Harold Titus's Blog - Posts Tagged "hazel-bryan"
Civil Rights Events -- Little Rock Nine -- First Day
In its Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, issued May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation of America’s public schools was unconstitutional.
Until the court’s decision, many states across the nation had mandatory segregation laws, requiring African-American and white children to attend separate schools. Resistance to the ruling was so widespread that the court issued a second decision in 1955, known as Brown II, ordering school districts to integrate “with all deliberate speed.”
In response to the Brown decisions and pressure from the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Little Rock, Arkansas, school board adopted a plan for gradual integration of its schools.
The first institutions to integrate would be the high schools, beginning in September 1957. Among these was Little Rock Central High School, which opened in 1927 and was originally called Little Rock Senior High School.
Two pro-segregation groups formed to oppose the plan: the Capital Citizens Council and the Mother’s League of Central High School.
Despite the virulent opposition, nine students registered to be the first African Americans to attend Central High School. Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls had been recruited by Daisy Gaston Bates, president of the Arkansas NAACP and co-publisher of the Arkansas State Press, an influential African-American newspaper.
Daisy Bates and others from the Arkansas NAACP carefully vetted the group of students and determined they all possessed the strength and determination to face the resistance they would encounter. In the weeks prior to the start of the new school year, the students participated in intensive counseling sessions guiding them on what to expect once classes began and how to respond to anticipated hostile situations (Little 1-2).
Years later in an interview Melba Pattillo said: Really, there were 116 students, and then it sort of whittled down to nine by people being frightened and people being threatened because by this time, the White Citizens' Council had nominated a committee of white people to go door to door, contact you through your doctor, contact you through whomever to get to you to tell you, oh, now, you know, you don't want to integrate. But eventually, to qualify - in the beginning, to qualify, you had to have good grades, and you had to have a record of not fighting, not talking back, a record of being a good student behavior-wise and academically (Davies 1).
The group soon became famous as the Little Rock Nine.
On September 2, 1957, Governor Orval Faubus announced that he would call in the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the African-American students’ entry to Central High, claiming this action was for the students’ own protection. In a televised address, Faubus insisted that violence and bloodshed might break out if black students were allowed to enter the school.
The Mother’s League held a sunrise service at the school on September 3 as a protest against integration. But that afternoon, federal judge Richard Davies issued a ruling that desegregation would continue as planned the next day.
The Little Rock Nine arrived for the first day of school at Central High on September 4, 1957. Eight arrived together, driven by Bates.
Elizabeth Eckford’s family, however, did not have a telephone, and Bates could not reach her to let her know of the carpool plans. Therefore, Eckford arrived alone (Little 1-2)
Interviewed years later, Ernest Green divulged the following.
Daisy [Bates] called us all up and told us that we were going to go to school as a group … and to arrange to meet at her house and there were a number of ministers … that … I was not aware of [that] … had been involved in trying to lay a groundwork to have … the integration of the schools reasonably accepted … by the people … in the city. So that morning, eight of us gathered at … Daisy's house, Elizabeth wasn't there. And … we went by car to Central, to the corner of 14th Street and Park. Uh… it was about eight o'clock that morning. And we made an attempt to go though the troops and … were denied access to the front of the school. And … we went home after that. Elizabeth had missed the call … she didn't have a phone I think. And that morning she was at the other end, two blocks down 16th, where there was nobody, no supporters at least, none of the ministers, none of the people that …had helped us … provide transportation up to the school and that she was down there facing the mob by herself. None of us knew that until we got home after school.
…
We just made a cursory kind of attempt to, to enter school that morning. Elizabeth ... attempted to go through the guards and had the mobs behind her. So that was the first day… at Central (Eyes 1-2)
The Arkansas National Guard, under orders of Governor Faubus, prevented any of the Little Rock Nine from entering the doors of Central High. One of the most enduring images from this day is a photograph of Eckford, alone with a notebook in her hand, stoically approaching the school as a crowd of hostile and screaming white students and adults surround her.
Eckford later recalled that one of the women spat on her. The image was printed and broadcast widely, bringing the Little Rock controversy to national and international attention (Little 1-2).
Elizabeth Eckford
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. …
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.
… 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.
…
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 light bulbs 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.
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 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 (Margolick 1-3).
Works cited:
Davies, Dave, interviewer. “'They Didn't Want Me There': Remembering The Terror Of School Integration.” NPR: Fresh Air, January 15, 2018. Web.
“Eyes on the Prize Interview of Earnest Green. “ Washington University Digital Gateway Texts, August 26, 1979. Web. <
“Little Rock Nine.” History. Web.
Margolick, David. “Through a Lens, Darkly.” Vanity Fair. September 24, 2007. Web.
Until the court’s decision, many states across the nation had mandatory segregation laws, requiring African-American and white children to attend separate schools. Resistance to the ruling was so widespread that the court issued a second decision in 1955, known as Brown II, ordering school districts to integrate “with all deliberate speed.”
In response to the Brown decisions and pressure from the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Little Rock, Arkansas, school board adopted a plan for gradual integration of its schools.
The first institutions