that I didn't want my children to grow up to be like that, and I was crying," Hazel says.
Honestly, Elizabeth wasn't sure just which girl Hazel was. Far from studying the picture, she avoided it; all those white people in it had merged. But she accepted Hazel's apology, because she seemed to be sincere, because her grandfather and father urged her to, and because Hazel so clearly craved forgiveness. Predictably, the two then resumed their very separate ways; this was, after all, the South in 1963. But thereafter, Elizabeth felt protective of Hazel—white people back then paid a price for extending blacks even the slightest courtesy—and whenever reporters asked her for the name of that white girl with the hateful face, she wouldn't say.
Despite the occasional interview, Elizabeth largely laid low. When she attended the March on Washington in the summer of 1963, taking a bus from Little Rock, few there would have known who she was. But she could not escape her past. Watching a production of the play In White America one night in St. Louis, she heard her own voice: an account of her walk she'd once given to a newspaper. Totally unprepared, she ran to the bathroom and cried. Briefly, she moved back to Little Rock. But a broken engagement, her failure to get a college degree, the difficulty finding a teaching job, and her mother's nagging led her, in September 1967, to escape again, this time by joining the Army.
Over the next five years she was stationed at bases in Indiana, in Georgia, in Washington State, and, for 18 months, in Anniston, Alabama. (Remembering the beating the Freedom Riders had taken there, she spent all of one hour during that time in town.) She worked as a pay clerk, then wrote news copy. Fearful that it would blow her cover, when Ernest Green of the Little Rock Nine mentioned her in a New Yorker story, in 1971, she had that issue removed from the base. She left the army in 1972, and in May 1974, at age 32, she moved back home, this time for good. "Other places, for me, weren't any better," she says. "They were just different places." She took a job in the state welfare agency, and for the next 20 years and more, lived in near-total anonymity and despair. In 1976, she had a son, Erin, by a man she did not marry. Two years later, there was another son, Calvin, by another man she didn't marry. Little Rock hadn't changed much, she told Steele Hays of the Arkansas Democrat in 1977, but she had: she expected less. "I want you to know why I came back," she said. "I came back because I felt I was chased away and because I thought it was cowardly and I wanted to come back and prove I could live in this situation. I don't intend to be driven out." To Hays, she appeared on the brink of a breakdown.
Her depression deepened. She quit work and went on non-service veterans' disability. She rarely went out, except to shop and do laundry; by the third or fourth day each month, she'd be broke. She'd declare "soup-and-casserole months" in order to afford rudimentary toys for her sons. To avoid people, she'd mail-order wash-and-wear clothes from Sears or Montgomery Ward. Twice, she put her boys into foster care. For hours she'd lie on her bed, her face to the wall. Or she would watch soap operas incessantly, then remember nothing about them afterward. Or she'd sleep, some days for 16 hours. "Tell them I'm dead," she'd have the boys tell reporters when they called. This they were happy to do, for they came to resent these strange intruders who would come to their home from time to time, make Mama cry, then disappear.
In May 1982, when seven of the Nine gathered in New York for a 25th-anniversary celebration, Elizabeth was one of the absentees: under a doctor's care, The Washington Post reported. That September Elizabeth told People she lived "like a hermit and a recluse." "I've got to get to the point where I can talk about this," she said, referring to her Central High School experiences, dabbing her reddened eyes with a dish towel. "Until then, it will never be over for me." In 1987, she refused to speak to the makers of Eyes on the Prize.
That year marked the 30th anniversary of Central's desegregation, and for the Nine and their supporters, there was something else to celebrate: Bill Clinton, who has said that the Little Rock crisis made racial equality "a driving obsession" in his life, was now governor of Arkansas. He took special pleasure in inviting the Nine to the governor's mansion, the very building in which Faubus had hatched his exclusionary schemes. (Elizabeth was impolitic, telling Clinton she had felt used by the N.A.A.C.P. "Mrs. Clinton's jaw kind of clenched," she recalls. "It really was a rude comment, but sometimes I can't help myself.")
The filmmakers Bill Jersey and Judith Leonard interviewed her for a 1989 documentary on Chief Justice Earl Warren, author of the Brown decision. Twice, in biopics of Mrs. Huckaby and Ernest Green, Hollywood had re-enacted Elizabeth's walk, neither time to her satisfaction; too cheap to hire enough extras, she grouses, they had turned it into a kind of ramble. For the Warren documentary, Elizabeth did it herself. It was, she now says, "a bad, bad, bad decision." The result was, and is, almost too painful to watch. "Little Rock would be the battlefield, and the first casualty would be one of the Nine," Atticus Finch—Gregory Peck—narrates as the original footage is shown. Then the contemporary Elizabeth appears, talking about the soldiers. "I thought they were there for my p-p-p-protection," she stammered, tears streaming down her face. "I was looking at a woman who was truly broken," Leonard recalls.
But shortly after this, Elizabeth changed medications for her depression, and her life began to brighten. She started to read more, buying 50-cent books from the thrift store. Some—Dickens, Robinson Crusoe, The Call of the Wild—she remembered from childhood; others, like the works of Plato and Aristotle, were new to her. She began also to read histories of the school crisis, and was shocked to see how incomplete they were.
Still, when in 1996 Oprah Winfrey brought seven of the Nine together with four white contemporaries from Central, Elizabeth would not join them. And only with repeated coaxing did she participate in the 40th-anniversary observances the following year. The celebration was the biggest yet—by now Clinton was president, and Central had become a National Historic Site—and included the opening of a new visitors' center, in an old Mobil station near where Elizabeth had begun her walk. Needless to say, the picture of Hazel and Elizabeth greeted people as soon as they walked in. At the dedication, Elizabeth Jacoway, a historian who'd met Hazel while writing her book on the school crisis, Turn Away Thy Son, spotted Will Counts. She suggested he take an updated photograph of Elizabeth and Hazel—this one symbolizing reconciliation.
By 1997, Hazel Bryan Massery had three adult children and seven grandchildren. She had grown more prosperous—her husband had gone into antennae and satellite-TV installation—but also more unsettled. She had joined peace groups, done spiritual things, taken up belly dancing and screenwriting and feminism and performing as a clown. Much she did in secret, so that her husband couldn't disapprove. On racial matters, she tried making amends, working with young black mothers-to-be and counseling minority students. She'd also confronted her mother on her racial attitudes, leaving the older woman, as she later put it, "foaming at the mouth." Few reporters had ever bothered tracking Hazel down, and this irked her: they preferred her frozen in time, and antipathy. But in early 1996 she'd been interviewed by Jacoway and Pete Daniel of the Smithsonian Institution. "She was very attractive, not mean-spirited in the way I expected, not bitter and—excuse me, but I hate this term—redneck-y," Jacoway remembers. When Counts called her, she agreed instantly to pose. So did Elizabeth. For years, she would not have. But she was curious to meet Hazel. And besides, she was slowly coming back to life.
Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery at Little Rock Central High School in 1997.
Will Counts Collection/Indiana University Archives.
Shortly before the anniversary celebration began, driving in a borrowed van with Arkansas plates to avoid any undue attention, Counts drove Hazel to Elizabeth's house. Then, 40 years and a couple of weeks after their first encounter, Elizabeth and Hazel were together again. This time, they talked—about flowers and children and clothes. Hazel apologized to Elizabeth, thanked her for agreeing to meet, helped her decide what to wear for the new photograph. Elizabeth told Hazel she was very brave to face the cameras again. Privately, she thought Hazel was naïve—that by coming out, she'd get plenty of attention all right, but not necessarily the kind she anticipated. The two then returned to Central, where Counts photographed them anew.
The next day the picture ran on the front page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Along with the photograph of Clinton escorting the Nine through Central's main doorway, it became the most enduring image of the anniversary. Hazel became a proxy for an entire community: saddled with images from 1957 wherever they went, dismissed as racist yahoos, people in Little Rock saw her re-emergence, and penitence, and apparent acceptance, as signs that they, too, might finally be redeemed. Some viewed the new photograph in biblical terms. "The beauty of the God-made deep black skin of the one seems to enhance the same-made and equally beautiful ice-white skin of the other," wrote the Reverend Will Campbell, one of the white ministers who had accompanied the black students to school on the first day. To him the bond between the two women was "the stuff of Scripture … a glimpse of the Promised Land."
President Bill Clinton at Little Rock Central High School celebrates the 40th anniversary of the 1957 desegregation with members of the Little Rock Nine and others.
Cynthia Johnson/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Skip Rutherford, the Friend of Bill who coordinated the anniversary celebration, quickly arranged to put the new picture on a poster, with the original inserted in the corner. He titled it "Reconciliation," and soon it was selling briskly at the new visitors' center. Little Rock's congressman, Vic Snyder, displayed it on the floor of the House of Representatives. (Central's current principal, Nancy Rousseau, has it hanging in her office.) To Michael Leahy of the Democrat-Gazette and other reporters, Hazel expressed remorse for the events of 1957, but insisted that her life was "more than a moment." "Hazel Massery beams, wondering whether at long last she gets to step out of one photograph and into another," one reporter wrote.
Elizabeth and Hazel, two loners who never quite fit in anywhere, became friends. They went to flower shows together, bought fabrics together, took mineral baths and massages together, appeared in documentaries and before school groups together. Since Elizabeth had never learned to drive, Hazel joked that she had become Elizabeth's chauffeur. Whenever something cost money, Hazel treated; it was awkward for Elizabeth, who had a hard time explaining to people just how poor she was. They spoke often, including once when Elizabeth called her from Air Force One. (After signing a measure at the White House to award the Nine the Congressional Gold Medal, Clinton invited Elizabeth to fly back to Arkansas with him. The Lewinsky scandal had broken, and when Elizabeth was too tongue-tied to make small talk with the president en route, she felt she'd failed him when he could have used some bolstering, or at least some distracting.)
At Hazel's urging—nagging may have been more like it—Elizabeth agreed to work with her on a book, and they found themselves an agent and an author. The two even visited Hazel's mother, who prepared a lunch for them. It was, Elizabeth surmised, probably the first time the older woman had ever served a black person in her home. Hazel wanted to make Elizabeth happy. Elizabeth called her "Pollyanna"; Hazel took it as a compliment. The Democrat-Gazette listed the rapprochement as one of the happiest events of 1997. "They sort of encapsulated all our community had gone through," says Cathy Collins, a social worker who ran a seminar on racial healing in which the two participated for 12 weeks, in 1998. "It gave us a tremendous amount of hope."
The relationship expedited Elizabeth's rebirth. Speaking to student groups brought her out and satisfied her lifelong urge to teach. Then, in April 1999, she took her first job in 20 years, as a probation officer for Judge Marion Humphrey of the Pulaski County Circuit Court in Little Rock. To Humphrey, who is black, Elizabeth embodied the pride and discipline lacking in many of the younger African-Americans who landed in his court. His office had recently been rocked by a personnel scandal, and in Elizabeth, he thought he'd found instant impeccability. And as someone who'd watched the Nine as a schoolboy in nearby Pine Bluff, he felt he had a debt to discharge, as did all of Little Rock. "She was someone who'd opened up doors of opportunity for me," he says. "She's owed much more than she's received in this community." So thrilled was Elizabeth to be working again that she never asked what the job paid, nor did it matter when she learned it wasn't very much.
From the outset, some found Elizabeth and Hazel's friendship artificial and unconvincing. To Mary Ann Burleson, who had apologized in 1996 for her conduct 40 years earlier, and who now lived in Hot Springs, it was her old friend on another ego trip. "I thought, 'That little stinker! She's doing this for Hazel, not for Elizabeth.'" Hazel's sister said their father, who'd died a few years earlier, was rolling over in his grave because of it. Hazel found a bouquet of dead flowers on her driveway. Her in-laws disapproved. Her friends were silent. So were her fellow troublemakers, not one of whom followed her example and came forward. It would ruin his business, another person in the picture once told Hazel. At a Central reunion, classmates gave her the cold shoulder—not because she apologized, though some doubted her sincerity, but because she hadn't apologized to them, too, for helping to paint them all as racists. That's certainly what Ralph Brodie believed. To Brodie, a Little Rock lawyer who'd been president of the student body in 1957 and had fought ever since to clear Central's sullied image, Hazel was a curse. For decades, he'd argued that most Central students were good kids, and that without their goodwill and levelheadedness, things would have been much, much worse. But in every history book, in every newspaper article, on every anniversary, and now before every museumgoer, Hazel's hate-filled face blocked all that out.
Elizabeth also got flak, from other blacks—her younger son among them—who felt she'd been hoodwinked. "Are you extremely gullible or are you just very, very forgiving?" one of the Nine asked her. Another complained when Hazel took part in various commemorations. "We're the Little Rock Nine, not the Little Rock Ten," she said. Among them, Hazel still finds little sympathy. "We kind of joked about it: here she is, framed forever with her mouth spewing out whatever she was spewing out, and no matter what she does in life she can't erase that photo," says Ernest Green. "The lesson in life is: Don't get in a picture unless you want to go through it forever, because you're not sure which one will survive and which one will not."
The most public skeptic was Oprah Winfrey, who hosted Elizabeth and Hazel on a program in November 1999. Reconciliation and redemption are her things, but this one was too much even for her. "They are friends. They … are … friends," Oprah said, the first time in apparent disbelief, the second time, it seemed, with distaste and resignation. Elizabeth, who still covers up the photograph with a tissue when she signs books (the white dress affords a perfect place for autographs), suddenly found it on a massive screen directly in front of her as her host bore down, asking her clinically why looking at it still upset her so. "She was as cold as she could be," Elizabeth recalls. "She went out of her way to be hateful." Characteristically, though, Elizabeth felt sorrier for Hazel. She was treated even more brusquely.
It was around this time, during a visit to Little Rock on another story, that I first saw the poster. Intrigued, I arranged to meet Elizabeth and Hazel at a suburban barbecue joint. What sticks with me was how giddy Elizabeth was that day: she had just gotten her first credit card and, wanting to see if it really worked, had insisted on picking up the check. Afterward, we went to Hazel's house, a pleasant, hand-built structure on the side of a hill. The three of us had what I thought was a friendly chat, though I later learned that Hazel had felt slighted: it seemed she'd thought I'd paid more attention to Elizabeth. Those blacks and Jews always stick together, she later complained. "I consider us very close," Elizabeth said that day. She dismissed those blacks who'd criticized the relationship. "I tell them the questions they're asking are racist, that I choose my own friends, and that I believe she's sincere."
In fact, the relationship was already beginning to fray, as Hazel hinted. "The honeymoon is over and now we're getting to take out the garbage," she said cryptically. Hazel forever felt on the defensive. Blacks were skeptical of her; whites (particularly younger white students), judgmental. She found herself apologizing incessantly for herself or for her parents. Meanwhile, Elizabeth was souring on her. Hazel's story, Elizabeth was discovering, was filled with holes and discrepancies. She refused to implicate her parents, insisting that the racism she learned was somehow "in the air." She pleaded "amnesia" about her activities at Central. She said she'd known right away that what she'd done was wrong, when in fact she kept saying the same things in the days after. Elizabeth came to think that Hazel was seeking forgiveness on the cheap, without any pain or introspection. "She wanted me to be cured and be over it and for this not to go on anymore," Elizabeth says. "She wanted me to be less uncomfortable so that she wouldn't feel responsible."
The rift was evident in October 1999, when the two spoke at the University of Indiana. "When they came out onstage I thought, There's nothing real about this," recalls Mary Smith-Forrest, then an official with the local N.A.A.C.P., who added that Hazel seemed ill-at-ease in Elizabeth's presence. When Hazel told a radio host there named Shana Ritter that her parents pulled her out of Central for her own safety, Elizabeth jumped on her. "Every time you say that I'm puzzled," she interjected. "Who did they expect to harm you?" Asked for some closing thoughts, Hazel offered something gaseous about "dialogue." "There's a southern saying about some people peeing and calling it rain," Elizabeth countered—on the air.
Hazel Bryan Massery (5th from left) and Elizabeth Eckford (on President Clinton's right) with others in the Oval Office after the Little Rock Nine received the Congressional Gold Medal, November 1999.
White House Photo/courtesy Ken Reinhardt.
The next month, the Nine collected their Congressional Gold Medals at a White House ceremony. Elizabeth invited all of those most responsible for her "personal renaissance," and says she'd have included Hazel had the others not been certain to object. But Skip Rutherford did invite Hazel, and she looked on as Clinton summoned Elizabeth to the podium. "Come here, girl!" he said. Elizabeth saluted him—civilians weren't supposed to, she knew, but she got carried away—and he saluted back. They hugged for a long time, and as they rocked back and forth, Elizabeth apologized for not consoling him better on that flight back to Arkansas. Later, when she and her friends posed with Clinton in the Oval Office, Elizabeth invited Hazel to join them. She felt sorry for her, she says: she was in Washington by herself. So now there was a third picture of the two of them together, this time with a president.
Two and a half years after it began, following an acrimonious dinner in Little Rock, this experiment in racial harmony quietly ended. There were no pictures in the papers. Many people didn't even notice, and probably haven't still, as the 50th anniversary has arrived. The rupture has been nearly total. Only twice since have Elizabeth and Hazel even spoken: on September 11, 2001, when a frightened Hazel called Elizabeth from somewhere in the Northeast, and a few weeks later, when Will Counts died. Hazel has also withdrawn from public life. She has never given another interview, to me or anyone else. It was all a big mistake, she has told friends, one that has caused her irreparable damage. She's "out of that loop," and she's never going back. Throughout this month's commemorations, she's been absolutely invisible.
In their seven years of silence, Elizabeth's attitude toward Hazel has hardened. An exhibitionist, she has called her. A profiteer. A white supremacist. A born-again bigot. Elizabeth still lets them sell the poster at the visitors' center; it's her way of supporting the place, something she could not otherwise afford to do. But at her insistence, it now carries a gold sticker in the corner, one resembling the surgeon general's warning on cigarette packs. "True reconciliation can occur only when we honestly acknowledge our painful, but shared, past," it states.
Some feel Elizabeth is too harsh. After all, Hazel has apologized—and apologized, and apologized, and apologized. That's more than all those tormentors in Mrs. Huckaby's files—Richard Boehler, Frankie Gregg, Herbert Blount, Kenny Vandiver, and all the rest—have ever done. Sammie Dean Parker, now living in Dallas, has never apologized; on the few occasions she's talked, she's sounded more aggrieved—because of the troubles at Central, she has complained, she never got to be Miss Little Rock—than contrite. Apart from Mary Ann Burleson, no one else in the photograph has ever come forward. For some, like Olen Spann (the man in the hat and pressed khakis) or Richard Stinnett (the boy in the striped shirt just behind Elizabeth) or Lonnie Ward (the boy behind Hazel), it's too late: they're all dead. Most typical, perhaps, is the smiling young man in the V-neck shirt, unidentified and, as far as we know, unreconstructed.
Hazel had helped coax Elizabeth out of her shell, but she was also a crutch. Without her around, Elizabeth's renewal intensified. Her appearances before students grew more frequent, though they were never easy: she would not eat or drink beforehand, and would make sure a lined wastebasket and paper towels were on hand just in case she threw up. She would read off cue cards, her hands shaking. She would not wear her glasses, so she could not make out any disapproving faces. She would speak fast, the better to exit quickly. And never would she allow pictures; after all, she was ugly.
I witnessed those difficulties firsthand a few years back, when Elizabeth spoke to a student group at a Golden Corral restaurant outside Little Rock. She'd been received reverentially, the boys and girls lining up beforehand to take her picture and have her sign their books. Half an hour into her talk, though, something in her snapped, and she bolted for the door. "I do apologize, but she is having an episode," a group leader told the dumbfounded group. With me, too, she'd balk. After one marathon phone call I found a message on my answering machine. "I want to discontinue those long interviews, because those calls cause some backwash in my life that's hard to deal with," she said. "I'm having trouble sleeping at all." But she persevered, and I, too, could see the change.
Over time, Elizabeth refined her message, and her delivery. She always spoke precisely and clearly, but now it is without notes. She sprinkles in humor. She goes over her personal story quickly and self-deprecatingly. "A 65-year-old footnote to the past," she calls herself, someone who didn't graduate magna or summa cum laude, but "thank you, lawdy." Then she gets to her real, and vaguely subversive, message: It doesn't matter whether your teacher likes you or not; study for yourselves. Even a shy person can develop steel. And if you reach out to someone being harassed, you can save his life.
She has experienced additional setbacks. On New Year's Day in 2003, 26-year-old Erin Eckford, who suffered from a host of psychological problems, walked out of his mother's house and started firing a semi-automatic rifle into the air. When he refused to put it down, the Little Rock police killed him. Community activists pressed Elizabeth to sue, or at least raise a ruckus, but she refused; "suicide by cop," she called what had occurred. Friends feared it might tip Elizabeth back over the edge. Instead, she seemed only to draw strength from it. (Hazel and her husband sent her a condolence card, without a note.) She says little about her surviving son, now in the Coast Guard. "I don't consider myself an extremely strong person, but both my kids are much weaker than I am," she says.
But there were triumphs, too. In August 2005, individual statues of the Nine, with Elizabeth, her binder held close to her chest, leading the way, were dedicated on the grounds of the state capitol. The sculptor, John Deering, said he had no trouble depicting Elizabeth: Will Counts's photo said it all. Elizabeth thinks it's a good likeness, but wonders about memorializing the living. "We still have time to mess up," she jokes.
*
In the First Division of Pulaski County Circuit Court, Elizabeth's clients are mostly black, often semi-illiterate, pinched for hot checks or credit-card fraud or taking or selling drugs. Many couldn't afford lawyers; few are hardened criminals. She spends her days hearing the same stock sob stories and, frustrated writer that she is, inventing her own, matching a new face with whatever she can conjure up. She keeps peanuts around for prisoners who have to skip breakfast to come in, but she's no soft touch. "Aren't you ashamed of showing your underwear?" she might ask some unkempt man. "How are you going to get a decent job looking like that?" she'll ask someone with glittering gold grills on his teeth. Some clients prefer to wait for her colleague Curtis Ricks: he's easier on them. Once in a while, after something's been on television, someone will say, "Miss Eckerd, I didn't know that was you." Treat her the way they always have, she tells them.
Eckford outside Little Rock Central High School, now a National Historic Site, June 18, 2007.
Photograph by Nigel Parry.
Next month, Elizabeth will be 66 years old. She has diabetes and tires easily; even were she willing to re-walk the walk for the cameras, her legs would not be up to the task. "Use the archival footage," she tells reporters. How much longer will she work? She leans forward, as if to reveal some secret. "Till they carry me out feet first," she whispers. "I never want to go back to where I was." Her life savings consist pretty much of that Congressional Gold Medal, which she says is worth about $35,000—that is, if anyone would ever buy it. She tried giving it to the Smithsonian, just to spare herself the fees for a safe-deposit box; until recently, it sat in her bedroom closet. If anyone could find it in that mess, she figured, they deserved it.
Elizabeth is slowly refurbishing her house, which reporters for 50 years have described as "sparsely furnished." Fearful it would turn the place into a shrine, she's resisted hanging any commemorative items on the wall, but will soon put up some photographs. The grounds outside are still recovering from Erin, who, unwilling to cut the grass, doused everything with weed killer. The rock on which she once daydreamed is still behind the house. One place she has never ventured is the attic. That's where the famous white skirt, which she never wore again, may be. Her friend Annie Abrams had hoped to convince Wal-Mart to mass-produce it, so that on September 4, 2007, schoolgirls everywhere could have worn it. But nothing came of the idea, which Elizabeth disparaged anyway: why would anyone have wanted to? Gangs now roam her neighborhood. Young black toughs "have killed more of our people than the K.K.K. did," she says.
No longer must the others in the Little Rock Nine hover over her protectively; at a public forum with them in May, she was positively ebullient, even chatty; at one point Ernest Green practically had to wrestle the microphone from her. She enjoys seeing the other eight, but they're spread out; even the two of them who now live in Little Rock—Minnijean Brown Trickey and Thelma Mothershed Wair—she seldom sees. Minnijean, who was as outspoken as Elizabeth was meek—she was suspended midyear for dumping chili on the head of a student, then expelled for calling another "white trash"—admires Elizabeth unabashedly. But asked whether she knows Elizabeth well, she says, simply, "Well enough to leave her alone." To Elizabeth's eyes, even the other eight are not beyond reproach. She contends that Green, the group's de facto spokesman over the years—he was the oldest, the first to graduate, and, as an official in the Carter administration, the most prominent—has always dished out feel-good, triumphal, "Good Negro" "top spin" rather than describe the Central experience as it really was. And she considers Melba Patillo Beals's memoir, Warriors Don't Cry, a staple on high-school reading lists, unreliable and hyperbolic. (Some of the others do, too, but only Elizabeth says so.)
This month there have been interviews galore: NBC Nightly News, USA Today, Newsweek. But truth be told, many whites in Little Rock are sick and tired of the Little Rock Nine. They feel they've already been honored enough, and can't wait for the events to pass—especially since, given the actuarial tables, they'll probably be the last. If it's any consolation to them, Elizabeth, too, has commemoration fatigue. She'd have skipped the 50th, she says, were her absence not so conspicuous. At an event in the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center this past April, I watched her grow claustrophobic during the crowded reception, then restless during the umpteenth round of speechified tributes. She was visibly relieved when the evening ended. Besides, she had to get up at 4:30 the next morning. She wanted to get back to Little Rock, and back to work.
Much as she'd like to leave the whole commemoration thing behind, it's gotten so she can't; her modest speaking fees have paid for a new heating system for her house, a new roof, new awnings. She says she does not expect ever to talk to Hazel again. But when I asked Elizabeth if she missed her, she nodded her head. "I wish I could tell her how much she helped me," she says. "I don't think I ever told her that."
*
Central High School looks as imposing as ever, but over the past 50 years, its innards have changed unimaginably: the school is now more than half black. It's all misleading, of course, because Central is really two different schools, separate and unequal, under one roof. The blacks go to different classes, sit on separate sides of the cafeteria, have different, and far lower, levels of performance and expectations. For a long time Elizabeth wasn't invited back, even when a black principal ran the place; never has she spoken at commencement, though Ernest Green has, twice. But now she speaks regularly to groups from Sojourn to the Past, an organization that introduces students from around the country to civil-rights landmarks and luminaries throughout the South. Its founder, Jeff Steinberg, is another of those people Elizabeth credits with her renaissance. One day this past April, she was back in Central's auditorium, the same sepia place where the Key Club once put on its minstrel shows, where she heard students sing "Dixie" and do their rebel yells during pep rallies. On the bus from Memphis that morning, the students discussed her story. And they were told today's ground rules: no hugging Elizabeth, no autographs, no gushing, no crowding around her, no loud noises. The questions would be scripted, so that there would be no surprises, either. Steinberg picked up a microphone, and reminded everyone that they were about to meet an American icon. "Ladies and gentlemen," he shouted, in the manner of a ring announcer, "it is my pleasure to introduce to you Miss Elizabeth Eckfooooooooooooord!"
And Elizabeth strolled out onto the stage. This time she was not in white but black, a black dress with red stripes on its sleeves. Once again, there were students behind her, but stagehands rather than segregationists, and integrated stagehands at that. They soon dispersed: this time, at least, she did not feel anyone at her heels, or even close. As she approached the bare black plastic chair, the students in the auditorium, black and white, quietly rose, raised their arms, and started waving their hands wildly. It is sign language—for a standing ovation.
Vanity Fair © Condé Nast Digital (emphasis in original)
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/09/littlerock200709
===
One of the 'Little Rock Nine' Looks Back
Elizabeth Eckford stands amid a hostile crowd outside Central High School in Little Rock on Sept. 4, 1957.
Audio [embedded]
Listen to the story
by Alex Chadwick
September 4, 2007
A half-century ago, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus ordered troops from the Arkansas National Guard to Central High School in Little Rock because the school board had decided to allow nine black students to attend the previously all-white school.
As is often the case with great historical events, a single image stays in our collective memory. For that ugly first day of school on Sept. 4, 1957, in Little Rock, Ark., it is the image of a crisply dressed Elizabeth Eckford surrounded by an angry crowd.
In the coming weeks and months, we will revisit Eckford's progress, and that of the "Little Rock Nine," since that day as we follow the singular events in Little Rock.
*
Related NPR Stories
The Legacy of the Little Rock Nine
Aug. 31, 2007
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14080755&ps=rs
Recalling the Segregation Showdown in Little Rock
Aug. 31, 2007
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14080752&ps=rs
*
Copyright 2007 NPR
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14091050
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Elizabeth and Hazel, September 4, 1957
Photo: Will Counts Collection, Indiana University Archives
Will Counts’s iconic photograph of Elizabeth Ann Eckford after she was denied entrance to Little Rock Central High School; September 4, 1957.
Photo by Will Counts; courtesy of the Arkansas History Commission
[ http://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=721 ]
A photograph taken by Will Counts of Elizabeth Eckford attempting to enter Little Rock School on 4th September, 1957. The girl shouting is Hazel Massery.
Elizabeth Eckford is depicted in this photograph taken by Will Counts in 1957. It is one of the top 100 photographs of the 20th century, according to the Associated Press. Hazel Massery is the Caucasian girl seen yelling as Eckford attempted to enter the school on her first day. Grace Lorch on the right side of the photo, was Eckford's escort and rescued her from the mob.
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Eckford ]
Reconsiliation; Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan and reunited for Will Counts's poster
Photo: WILL COUNTS
One was trying to go to school; the other didn’t want her there. Together, Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan starred in one of the most memorable photographs of the Civil Rights era. But their story had only just begun.
By David Margolick
12:01AM BST 09 Oct 2011
On her first morning of school, September 4 1957, Elizabeth Eckford’s primary concern was looking nice. Her mother had done her hair the night before; an elaborate two-hour ritual, with a hot iron and a hotter stove, of straightening and curling. Then there were her clothes. People in black Little Rock knew that the Eckford girls were expert seamstresses; practically everything they wore they made themselves, and not from the basic patterns of McCall’s but from the more complicated ones in Vogue. It was a practice borne of tradition, pride, and necessity: homemade was cheaper, and it spared black children the humiliation of having to ask to try things on in the segregated department stores downtown.
In the fall of 1957, Elizabeth was among the nine black students who had enlisted, then been selected, to enter Little Rock Central High School.
Central was the first high school in a major southern city set to be desegregated since the United States Supreme Court had ruled three years earlier in Brown vs Board of Education that separate and ostensibly equal education was unconstitutional. Inspired both by Thurgood Marshall, who had argued the case of plaintiff Oliver L Brown, and Clarence Darrow, Elizabeth wanted to become a lawyer, and she thought Central would help her realise that dream.
On the television as Elizabeth ate her breakfast, a newsman described large crowds gathering around Central. It was all her mother, Birdie, needed to hear. “Turn that thing off!” she shouted. Should anyone say something nasty at her, she counselled Elizabeth, pretend not to hear them. Or better yet, be nice, and put them to shame.
Lots of white people lined Park Street as Elizabeth headed towards the school. As she passed the Mobil station and came nearer, she could see the white students filtering unimpeded past the soldiers. To her, it was a sign that everything was all right. But as she herself approached, three Guardsmen, two with rifles, held out their arms, directing her to her left, to the far side of Park.
A crowd had started to form behind Elizabeth, and her knees began to shake. She continued down Park. For an instant, she faced the school: it just looked so big! She steadied herself, then walked up to another soldier. He didn’t move.
When she tried to squeeze past him, he raised his carbine. Other soldiers moved over to assist him. When she tried to get in around them, they moved to block her way. They glared at her.
Now, as Elizabeth continued walking south down Park, more and more of the people lining the street fell in behind her. Some were Central students, others adults. They started shouting at her. The primitive television cameras, for all their bulkiness, had no sound equipment. But the reporters on the scene scribbled down what they heard: “Lynch her! Lynch her!” “No nigger bitch is going to get in our school!” “Go home, nigger!” Looking for a friendly face, Elizabeth turned to an old white woman. The woman spat on her.
Three young girls, barely into their teens, fell in directly behind Elizabeth. They were clearly together, and clearly students; two of them, like Elizabeth, carried books. They wanted to be at the very centre of things. And they wanted to get really close to Elizabeth – close enough to let her know that they didn’t want her in their school. “Two, four, six, eight! We don’t want to integrate!” they chanted.
One girl, Hazel Bryan, looked livid, her face poisoned with hate. As Benjamin Fine of The New York Times later described her, she was “screaming, just hysterical, just like one of these Elvis Presley hysterical deals, where these kids are fainting with hysteria”. Her eyes narrowed, her brow furrowed, her teeth clenched, Hazel shouted: “Go home, nigger! Go back to A-”. Click. “-frica!” Will Counts, a photographer for the Arkansas Democrat, had his picture.
When it comes down to it, Counts’s famous photograph of Elizabeth Eckford is really more of Hazel Bryan: it is on Hazel that the eyes land, and linger.
Despite the tricky lighting, her face is perfectly exposed: the early morning September sun shines on her like a spotlight. It hits her from the side, painting her face in a stark chiaroscuro that makes it look more demonic still. She’s caught mid-vowel, with her mouth gapingly, ferociously open. At that instant, and in perpetuity, Hazel Bryan, always the performer, has the stage completely to herself.
Others played their own small parts in the picture, but “the mouth” she later said, “was mine”. And dressing that morning as she had, trying to look all grown up and sexed up, she had masked how young she really was. She was only 15, but she would always be seen, and judged, as an adult.
The next morning, Elizabeth and Hazel landed on millions of doorsteps.
Elizabeth became, as Ted Poston of the New York Post put it, “probably the most widely known high school student in the whole United States”, with the unidentified white girl to her running a close second.
Attention, and commentary, came from abroad as well. “One Girl Runs Gauntlet of Hate”, shouted a headline in the Daily Express in London.
The Arkansas Gazette marvelled at how the events had united in their outrage the newspapers of the Vatican, the Kremlin and a country whose leader had snubbed Jesse Owens only 20 years earlier. The story and picture led off the Little Rock coverage in Paris Match.
Long-distance telephone calls for Elizabeth came into her grandfather’s store from Chicago, Detroit, New York, even Oklahoma. Though all of The Nine got letters, Elizabeth got far and away the most, as many as 50 a day.
Because she’d rarely been identified by name, Hazel got little mail. A few letters, all from the North, all critical, were sent to her care of Central. Hazel read them, found their critical tone surprising, then gave them little mind.
Hazel’s parents, though, found her sudden notoriety sufficiently alarming to pull her out of Central. As linked as she became to the Little Rock Nine, then, Hazel did not in fact spend a single day inside Central with any of them.
The initial reports from inside were encouraging. “The teachers are very nice. Nothing went wrong, there were no catcalls. I especially enjoyed my history and English classes,” Elizabeth reported after that first day.
“Everything will be all right, for the majority of the white students themselves are all right.” Soon, though, there were disquieting signs. On October 1, while walking down the hall, Elizabeth was struck from behind with a pencil. In gym class the next day, someone threw a rock at her. When a soldier asked who, the white students just laughed.
Elizabeth suffered disproportionately. Apart from being the most vulnerable, she was also the most symbolically potent: if only they could drive out the girl who had come to epitomise the Nine, the segregationists may have hoped, the others would quickly follow, and the whole integrationist edifice would crumble.
Elizabeth had to be coaxed into participating in the 40th anniversary celebrations in 1997, even though they promised to be the most glorious yet: President Bill Clinton would preside. Elizabeth gradually became involved, meeting planners of the visitor centre the National Park Service planned to open in the old Mobil station near the school.
Also involved in the commemorations was Elizabeth Jacoway of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, who was writing a history of the schools crisis. Jacoway had interviewed dozens of participants, including Elizabeth (in 1994) and Hazel (in 1996). Having pondered Hazel’s face for decades, Jacoway had been expecting an uneducated hick and was surprised by how articulate and remorseful she was.
In the years after Little Rock, Hazel had become increasingly political, branching out into peace activism and social work. One programme focused on self-esteem for teenagers. She took black teenagers who rarely had left Little Rock on field trips, climbing Pinnacle Mountain and picking strawberries. And, putting her course work in child psychology to use, she counselled young unwed mothers, many of them black, on parenting skills.
All this do-gooding with blacks, her husband, Antoine, joked, was really her way of atoning for the picture. And maybe he was right. Her whole outlook towards black people had changed. At the Barnes & Noble in Little Rock, she perused the sections on black history. She read David Shipler’s study of black-white relations in America, A Country of Strangers, a book Elizabeth herself had helped inspire.
Someone had suggested that an entire wall of the new visitor centre be devoted to the photograph. But Jacoway had another idea: subordinating the original photograph to a contemporary picture of Elizabeth and Hazel together – one symbolising the racial progress Little Rock had made. Will Counts was thinking similar thoughts. Newly retired from a professorship at Indiana University, the photographer had returned to Arkansas to chronicle the changes at Central since 1957.
When Elizabeth cut the ribbon at the dedication of the new visitor centre on September 20, Counts looked on. Afterward, Jacoway gave him Hazel’s number. Later that day, he spoke to both women. They agreed to meet.
For a moment, the two women faced one another. Still imagining Hazel as a blonde, Elizabeth was taken a bit aback to behold a brunette. “Hi, I’ve always wanted to meet you,” Elizabeth told her. “You’re mighty brave to face the cameras again,” she told Hazel as the three visitors entered the house. Hazel found the remark puzzling: Elizabeth seemed to be warning her of risks she couldn’t foresee.
Counts had already scouted possible locations to shoot the pair. He was thinking not so much about making great art, but about making a point, about the power of human beings to grow, and to forgive. And these two women actually looked comfortable with each other; they weren’t just putting on a show. Watching it was, for him, a near-religious experience, one of the most thrilling moments in his life.
When the anniversary commemorations ended in late September of 1997, Elizabeth and Hazel prepared to go their very separate ways. But, as time passed, Hazel realised that she wasn’t quite ready to let go.
In mid-November, Hazel invited Elizabeth and two of her sister Anna’s grandchildren to her house. Then, later that month, came the poster signing.
A large crowd showed up. As for the poster itself, Hazel thought the original picture was too small: as much as she hated it, she believed it couldn’t and shouldn’t be hidden. Elizabeth had a different problem with it: she thought the title – “Reconciliation” — overstated; there was a big difference between that and forgiveness.
Their encounters gradually became more frequent, almost routine. Over the next several months, they went to a home and garden show, and bought daylilies and irises together. They shopped for fabrics together. They heard Maya Angelou read poetry together.
The two enrolled in a seminar on racial healing offered by Little Rock’s racial and cultural diversity commission. Discussing race relations in a group of 20 every Monday night for 12 weeks was a revelation to each: Elizabeth had never realised how paralysed by anger and hate she had been, and hoped to leech some of that rage. It seemed to work, and she came to look forward to each session.
As for Hazel, she was naive about how bitter some blacks were; here was a problem one couldn’t simply wish away, or eliminate with soothing words. She was also amazed by how little race history she knew: after one class, Elizabeth mentioned Strange Fruit, the anti-lynching song Billie Holiday had made famous, and, much to Elizabeth’s astonishment, Hazel knew nothing about either the song or the subject. The picture itself was never discussed. But their classmates were tickled to be sitting alongside two such famous antagonists and, week by week, watching them bond.
Quietly, though, some considered the rapprochement, however lovely in principle, a triumph of sentimentality, wishful thinking, and marketing over reality. They wondered how deep it went and how long it could last. In some segments of her own community, Elizabeth stood accused of whitewashing reality. “I have been surprised by the vitriol that some young blacks approach me with,” she told the BBC. “They feel like I’m saying that what happened, it’s all over with and there are no repercussions. They feel like I’m wiping away the past.”
Almost from the outset, Hazel encountered hostility from whites. Some doubted her sincerity; more resented it. Soon, and most seriously, tensions developed with Elizabeth. Novelty and companionability, excitement and relief had propelled them along for a time.
But strains soon surfaced. The source was Elizabeth, and it was predictable, for she had always been the harder sell. Her usual wariness, vigilance, and perfectionism could be kept at bay only so long. As the two shared more time and platforms, Elizabeth spotted what she perceived to be discrepancies, inconsistencies and evasions, in Hazel’s story.
The fissure was painfully apparent that March, 18 months into their relationship, when they met Linda Monk, a lawyer turned writer who hoped to write a book about the women. She recorded some of their sessions, and those taped conversations captured how Elizabeth’s mood had changed.
“After you saw [Counts’s] pictures in the paper, you don’t remember how you felt or what people close to you talked about?” she asked Hazel incredulously at one point. ‘‘There wasn’t much conversation about it, really,’’ replied Hazel. What she’d done that morning had been so banal — “just hamming up and being recognised – getting attention” – that it hadn’t been worth remembering, she insisted. Maybe she had a block. But Elizabeth wasn’t buying it.
Elizabeth had forgiven Hazel, but that forgiveness, she concluded, had been obtained under false pretences: Hazel hadn’t fully owned up to her past. For her part, Hazel felt under assault. “It’s very hard for me to sit there and listen to you, Elizabeth,” she said weakly. “It’s very hard for me… and if there’s anything I could give you… if I could take it back… if I could…” She began to sob.
In the spring of 1999 I travelled to Little Rock and arranged to meet Elizabeth and Hazel at a barbecue. Afterwards we went to Hazel’s house and talked some more. It was, I thought, a friendly chat. Elizabeth did not let on that she and Hazel were having problems; the two of them were “very close”, she said. They talked a lot, she went on, maybe once a week. Hazel was more forthright about where things stood between them, but still oblique. “I think she still… at times we have a little… well, the honeymoon is over and now we’re getting to take out the garbage,” she said.
Early in 2000 Cathy Collins, the sociologist who had conducted the racial healing seminar Elizabeth and Hazel had attended, invited them for catfish at a local restaurant. Collins planned to write her dissertation on the two of them, and wanted to discuss the project. She had picked up no bad vibes that evening, but Elizabeth had: Hazel seemed very much on edge. Her instincts were sound. Hazel had had enough. They would no longer see each other. Quietly, unceremoniously, their great experiment in racial rapprochement was over.
The “reconciliation” poster was popular enough to warrant another printing. Elizabeth let them go ahead; it was her way of supporting the place. Now, though, she insisted that it carry a caveat, one she devised herself. Soon, a small sticker, resembling the surgeon general’s warning on cigarette packs, appeared in the upper right hand corner. It was gold, and relatively inconspicuous, particularly against Central’s ochre bricks: “True reconciliation can occur only when we honestly acknowledge our painful, but shared, past.” – Elizabeth Eckford.
The message puzzled Hazel, who had not been consulted about either the reprinting or the disclaimer. As far as she was concerned, ‘‘acknowledging the painful but shared past’’ was just what she had been trying to do. She’d have liked to have had her own sticker, one that said, ‘‘True reconciliation can occur only when we honestly let go of resentment and hatred, and move forward.’’ The poster continued to hang in the office of Central’s principal, Nancy Rousseau, though more as an ideal than a reflection of reality.
“I just had hoped that I could show this picture and say, ‘This happened, and that happened, and now…’ and there is no ‘now’,” she said. “And that makes me sad. It makes me sad for them, it makes me sad for the future students at our school, and for the history books, because I’d like a happy ending. And we don’t have that.”
‘Elizabeth and Hazel’ by David Margolick (Yale University Press, £18.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £16.99 plus £1.25p p and p; 0844 871 1516; books.telegraph.co.uk [ http://books.telegraph.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780300141931 ]
*
Related Articles
Jefferson Thomas
07 Sep 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/law-obituaries/7987562/little-rock-nine-us-anti-segregation-law-central-high-school-arkansas-national-guard-101st-airborne.html
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© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2011 (emphasis in original)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/8813134/Elizabeth-Eckford-and-Hazel-Bryan-the-story-behind-the-photograph-that-shamed-America.html
===
Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4ZyuULy9zs
*
Billie Holiday Strange Fruit Lyrics
Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Fruit
*
Strange Fruit - The Film
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/strangefruit/film.html
===
Through a Lens, Darkly
Elizabeth Eckford, followed and taunted by an angry crowd after she was denied entrance to Little Rock Central High School, September 4, 1957. The girl in the light dress behind her is Hazel Bryan.
Will Counts Collection/Indiana University Archives.
During the historic 1957 desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, 26-year-old journalist Will Counts took a photograph that gave an iconic face to the passions at the center of the civil-rights movement—two faces, actually: those of 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford on her first day of school, and her most recognizable tormentor, Hazel Bryan. The story of how these two women struggled to reconcile and move on from the event is a remarkable journey through the last half-century of race relations in America.
by David Margolick
September 24, 2007
It was a school night, and Elizabeth Eckford was too excited to sleep. The next morning, September 4, 1957, was her first day of classes, and one last time she ironed the pleated white skirt she'd made for the occasion. It was made of piqué cotton; when she'd run out of material, she'd trimmed it with navy-blue-and-white gingham. Then she put aside her new bobby socks and white buck loafers. Around 7:30 a.m. the following day, she boarded a bus bound for Little Rock Central High School.
Other black schoolchildren were due at Central that historic day, but Elizabeth would be the first to arrive. The world would soon know all about the Little Rock Nine. But when Elizabeth Eckford tried to enter Central, and thereby become the first black student to integrate a major southern high school, she was really the Little Rock One. The painfully shy 15-year-old daughter of a hyper-protective mother reluctant to challenge age-old racial mores, she was the unlikeliest trailblazer of all. But as dramatic as the moment was, it really mattered only because Elizabeth wandered into the path of Will Counts's camera.
Few pictures capture an epoch. But in the contorted, hate-filled face of a young white girl named Hazel Bryan standing behind Elizabeth, screaming epithets at her, Counts encapsulated the rage of the Jim Crow South. And even behind her large sunglasses—her eyes were as sensitive as the rest of her—Elizabeth embodied something else: the dignity, and determination, and wisdom, and stoicism, with which black Americans tried to change their lot. It's all there in one picture, in a way white America could readily understand when it landed on its front stoops. It has reverberated ever since, and resonates still as the 50th anniversary of the events in Little Rock is marked this month.
Study any great photograph, and you will always find more things to see, and learn. For instance, there are the bystanders—out of focus, perhaps, but clear enough to reveal their indifference to or pleasure in another person's pain. But the picture belongs to Elizabeth and Hazel, and for them it set off a drama that has never really ended. Bound together in fame and misfortune, they have tried, separately and together, to escape the frame. After a brief and well-photographed pseudo-reconciliation 10 years ago, the two are once more incommunicado, living only a few miles, and a cultural chasm, apart. While Elizabeth has spent the past decade coming out of a shell, Hazel has spent it going in.
Elizabeth Eckford sits at home with her schoolbooks after being turned away from Central High by National Guardsmen on September 4, 1957.
© Bettmann/Corbis.
In the next few days, all of the well-practiced and increasingly elaborate rituals that have developed around the Little Rock Nine will be re-enacted, bigger and better than ever. Bill Clinton, who as an 11-year-old boy 50 miles down the road in Hot Springs watched the drama in Little Rock unfold—and who credits Elizabeth and the other eight with liberating him from racial prejudice—will be there, and so will Hillary. But there will be no photograph of Elizabeth and Hazel this time around. Now, as it was 50 years ago, they symbolize America's racial divide.
What the local black newspaper wrote about Elizabeth in September 1957—that her fateful walk to school would leave an impression on her that "only death will erase"—has proven to be prophetic. The eight others quickly moved on. They left the South and, in a couple of instances, the country. Four of them married whites. They have had successful careers and families. Elizabeth, by contrast, has never strayed all that far from Little Rock, psychologically or physically. She lives in the house she left on the morning of September 4, 1957. And she has struggled with the legacy of Little Rock in a way the others haven't. Keen and unsentimental, and at times undiplomatic, she alone says she would not do it again, though she's pleased she did it once. The others regard Elizabeth as the most vulnerable among them, and have always looked out for her. But they know, too, that as stationary as she appears, it is she who's come the furthest.
*
As southern states went 50 years ago, Arkansas was racially open-minded. Its governor in 1957, Orval Faubus, had been elected three years earlier as a moderate. Little Rock (population 100,000 at the time) was considered one of the most progressive cities in the region. Five days after the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 ruling ordering school integration, the local school board pledged to comply. But beneath the city's tolerant façade, Jim Crow was alive and well. When perhaps the most famous black reporter in the country, Ethel Payne of the Chicago Defender, came to town to cover the school crisis, for instance, she couldn't find a place to eat. "The crummiest corner on the map," she called Little Rock.
For all its professed good intentions, the school board moved tentatively and begrudgingly, taking three years to enroll only a token number of blacks in one school: Little Rock Central High School, the most prestigious in the state. Administrators looked for black students strong enough to survive the ordeal but placid enough not to make trouble. The superintendent told Elizabeth she'd have to be like Jackie Robinson, turning the other cheek, never talking or fighting back. Improbably—mistakenly, really—sensitive, brooding Elizabeth somehow made the cut. And even more improbably, her worrywart mother agreed to let her go. There'd be only eight others, in a student population of roughly 2,000.
Among Little Rock's black community, the Eckfords were known for their intelligence and seriousness. They thought of themselves as special—as "something on a stick," Elizabeth's mother once said. The patriarch was Elizabeth's grandfather Oscar Eckford Sr., a large and formidable man—his wife, and even some white people, used "Mr." when addressing him—who ran a small grocery store. From him, Elizabeth always understood she would go to college, even though it was never clear how they'd pay. Elizabeth's father, Oscar Jr., worked nights at the train station and weekends cleaning white peoples' houses; her mother, Birdie, did the laundry at the Arkansas School for the Blind and Deaf Negro, five blocks from the modest home the Eckfords bought in 1949 and moved into on Elizabeth's eighth birthday, later that year. Birdie Eckford's job allowed her to look out for her badly handicapped son, one of her six children, who went to school there. Elizabeth's grandfather was the only man she knew who spoke to white people without fear, but her mother had her Uncle Tom ways. "I have never had trouble with white people," she once said. "I always gave in, if necessary." The Eckfords had no phone but did have a television, the better to keep the children in Birdie's sights. "The Queen of No," Elizabeth still calls her mother, 15 years after her death.
A 10th grader at the segregated Horace Mann High School in the spring of 1957, Elizabeth read habitually and got good grades. She especially loved history. She was essentially a loner, prone to sitting and daydreaming on the big rock in her backyard for hours at a time, thinking that wherever she was, she didn't quite belong. No one had yet diagnosed her as depressed, but there was a history of the condition in her family.
Inspired by the example of Thurgood Marshall, who'd just argued the Brown case before the Supreme Court, she wanted to become a lawyer. She preferred Central not out of some burning desire to mix with whites, but because it offered courses that Horace Mann didn't. While underfunded, Little Rock's black schools had a distinguished tradition, teaching black pride before the term existed and black history before there were any texts. So whatever benefits Central conferred on its first black students would come at a cost: the loss of friends, community, and teachers who cared, as well as the chance to participate in extracurricular activities, since the school board, fearing white outrage over racial mixing, had barred the nine black students from them.
Eckford being turned away by the Arkansas National Guard, September 4, 1957.
Will Counts Collection/Indiana University Archives.
As the new school year loomed, segregationist groups and fundamentalist clergy mobilized. On the night of September 1, 1957, Faubus stationed the Arkansas National Guard around Central, ostensibly to prevent violence, but really to keep the black students out. On September 3, a federal judge ordered that desegregation proceed, and late that night, the director of the Arkansas chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., Daisy Bates, instructed the black parents to bring their children to her home the following morning. From there, the students, accompanied by a few ministers—white and black—would proceed to Central as a group. But the Eckfords didn't have a phone, so Bates never notified them.
Growing up in the segregated South, Elizabeth had little experience with whites, good or bad. While her parents were apprehensive that first morning, what mattered most to her was looking nice, and in that, she had an edge. Everyone knew that the Eckford girls were expert seamstresses; practically everything they wore, they made, and not using the rudimentary patterns from McCall's or Simplicity, but following the more complicated ones from Vogue. After making sure everyone looked right and had their pencils and notebooks and lunch money, Mrs. Eckford gathered her children around her, and together they read aloud the 27th Psalm.
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?
When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell.
Though an host should encamp against me, my heart shall not fear:
Though war should rise against me, in this will I be confident.
Then Elizabeth left the house and, four blocks away, boarded the bus heading downtown.
Fifteen minutes later, at the corner of 12th and Park Avenue, two blocks from Central, she hopped off. She'd often walked by Central—it was on the way to her grandfather's store—and instantly she sensed something was awry: more parked cars than usual, the murmur of a crowd. Then the jeeps and half-tracks came into view, along with the soldiers ringing the school. She saw some white children pass quietly through the line, a sign that everything was al right. But the first two soldiers she approached rebuffed her. A mob of several hundred protesters that had gathered across the street quickly caught sight of her. "They're coming!" someone shouted. "The niggers are coming!" Elizabeth walked down the street a bit, then approached a different group of soldiers. This time they closed ranks and crossed rifles. "Don't let her in!" someone shouted.
Elizabeth's knees started to shake. She walked toward Central's main entrance and tried a third time; again, the soldiers blocked her way, but this time told her to cross the street. Now the crowd fell in behind her, shouting: "Lynch her! Lynch her!" "No nigger bitch is going to get in our school! Get out of here!" "Go back to where you came from!" Looking for a friendly face, she turned to an old woman, who spat on her. Before long, some 250 whites were at her heels. She knew she couldn't go back the way she'd come. But if she could only get to the bus stop a block ahead, she thought, she would be safe. She wanted to run, but thought she might fall down. Recording it all was 26-year-old Will Counts of the Arkansas Democrat. He felt sorry for Elizabeth, but he had a job to do; he just hoped he had enough film. "Lynch her!" someone shouted. "Send that nigger back to the jungle!"
One white girl in the throng stood out: she was "screaming, just hysterical," as Benjamin Fine of The New York Times later put it. It was Hazel Bryan. Unlike many in the crowd, rednecks from the sticks, Hazel was a student at Central—like Elizabeth, about to begin her junior year. Her father was a disabled vet; her mother made lightbulbs for Westinghouse. Hazel's dress was fashionable and a bit too tight, as if to show off her figure. Her good looks brought her lots of boys and a certain license, and she'd always been a bit of a performer. Her racial attitudes mirrored her parents': her father would not let black clerks wait on him, for instance, and when banks started hiring black tellers, he found himself another line.
Marching alongside Hazel, chanting "Two, four, six, eight—we don't want to integrate!" were two friends, Mary Ann Burleson and Sammie Dean Parker. Sammie Dean, immediately to Hazel's right in the picture and wearing a dark dress, was one of the ringleaders of the segregationist students; Mary Ann, the girl carrying the purse at the far left, was largely along for the ride. Each of them was having herself a grand old time. But to Hazel—her friends called her "Kitty"—this was serious business, and her mood, and look, were dark. An alien federal government was foisting blacks into her secure, comfortable schoolgirl world, and she was outraged. While Mary Ann stared ahead amiably and Sammie Dean Parker turned momentarily toward her father, thereby protecting herself from ignominy and posterity, Hazel, her eyes narrowed, her brow furrowed, her teeth clenched as if about to bite, shrieked: "Go home, nigger! Go back to Africa!" Click. Will Counts had his picture.
"This little girl, this tender little thing, walking with this whole mob baying at her like a pack of wolves" was how Benjamin Fine later described the scene. Once she reached the bus stop, Elizabeth sat herself down at the edge of the empty bench, as if not wanting to take up too much space. "Drag her over to this tree!" someone shouted. A small group of reporters—Jerry Dhonau and Ray Moseley of the Arkansas Gazette, Paul Welch of Life—formed an informal protective cordon around her; it was all that they, as professionals, felt they could do. But Fine sat himself next to Elizabeth and, at a time and place in which whites simply didn't do such things, put his arm around her, then lifted her chin. "Don't let them see you cry," he said. The move inflamed the crowd, made Fine a target for the rest of his stay in Little Rock, and probably hastened his departure from the paper. Years later, he was asked if he'd stepped beyond his assigned role. "A reporter has to be a human being," he replied.
Moments after Fine had sat with Elizabeth, Robert Schakne of CBS News approached her with a microphone, and stuck it in her face. Television news was still new, and the rules were not yet clear. "Can you tell us who you are?" he asked. "Can you tell me your name, please? Are you going to go to school here at Central High?" Elizabeth said nothing. As the camera rolled, Hazel, still looking cross, passed by Elizabeth and, perhaps for the first time that day, actually saw her face.
By now, the other eight black students had been rebuffed en masse, and dispersed. One of them, Terrence Roberts, spotted Elizabeth, and offered to walk her home. But he would have accompanied her only part of the way, and she worried what could happen once he'd left her. Daisy Bates's husband also offered assistance, pulling back his jacket to show Elizabeth the gun he was wearing beneath his belt. But her mother would never have approved of her going off with a strange man. Then a white woman named Grace Lorch, wife of a professor at the local black college, tried to help, taking Elizabeth with her to the drugstore across the street to call for a cab. When they reached it, the owner locked the door in their faces. After 35 minutes the bus finally came and, through a barrage of abuse, the two boarded. (The Lorches were old radicals—Grace's husband, Lee, had lost his job at City College in New York for agitating to integrate Stuyvesant Town, the massive housing complex on New York's East Side—and one Arkansas official later charged that Grace's "Communist masters" had directed her to protect Elizabeth that day.) As for Elizabeth, she hadn't wanted Grace Lorch's help—her admonishments to the crowd (she told them that one day they'd all be ashamed of themselves) had only riled it up more—and she was relieved when, after a brief time, Lorch got off the bus.
There are times, as Elizabeth puts it, when you just know you need your mama. She went directly to the basement of her mother's school, where the laundry was located. Elizabeth found her looking out the window; simply from her posture, she could tell she'd been praying. When her mother turned, she could see she'd been crying too. Elizabeth wanted to say she was all right, but neither of them could speak. Instead, they embraced, then headed home. Meantime, Elizabeth's father had gone looking for her, carrying a .45-caliber revolver along with the only three bullets he could find.
The afternoon Democrat soon hit the streets, with Counts's picture at the bottom of the front page. Elizabeth's last name was misspelled (as it was beneath a similar picture by United Press photographer Johnny Jenkins in the Gazette the next morning). Hazel was unidentified, the editors apparently regarding her simply as a generic segregationist white kid. "Read the awful story," the vice principal for girls at Central, Elizabeth Huckaby, wrote in her diary that night. "Saw the awful pictures—the dignity of the rejected Negro girl, the obscenity of the faces of her tormentors."
Around the same time, the Nine gathered at the Bates home. It was the first time Elizabeth had ever met Daisy Bates. Segregationists, reporters, and Faubus were to accuse her of sending Elizabeth into the mob deliberately, to garner sympathetic publicity. Now Elizabeth let her have it, too. "Why did you forget me?" she asked, with what Bates, who died in 1999, later called "cold hatred in her eyes." To this day, Elizabeth believes that Bates, now lionized by everyone (a major street near Central High School has been named for her), saw the black students as little more than foot soldiers in a cause, and left them woefully unprepared for their ordeal.
For two and a half weeks, as lawyers, judges, and politicians wrangled over their fate, the Little Rock Nine stayed home. Meantime, the image of Elizabeth and Hazel flashed around the world. A century from now, Langston Hughes wrote in the Chicago Defender, this "one lone little Negro girl" would matter more than all the other allegedly more important players in the drama. Soviet Russia relished the black eye the photograph gave the United States. (Later, Radio Moscow reported that Elizabeth had been murdered.) The world press praised Elizabeth and condemned her attackers. It was no small feat, the Arkansas Gazette editorialized, to bring together L'Osservatore Romano (the Vatican paper), Pravda, and newspapers in Germany, whose leader had snubbed Jesse Owens only 20 years before. Also in the Gazette, a farmer named Davis Fitzhugh took out an ad, in which he reprinted the photograph, with a message: "If you live in Arkansas, Study This Picture and Know Shame."
Elizabeth received long-distance calls, and as many as 50 letters a day, from all over the world. One, from a 16-year-old in Japan, was addressed simply to "Miss Elizabeth Eckford, Littol Rocke, USA." A few sympathetic whites left cash for her at her grandfather's store. On her birthday in October, a white man came to her home and gave her a new wristwatch, a gift from his dying wife. To a few reporters, Elizabeth told her story, "punctuated with sobs." "Elizabeth Ann Eckford, 15, is the most sensitive of the children," a reporter from NBC told a radio audience. "She's also the prettiest girl. She's pensive, the kind of person who loves deeply and can be hurt deeply." Checks flooded into the N.A.A.C.P. With all this visibility came repercussions. Someone threw a brick through the window of her grandfather's store. And something descended on Elizabeth that has never fully lifted. Afterward, says another of the Nine, Jefferson Thomas, "she walked with her head down, as if she wanted to make sure the floor didn't open up beneath her."
As for Hazel, Mary Ann Burleson recalls, she was "rather pleased with herself"—so much so that two days later, she was in front of Central again, telling reporters that no way would she attend an integrated Central High School. "Whites should have rights, too!" she barked at a television camera, as Mary Ann and Sammie Dean looked on with approval. "Nigras aren't the only ones that have a right!" At first, Mrs. Huckaby couldn't place the screaming white girl in the picture, but she later remembered her from the previous winter: Hazel had played hooky to be with her boyfriend, and had failed some courses. The school notified her parents; her father said he did not want to beat her, but sometimes couldn't help himself. Hazel subsequently swallowed some poison, and was briefly hospitalized; Mrs. Huckaby sent a teacher to check on her. The story even made the papers.
Now Hazel was in them again, far more prominently, and the irate vice principal hauled her into her office. Hatred destroyed haters, the older woman said. Hazel only shrugged; "breath wasted," Mrs. Huckaby later wrote. And she was right: the following Monday, Hazel was at Central again, telling newsmen that had God really wanted whites and blacks to be together, "he would have made us all the same color." "The boys and girls pictured in the newspapers are hardly typical and certainly not our leading students," Mrs. Huckaby wrote her brother in New York. "The girl (with mouth open) behind the Negro girl is a badly disorganized child, with violence accepted in the home, and with a poor emotional history." Hazel's parents promptly pulled her out of Central and put her in a rural high school closer to her home. America had seen its last of Hazel Bryan for the next 40 years—except, that is, for the picture, which popped up whenever Little Rock in the 1950s, or the civil-rights movement or race hatred, was recalled.
The spectacle in Little Rock, and federal impotence over what amounted to an insurrection, proved a national embarrassment. Even the perpetually sunny, uncontroversial Louis Armstrong was moved to protest, declaring that the country could go to hell and that President Eisenhower had "no guts," and threatening to cancel a State Department–sponsored goodwill tour to the Soviet Union. (He called Faubus a "no-good motherfucker," which ended up in print as "uneducated plowboy.") "When I see on television and read about a crowd in Arkansas spitting on a little colored girl, I think I have a right to get sore," he explained.
Again, a federal judge ordered Faubus to stop interfering and admit the black children. Again, a date was set: September 23. Again, Daisy Bates notified the black families. By now, the Eckfords had gotten themselves a telephone, but dreading a conversation with them—how could she ask Elizabeth's mother to send her daughter back into the mob?—Bates kept moving them to the bottom of her list. Once more, though, Birdie Eckford agreed to let Elizabeth go, and when the black children assembled at the Bateses' home the next morning, she was among the first to arrive.
Reporter L. Alex Wilson being attacked by a mob, September 23, 1957.
Will Counts Collection/Indiana University Archives.
This time, the Nine got into Central, partly because the rioters had been too busy assaulting a group of black newsmen to notice. (The reporter they focused on, L. Alex Wilson of the Memphis Tri-State Defender, refused to run away, even after being hit over the head by a brick: Elizabeth Eckford hadn't run, he later wrote; how could he? Within three years he died from a case of Parkinson's disease that may well have been brought on by the beating. No one was ever prosecuted.) When the crowd realized what had happened, they threatened to storm the school, and the black students were hastily smuggled out to safety. The chaos led Eisenhower belatedly to send in the 101st Airborne Division, which two days later escorted the Little Rock Nine into Central High School. This time, they stayed.
In all the documentaries over the years, it is invariably at this moment, when Elizabeth and the other eight ascend Central's stately stairs and walk through its grand wooden doors, that the music swells and the credits begin to roll: the story is over. In fact, the world only stopped watching. Within a few weeks Sputnik went up, and everyone had an excuse to look elsewhere. But for the Little Rock Nine, the mob didn't so much disperse as move inside the building. And the more the world looked away, the worse things got.
Students enter Little Rock Central High School under the protection of federal troops.
Will Counts Collection/Indiana University Archives.
Within two weeks, whatever pockets of goodwill the black students initially encountered had evaporated. Instead, a distinct minority of segregationist students—estimates vary between 50 and 200—set the tone, intimidating all the others (few labels were more noxious than "nigger lover") into silence. Their campaign of unremitting but largely clandestine harassment was abetted by school officials who, fearful of making things even worse, ignored all but the most flagrant offenders. The black students, already scattered, became almost entirely isolated, none more than Elizabeth. In classes, she was made to sit by herself, always at the back, often with no one nearby. In the corridors, there was always a space around her. Even the few white children she knew steered clear: Please don't let them know you know me, their eyes seemed to plead. Only during the last class of the day—speech—did she encounter any friendly faces: two, fellow students named Ken Reinhardt and Ann Williams. "I can still see how she looked that [first] day," Ann Williams Wedaman recalls. "Nobody needs to be that lonely." A few other students did speak to her, it was true, but only to hear what "it" sounded like.
Less than a week into school, Mrs. Huckaby later wrote, Elizabeth came into her office "red-eyed, her handkerchief in a damp ball in her hands." The harassment was so bad that she wanted to go home early. But things only got worse, as the disciplinary files, in the collection of Mrs. Huckaby's papers at the University of Arkansas, reveal. Sometime in October: Elizabeth hit with a shower of sharpened pencils. October 28: Elizabeth shoved in hall. November 20: Elizabeth jostled in gym. November 21: Elizabeth hit with paper clip. December 10: Elizabeth kicked. December 18: Elizabeth punched. January 10: Elizabeth shoved on the stairs. January 14: Elizabeth knocked flat. January 22: Elizabeth spat upon. January 29: Elizabeth attacked with spitballs. January 31: Elizabeth asks grandfather to take her home after girls serenade her with humiliating songs in gym class. February 4: Elizabeth has soda bottle thrown at her. February 14: Elizabeth attacked with rock-filled snowballs. March 7: Elizabeth hit by egg. March 12: Elizabeth hit by tomato. "She said that except for some broken glass thrown at her during lunch, she really had had a wonderful day," Mrs. Huckaby wrote at one point, apparently with a straight face.
Jefferson Thomas and Elizabeth Eckford during lunch period at Little Rock Central High School, October 1957.
© Bettmann/Corbis.
The list could have been much longer: Elizabeth gradually stopped reporting problems, because they were so chronic, and because complaining about them did no good. In history class, for instance, a boy with bad skin and a protruding Adam's apple sat behind her muttering "nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger" daily, while classmates looked the other way. The boy, Charles Sawrie, looks back on it all with shame. "It was all kind of stupid," he says. "I just wanted to get a name for myself. I don't remember anything about her except she was black and my job was to make it as rough for the blacks as I could." For Sawrie, the problem was one of class as well as race: for all the abuse these black children were taking, some people actually cared about them, as they did not for poor white kids like himself. Elizabeth sensed as much; she says she actually felt sorry for him.
Most of her tormentors, though, were girls, suggesting the attacks were coordinated. They were also disciplined. The girls left another of the Nine, Thelma Mothershed, who had a serious heart ailment, alone: they didn't want to kill the black students, only drive them out. The local National Guardsmen were either indifferent or even sympathetic to the bigots, and Elizabeth didn't seek their help. "Elizabeth is more anxious to be independent than safe," Mrs. Huckaby wrote. Instead, she fended for herself: a houseful of seamstresses had plenty of straight pins, and she stuck them around the edges of her binder, turning it into a shield. That didn't help in gym class, where supervision was the spottiest; white girls would put broken glass on the shower-room floor, and scald her by flushing all the toilets simultaneously. (The girls showering nearby had evidently been forewarned, and knew when to step aside.)
Worse even than those who harassed her were the vastly larger number of students who ignored her altogether. Then there was Miss Emily Penton's history class, in which she got to hear that slavery actually civilized blacks, that the black officeholders during Reconstruction were "ignoramuses," that the Ku Klux Klan was founded to defend white womanhood. A stern woman with a pince-nez who had taught at Central since it opened, Miss Penton refused even to touch Elizabeth. When there was money to collect, she made her put the coins down on her desk. (When Elizabeth complained about her, she was informed that Miss Penton not only was a graduate of the University of Chicago but also was very much respected in the community.)
Elizabeth could not turn to Daisy Bates and the N.A.A.C.P., which, she felt, had its own agenda. She could not turn to her mother, who would have yanked her out of Central had she known what was happening. Or to her father, who to this day is largely unsympathetic. "Just a little pushing and shoving" is how he once characterized what his daughter had endured. (When Elizabeth and I visited him, he told her that black America was at war at the time; she was, he said, a soldier doing her duty. Besides, he never saw any marks on her.) She couldn't talk to the other black students; none were in her classes, and away from Central, school was the last thing they wanted to discuss. She could not talk to friends; the few she had had steered clear. She couldn't talk to the local press, which either sympathized with the segregationists or ducked the story. That spring a white student told Stan Opotowsky of the New York Post that the nine blacks appeared "in a state of shock." "They jump when you speak," she said. "The other day I smiled and said hello to Elizabeth Eckford and she looked so startled. She looked as though she were waiting for me to say something bad after I said hello."
In January, there were press reports that Elizabeth was withdrawing. But she persevered—she felt she could not let the others down—and she finished the year. Then the Little Rock Nine took a fund-raising tour for the N.A.A.C.P. There were awards in Chicago and Cleveland, and a visit to New York, where they met Dag Hammarskjöld, Ralph Bunche, and Lena Horne. Elizabeth collected all their autographs; it was her way of connecting with people. In Washington, they toured the White House and posed outside the Supreme Court with Thurgood Marshall. Her Central experience had extinguished any desire Elizabeth had had to become a lawyer, but Marshall—funny, profane, the only man gutsy enough to talk back to Daisy Bates—well, he was a different story. "I had a crush on him, I sure did," she says with a laugh.
At summer's end, her mother lost her job—retaliation, surely, for her daughter's role in the Little Rock drama. And then, in the final paroxysm of the segregationists, all of Little Rock's public high schools were closed the 1958–59 year. A tutor taught Elizabeth, leaving her a few credits short of graduating. Like all the others of the Little Rock Nine, she would flee the South, moving in the summer of 1959 to St. Louis. There she got the remaining credits, and there she made the first of several suicide attempts, with over-the-counter sleeping pills. She then continued her education, enrolling first at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, then at Central State University, in Wilberforce, Ohio. Again, she tried killing herself, though in more novel ways: hitchhiking far from campus, for instance, half hoping someone would pick her up and murder her.
Elizabeth, now 21, was visiting Little Rock in the summer of 1963 when she got a most surprising message. Someone had called whom she'd never heard of before. Her name was Hazel Bryan.
At 16, Hazel had married a schoolmate, Antoine Massery, then dropped out. But Hazel, by now the mother of two and living off a gravel road in South Little Rock, had an intellectually curious, independent streak: she chafed at the regimentation and racial intolerance of her church, for instance, and was eventually kicked out of it. Seeing Martin Luther King and the civil-rights protesters on television made her think of Elizabeth, and what she'd done to her six years earlier. Never mentioning it to her husband, she called the first Eckford in the phone book—Elizabeth's grandfather—and left several messages for her. Finally, Elizabeth got back to her. "I just told her who I was—I was the girl in that picture that was yelling at her, that I was sorry, that it was a terrible thing to do and that I didn't want my children to grow up to be like that, and I was crying," Hazel says.
Honestly, Elizabeth wasn't sure just which girl Hazel was. Far from studying the picture, she avoided it; all those white people in it had merged. But she accepted Hazel's apology, because she seemed to be sincere, because her grandfather and father urged her to, and because Hazel so clearly craved forgiveness. Predictably, the two then resumed their very separate ways; this was, after all, the South in 1963. But thereafter, Elizabeth felt protective of Hazel—white people back then paid a price for extending blacks even the slightest courtesy—and whenever reporters asked her for the name of that white girl with the hateful face, she wouldn't say.
Despite the occasional interview, Elizabeth largely laid low. When she attended the March on Washington in the summer of 1963, taking a bus from Little Rock, few there would have known who she was. But she could not escape her past. Watching a production of the play In White America one night in St. Louis, she heard her own voice: an account of her walk she'd once given to a newspaper. Totally unprepared, she ran to the bathroom and cried. Briefly, she moved back to Little Rock. But a broken engagement, her failure to get a college degree, the difficulty finding a teaching job, and her mother's nagging led her, in September 1967, to escape again, this time by joining the Army.
Over the next five years she was stationed at bases in Indiana, in Georgia, in Washington State, and, for 18 months, in Anniston, Alabama. (Remembering the beating the Freedom Riders had taken there, she spent all of one hour during that time in town.) She worked as a pay clerk, then wrote news copy. Fearful that it would blow her cover, when Ernest Green of the Little Rock Nine mentioned her in a New Yorker story, in 1971, she had that issue removed from the base. She left the army in 1972, and in May 1974, at age 32, she moved back home, this time for good. "Other places, for me, weren't any better," she says. "They were just different places." She took a job in the state welfare agency, and for the next 20 years and more, lived in near-total anonymity and despair. In 1976, she had a son, Erin, by a man she did not marry. Two years later, there was another son, Calvin, by another man she didn't marry. Little Rock hadn't changed much, she told Steele Hays of the Arkansas Democrat in 1977, but she had: she expected less. "I want you to know why I came back," she said. "I came back because I felt I was chased away and because I thought it was cowardly and I wanted to come back and prove I could live in this situation. I don't intend to be driven out." To Hays, she appeared on the brink of a breakdown.
Her depression deepened. She quit work and went on non-service veterans' disability. She rarely went out, except to shop and do laundry; by the third or fourth day each month, she'd be broke. She'd declare "soup-and-casserole months" in order to afford rudimentary toys for her sons. To avoid people, she'd mail-order wash-and-wear clothes from Sears or Montgomery Ward. Twice, she put her boys into foster care. For hours she'd lie on her bed, her face to the wall. Or she would watch soap operas incessantly, then remember nothing about them afterward. Or she'd sleep, some days for 16 hours. "Tell them I'm dead," she'd have the boys tell reporters when they called. This they were happy to do, for they came to resent these strange intruders who would come to their home from time to time, make Mama cry, then disappear.
In May 1982, when seven of the Nine gathered in New York for a 25th-anniversary celebration, Elizabeth was one of the absentees: under a doctor's care, The Washington Post reported. That September Elizabeth told People she lived "like a hermit and a recluse." "I've got to get to the point where I can talk about this," she said, referring to her Central High School experiences, dabbing her reddened eyes with a dish towel. "Until then, it will never be over for me." In 1987, she refused to speak to the makers of Eyes on the Prize.
That year marked the 30th anniversary of Central's desegregation, and for the Nine and their supporters, there was something else to celebrate: Bill Clinton, who has said that the Little Rock crisis made racial equality "a driving obsession" in his life, was now governor of Arkansas. He took special pleasure in inviting the Nine to the governor's mansion, the very building in which Faubus had hatched his exclusionary schemes. (Elizabeth was impolitic, telling Clinton she had felt used by the N.A.A.C.P. "Mrs. Clinton's jaw kind of clenched," she recalls. "It really was a rude comment, but sometimes I can't help myself.")
The filmmakers Bill Jersey and Judith Leonard interviewed her for a 1989 documentary on Chief Justice Earl Warren, author of the Brown decision. Twice, in biopics of Mrs. Huckaby and Ernest Green, Hollywood had re-enacted Elizabeth's walk, neither time to her satisfaction; too cheap to hire enough extras, she grouses, they had turned it into a kind of ramble. For the Warren documentary, Elizabeth did it herself. It was, she now says, "a bad, bad, bad decision." The result was, and is, almost too painful to watch. "Little Rock would be the battlefield, and the first casualty would be one of the Nine," Atticus Finch—Gregory Peck—narrates as the original footage is shown. Then the contemporary Elizabeth appears, talking about the soldiers. "I thought they were there for my p-p-p-protection," she stammered, tears streaming down her face. "I was looking at a woman who was truly broken," Leonard recalls.
But shortly after this, Elizabeth changed medications for her depression, and her life began to brighten. She started to read more, buying 50-cent books from the thrift store. Some—Dickens, Robinson Crusoe, The Call of the Wild—she remembered from childhood; others, like the works of Plato and Aristotle, were new to her. She began also to read histories of the school crisis, and was shocked to see how incomplete they were.
Still, when in 1996 Oprah Winfrey brought seven of the Nine together with four white contemporaries from Central, Elizabeth would not join them. And only with repeated coaxing did she participate in the 40th-anniversary observances the following year. The celebration was the biggest yet—by now Clinton was president, and Central had become a National Historic Site—and included the opening of a new visitors' center, in an old Mobil station near where Elizabeth had begun her walk. Needless to say, the picture of Hazel and Elizabeth greeted people as soon as they walked in. At the dedication, Elizabeth Jacoway, a historian who'd met Hazel while writing her book on the school crisis, Turn Away Thy Son, spotted Will Counts. She suggested he take an updated photograph of Elizabeth and Hazel—this one symbolizing reconciliation.
By 1997, Hazel Bryan Massery had three adult children and seven grandchildren. She had grown more prosperous—her husband had gone into antennae and satellite-TV installation—but also more unsettled. She had joined peace groups, done spiritual things, taken up belly dancing and screenwriting and feminism and performing as a clown. Much she did in secret, so that her husband couldn't disapprove. On racial matters, she tried making amends, working with young black mothers-to-be and counseling minority students. She'd also confronted her mother on her racial attitudes, leaving the older woman, as she later put it, "foaming at the mouth." Few reporters had ever bothered tracking Hazel down, and this irked her: they preferred her frozen in time, and antipathy. But in early 1996 she'd been interviewed by Jacoway and Pete Daniel of the Smithsonian Institution. "She was very attractive, not mean-spirited in the way I expected, not bitter and—excuse me, but I hate this term—redneck-y," Jacoway remembers. When Counts called her, she agreed instantly to pose. So did Elizabeth. For years, she would not have. But she was curious to meet Hazel. And besides, she was slowly coming back to life.
Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery at Little Rock Central High School in 1997.
Will Counts Collection/Indiana University Archives.
Shortly before the anniversary celebration began, driving in a borrowed van with Arkansas plates to avoid any undue attention, Counts drove Hazel to Elizabeth's house. Then, 40 years and a couple of weeks after their first encounter, Elizabeth and Hazel were together again. This time, they talked—about flowers and children and clothes. Hazel apologized to Elizabeth, thanked her for agreeing to meet, helped her decide what to wear for the new photograph. Elizabeth told Hazel she was very brave to face the cameras again. Privately, she thought Hazel was naïve—that by coming out, she'd get plenty of attention all right, but not necessarily the kind she anticipated. The two then returned to Central, where Counts photographed them anew.
The next day the picture ran on the front page of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Along with the photograph of Clinton escorting the Nine through Central's main doorway, it became the most enduring image of the anniversary. Hazel became a proxy for an entire community: saddled with images from 1957 wherever they went, dismissed as racist yahoos, people in Little Rock saw her re-emergence, and penitence, and apparent acceptance, as signs that they, too, might finally be redeemed. Some viewed the new photograph in biblical terms. "The beauty of the God-made deep black skin of the one seems to enhance the same-made and equally beautiful ice-white skin of the other," wrote the Reverend Will Campbell, one of the white ministers who had accompanied the black students to school on the first day. To him the bond between the two women was "the stuff of Scripture … a glimpse of the Promised Land."
President Bill Clinton at Little Rock Central High School celebrates the 40th anniversary of the 1957 desegregation with members of the Little Rock Nine and others.
Cynthia Johnson/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Skip Rutherford, the Friend of Bill who coordinated the anniversary celebration, quickly arranged to put the new picture on a poster, with the original inserted in the corner. He titled it "Reconciliation," and soon it was selling briskly at the new visitors' center. Little Rock's congressman, Vic Snyder, displayed it on the floor of the House of Representatives. (Central's current principal, Nancy Rousseau, has it hanging in her office.) To Michael Leahy of the Democrat-Gazette and other reporters, Hazel expressed remorse for the events of 1957, but insisted that her life was "more than a moment." "Hazel Massery beams, wondering whether at long last she gets to step out of one photograph and into another," one reporter wrote.
Elizabeth and Hazel, two loners who never quite fit in anywhere, became friends. They went to flower shows together, bought fabrics together, took mineral baths and massages together, appeared in documentaries and before school groups together. Since Elizabeth had never learned to drive, Hazel joked that she had become Elizabeth's chauffeur. Whenever something cost money, Hazel treated; it was awkward for Elizabeth, who had a hard time explaining to people just how poor she was. They spoke often, including once when Elizabeth called her from Air Force One. (After signing a measure at the White House to award the Nine the Congressional Gold Medal, Clinton invited Elizabeth to fly back to Arkansas with him. The Lewinsky scandal had broken, and when Elizabeth was too tongue-tied to make small talk with the president en route, she felt she'd failed him when he could have used some bolstering, or at least some distracting.)
At Hazel's urging—nagging may have been more like it—Elizabeth agreed to work with her on a book, and they found themselves an agent and an author. The two even visited Hazel's mother, who prepared a lunch for them. It was, Elizabeth surmised, probably the first time the older woman had ever served a black person in her home. Hazel wanted to make Elizabeth happy. Elizabeth called her "Pollyanna"; Hazel took it as a compliment. The Democrat-Gazette listed the rapprochement as one of the happiest events of 1997. "They sort of encapsulated all our community had gone through," says Cathy Collins, a social worker who ran a seminar on racial healing in which the two participated for 12 weeks, in 1998. "It gave us a tremendous amount of hope."
The relationship expedited Elizabeth's rebirth. Speaking to student groups brought her out and satisfied her lifelong urge to teach. Then, in April 1999, she took her first job in 20 years, as a probation officer for Judge Marion Humphrey of the Pulaski County Circuit Court in Little Rock. To Humphrey, who is black, Elizabeth embodied the pride and discipline lacking in many of the younger African-Americans who landed in his court. His office had recently been rocked by a personnel scandal, and in Elizabeth, he thought he'd found instant impeccability. And as someone who'd watched the Nine as a schoolboy in nearby Pine Bluff, he felt he had a debt to discharge, as did all of Little Rock. "She was someone who'd opened up doors of opportunity for me," he says. "She's owed much more than she's received in this community." So thrilled was Elizabeth to be working again that she never asked what the job paid, nor did it matter when she learned it wasn't very much.
From the outset, some found Elizabeth and Hazel's friendship artificial and unconvincing. To Mary Ann Burleson, who had apologized in 1996 for her conduct 40 years earlier, and who now lived in Hot Springs, it was her old friend on another ego trip. "I thought, 'That little stinker! She's doing this for Hazel, not for Elizabeth.'" Hazel's sister said their father, who'd died a few years earlier, was rolling over in his grave because of it. Hazel found a bouquet of dead flowers on her driveway. Her in-laws disapproved. Her friends were silent. So were her fellow troublemakers, not one of whom followed her example and came forward. It would ruin his business, another person in the picture once told Hazel. At a Central reunion, classmates gave her the cold shoulder—not because she apologized, though some doubted her sincerity, but because she hadn't apologized to them, too, for helping to paint them all as racists. That's certainly what Ralph Brodie believed. To Brodie, a Little Rock lawyer who'd been president of the student body in 1957 and had fought ever since to clear Central's sullied image, Hazel was a curse. For decades, he'd argued that most Central students were good kids, and that without their goodwill and levelheadedness, things would have been much, much worse. But in every history book, in every newspaper article, on every anniversary, and now before every museumgoer, Hazel's hate-filled face blocked all that out.
Elizabeth also got flak, from other blacks—her younger son among them—who felt she'd been hoodwinked. "Are you extremely gullible or are you just very, very forgiving?" one of the Nine asked her. Another complained when Hazel took part in various commemorations. "We're the Little Rock Nine, not the Little Rock Ten," she said. Among them, Hazel still finds little sympathy. "We kind of joked about it: here she is, framed forever with her mouth spewing out whatever she was spewing out, and no matter what she does in life she can't erase that photo," says Ernest Green. "The lesson in life is: Don't get in a picture unless you want to go through it forever, because you're not sure which one will survive and which one will not."
The most public skeptic was Oprah Winfrey, who hosted Elizabeth and Hazel on a program in November 1999. Reconciliation and redemption are her things, but this one was too much even for her. "They are friends. They … are … friends," Oprah said, the first time in apparent disbelief, the second time, it seemed, with distaste and resignation. Elizabeth, who still covers up the photograph with a tissue when she signs books (the white dress affords a perfect place for autographs), suddenly found it on a massive screen directly in front of her as her host bore down, asking her clinically why looking at it still upset her so. "She was as cold as she could be," Elizabeth recalls. "She went out of her way to be hateful." Characteristically, though, Elizabeth felt sorrier for Hazel. She was treated even more brusquely.
It was around this time, during a visit to Little Rock on another story, that I first saw the poster. Intrigued, I arranged to meet Elizabeth and Hazel at a suburban barbecue joint. What sticks with me was how giddy Elizabeth was that day: she had just gotten her first credit card and, wanting to see if it really worked, had insisted on picking up the check. Afterward, we went to Hazel's house, a pleasant, hand-built structure on the side of a hill. The three of us had what I thought was a friendly chat, though I later learned that Hazel had felt slighted: it seemed she'd thought I'd paid more attention to Elizabeth. Those blacks and Jews always stick together, she later complained. "I consider us very close," Elizabeth said that day. She dismissed those blacks who'd criticized the relationship. "I tell them the questions they're asking are racist, that I choose my own friends, and that I believe she's sincere."
In fact, the relationship was already beginning to fray, as Hazel hinted. "The honeymoon is over and now we're getting to take out the garbage," she said cryptically. Hazel forever felt on the defensive. Blacks were skeptical of her; whites (particularly younger white students), judgmental. She found herself apologizing incessantly for herself or for her parents. Meanwhile, Elizabeth was souring on her. Hazel's story, Elizabeth was discovering, was filled with holes and discrepancies. She refused to implicate her parents, insisting that the racism she learned was somehow "in the air." She pleaded "amnesia" about her activities at Central. She said she'd known right away that what she'd done was wrong, when in fact she kept saying the same things in the days after. Elizabeth came to think that Hazel was seeking forgiveness on the cheap, without any pain or introspection. "She wanted me to be cured and be over it and for this not to go on anymore," Elizabeth says. "She wanted me to be less uncomfortable so that she wouldn't feel responsible."
The rift was evident in October 1999, when the two spoke at the University of Indiana. "When they came out onstage I thought, There's nothing real about this," recalls Mary Smith-Forrest, then an official with the local N.A.A.C.P., who added that Hazel seemed ill-at-ease in Elizabeth's presence. When Hazel told a radio host there named Shana Ritter that her parents pulled her out of Central for her own safety, Elizabeth jumped on her. "Every time you say that I'm puzzled," she interjected. "Who did they expect to harm you?" Asked for some closing thoughts, Hazel offered something gaseous about "dialogue." "There's a southern saying about some people peeing and calling it rain," Elizabeth countered—on the air.
Hazel Bryan Massery (5th from left) and Elizabeth Eckford (on President Clinton's right) with others in the Oval Office after the Little Rock Nine received the Congressional Gold Medal, November 1999.
White House Photo/courtesy Ken Reinhardt.
The next month, the Nine collected their Congressional Gold Medals at a White House ceremony. Elizabeth invited all of those most responsible for her "personal renaissance," and says she'd have included Hazel had the others not been certain to object. But Skip Rutherford did invite Hazel, and she looked on as Clinton summoned Elizabeth to the podium. "Come here, girl!" he said. Elizabeth saluted him—civilians weren't supposed to, she knew, but she got carried away—and he saluted back. They hugged for a long time, and as they rocked back and forth, Elizabeth apologized for not consoling him better on that flight back to Arkansas. Later, when she and her friends posed with Clinton in the Oval Office, Elizabeth invited Hazel to join them. She felt sorry for her, she says: she was in Washington by herself. So now there was a third picture of the two of them together, this time with a president.
Two and a half years after it began, following an acrimonious dinner in Little Rock, this experiment in racial harmony quietly ended. There were no pictures in the papers. Many people didn't even notice, and probably haven't still, as the 50th anniversary has arrived. The rupture has been nearly total. Only twice since have Elizabeth and Hazel even spoken: on September 11, 2001, when a frightened Hazel called Elizabeth from somewhere in the Northeast, and a few weeks later, when Will Counts died. Hazel has also withdrawn from public life. She has never given another interview, to me or anyone else. It was all a big mistake, she has told friends, one that has caused her irreparable damage. She's "out of that loop," and she's never going back. Throughout this month's commemorations, she's been absolutely invisible.
In their seven years of silence, Elizabeth's attitude toward Hazel has hardened. An exhibitionist, she has called her. A profiteer. A white supremacist. A born-again bigot. Elizabeth still lets them sell the poster at the visitors' center; it's her way of supporting the place, something she could not otherwise afford to do. But at her insistence, it now carries a gold sticker in the corner, one resembling the surgeon general's warning on cigarette packs. "True reconciliation can occur only when we honestly acknowledge our painful, but shared, past," it states.
Some feel Elizabeth is too harsh. After all, Hazel has apologized—and apologized, and apologized, and apologized. That's more than all those tormentors in Mrs. Huckaby's files—Richard Boehler, Frankie Gregg, Herbert Blount, Kenny Vandiver, and all the rest—have ever done. Sammie Dean Parker, now living in Dallas, has never apologized; on the few occasions she's talked, she's sounded more aggrieved—because of the troubles at Central, she has complained, she never got to be Miss Little Rock—than contrite. Apart from Mary Ann Burleson, no one else in the photograph has ever come forward. For some, like Olen Spann (the man in the hat and pressed khakis) or Richard Stinnett (the boy in the striped shirt just behind Elizabeth) or Lonnie Ward (the boy behind Hazel), it's too late: they're all dead. Most typical, perhaps, is the smiling young man in the V-neck shirt, unidentified and, as far as we know, unreconstructed.
Hazel had helped coax Elizabeth out of her shell, but she was also a crutch. Without her around, Elizabeth's renewal intensified. Her appearances before students grew more frequent, though they were never easy: she would not eat or drink beforehand, and would make sure a lined wastebasket and paper towels were on hand just in case she threw up. She would read off cue cards, her hands shaking. She would not wear her glasses, so she could not make out any disapproving faces. She would speak fast, the better to exit quickly. And never would she allow pictures; after all, she was ugly.
I witnessed those difficulties firsthand a few years back, when Elizabeth spoke to a student group at a Golden Corral restaurant outside Little Rock. She'd been received reverentially, the boys and girls lining up beforehand to take her picture and have her sign their books. Half an hour into her talk, though, something in her snapped, and she bolted for the door. "I do apologize, but she is having an episode," a group leader told the dumbfounded group. With me, too, she'd balk. After one marathon phone call I found a message on my answering machine. "I want to discontinue those long interviews, because those calls cause some backwash in my life that's hard to deal with," she said. "I'm having trouble sleeping at all." But she persevered, and I, too, could see the change.
Over time, Elizabeth refined her message, and her delivery. She always spoke precisely and clearly, but now it is without notes. She sprinkles in humor. She goes over her personal story quickly and self-deprecatingly. "A 65-year-old footnote to the past," she calls herself, someone who didn't graduate magna or summa cum laude, but "thank you, lawdy." Then she gets to her real, and vaguely subversive, message: It doesn't matter whether your teacher likes you or not; study for yourselves. Even a shy person can develop steel. And if you reach out to someone being harassed, you can save his life.
She has experienced additional setbacks. On New Year's Day in 2003, 26-year-old Erin Eckford, who suffered from a host of psychological problems, walked out of his mother's house and started firing a semi-automatic rifle into the air. When he refused to put it down, the Little Rock police killed him. Community activists pressed Elizabeth to sue, or at least raise a ruckus, but she refused; "suicide by cop," she called what had occurred. Friends feared it might tip Elizabeth back over the edge. Instead, she seemed only to draw strength from it. (Hazel and her husband sent her a condolence card, without a note.) She says little about her surviving son, now in the Coast Guard. "I don't consider myself an extremely strong person, but both my kids are much weaker than I am," she says.
But there were triumphs, too. In August 2005, individual statues of the Nine, with Elizabeth, her binder held close to her chest, leading the way, were dedicated on the grounds of the state capitol. The sculptor, John Deering, said he had no trouble depicting Elizabeth: Will Counts's photo said it all. Elizabeth thinks it's a good likeness, but wonders about memorializing the living. "We still have time to mess up," she jokes.
*
In the First Division of Pulaski County Circuit Court, Elizabeth's clients are mostly black, often semi-illiterate, pinched for hot checks or credit-card fraud or taking or selling drugs. Many couldn't afford lawyers; few are hardened criminals. She spends her days hearing the same stock sob stories and, frustrated writer that she is, inventing her own, matching a new face with whatever she can conjure up. She keeps peanuts around for prisoners who have to skip breakfast to come in, but she's no soft touch. "Aren't you ashamed of showing your underwear?" she might ask some unkempt man. "How are you going to get a decent job looking like that?" she'll ask someone with glittering gold grills on his teeth. Some clients prefer to wait for her colleague Curtis Ricks: he's easier on them. Once in a while, after something's been on television, someone will say, "Miss Eckerd, I didn't know that was you." Treat her the way they always have, she tells them.
Eckford outside Little Rock Central High School, now a National Historic Site, June 18, 2007.
Photograph by Nigel Parry.
Next month, Elizabeth will be 66 years old. She has diabetes and tires easily; even were she willing to re-walk the walk for the cameras, her legs would not be up to the task. "Use the archival footage," she tells reporters. How much longer will she work? She leans forward, as if to reveal some secret. "Till they carry me out feet first," she whispers. "I never want to go back to where I was." Her life savings consist pretty much of that Congressional Gold Medal, which she says is worth about $35,000—that is, if anyone would ever buy it. She tried giving it to the Smithsonian, just to spare herself the fees for a safe-deposit box; until recently, it sat in her bedroom closet. If anyone could find it in that mess, she figured, they deserved it.
Elizabeth is slowly refurbishing her house, which reporters for 50 years have described as "sparsely furnished." Fearful it would turn the place into a shrine, she's resisted hanging any commemorative items on the wall, but will soon put up some photographs. The grounds outside are still recovering from Erin, who, unwilling to cut the grass, doused everything with weed killer. The rock on which she once daydreamed is still behind the house. One place she has never ventured is the attic. That's where the famous white skirt, which she never wore again, may be. Her friend Annie Abrams had hoped to convince Wal-Mart to mass-produce it, so that on September 4, 2007, schoolgirls everywhere could have worn it. But nothing came of the idea, which Elizabeth disparaged anyway: why would anyone have wanted to? Gangs now roam her neighborhood. Young black toughs "have killed more of our people than the K.K.K. did," she says.
No longer must the others in the Little Rock Nine hover over her protectively; at a public forum with them in May, she was positively ebullient, even chatty; at one point Ernest Green practically had to wrestle the microphone from her. She enjoys seeing the other eight, but they're spread out; even the two of them who now live in Little Rock—Minnijean Brown Trickey and Thelma Mothershed Wair—she seldom sees. Minnijean, who was as outspoken as Elizabeth was meek—she was suspended midyear for dumping chili on the head of a student, then expelled for calling another "white trash"—admires Elizabeth unabashedly. But asked whether she knows Elizabeth well, she says, simply, "Well enough to leave her alone." To Elizabeth's eyes, even the other eight are not beyond reproach. She contends that Green, the group's de facto spokesman over the years—he was the oldest, the first to graduate, and, as an official in the Carter administration, the most prominent—has always dished out feel-good, triumphal, "Good Negro" "top spin" rather than describe the Central experience as it really was. And she considers Melba Patillo Beals's memoir, Warriors Don't Cry, a staple on high-school reading lists, unreliable and hyperbolic. (Some of the others do, too, but only Elizabeth says so.)
This month there have been interviews galore: NBC Nightly News, USA Today, Newsweek. But truth be told, many whites in Little Rock are sick and tired of the Little Rock Nine. They feel they've already been honored enough, and can't wait for the events to pass—especially since, given the actuarial tables, they'll probably be the last. If it's any consolation to them, Elizabeth, too, has commemoration fatigue. She'd have skipped the 50th, she says, were her absence not so conspicuous. At an event in the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center this past April, I watched her grow claustrophobic during the crowded reception, then restless during the umpteenth round of speechified tributes. She was visibly relieved when the evening ended. Besides, she had to get up at 4:30 the next morning. She wanted to get back to Little Rock, and back to work.
Much as she'd like to leave the whole commemoration thing behind, it's gotten so she can't; her modest speaking fees have paid for a new heating system for her house, a new roof, new awnings. She says she does not expect ever to talk to Hazel again. But when I asked Elizabeth if she missed her, she nodded her head. "I wish I could tell her how much she helped me," she says. "I don't think I ever told her that."
*
Central High School looks as imposing as ever, but over the past 50 years, its innards have changed unimaginably: the school is now more than half black. It's all misleading, of course, because Central is really two different schools, separate and unequal, under one roof. The blacks go to different classes, sit on separate sides of the cafeteria, have different, and far lower, levels of performance and expectations. For a long time Elizabeth wasn't invited back, even when a black principal ran the place; never has she spoken at commencement, though Ernest Green has, twice. But now she speaks regularly to groups from Sojourn to the Past, an organization that introduces students from around the country to civil-rights landmarks and luminaries throughout the South. Its founder, Jeff Steinberg, is another of those people Elizabeth credits with her renaissance. One day this past April, she was back in Central's auditorium, the same sepia place where the Key Club once put on its minstrel shows, where she heard students sing "Dixie" and do their rebel yells during pep rallies. On the bus from Memphis that morning, the students discussed her story. And they were told today's ground rules: no hugging Elizabeth, no autographs, no gushing, no crowding around her, no loud noises. The questions would be scripted, so that there would be no surprises, either. Steinberg picked up a microphone, and reminded everyone that they were about to meet an American icon. "Ladies and gentlemen," he shouted, in the manner of a ring announcer, "it is my pleasure to introduce to you Miss Elizabeth Eckfooooooooooooord!"
And Elizabeth strolled out onto the stage. This time she was not in white but black, a black dress with red stripes on its sleeves. Once again, there were students behind her, but stagehands rather than segregationists, and integrated stagehands at that. They soon dispersed: this time, at least, she did not feel anyone at her heels, or even close. As she approached the bare black plastic chair, the students in the auditorium, black and white, quietly rose, raised their arms, and started waving their hands wildly. It is sign language—for a standing ovation.
Vanity Fair © Condé Nast Digital (emphasis in original)
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/09/littlerock200709
===
One of the 'Little Rock Nine' Looks Back
Elizabeth Eckford stands amid a hostile crowd outside Central High School in Little Rock on Sept. 4, 1957.
Audio [embedded]
Listen to the story
by Alex Chadwick
September 4, 2007
A half-century ago, Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus ordered troops from the Arkansas National Guard to Central High School in Little Rock because the school board had decided to allow nine black students to attend the previously all-white school.
As is often the case with great historical events, a single image stays in our collective memory. For that ugly first day of school on Sept. 4, 1957, in Little Rock, Ark., it is the image of a crisply dressed Elizabeth Eckford surrounded by an angry crowd.
In the coming weeks and months, we will revisit Eckford's progress, and that of the "Little Rock Nine," since that day as we follow the singular events in Little Rock.
*
Related NPR Stories
The Legacy of the Little Rock Nine
Aug. 31, 2007
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14080755&ps=rs
Recalling the Segregation Showdown in Little Rock
Aug. 31, 2007
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14080752&ps=rs
*
Copyright 2007 NPR
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14091050
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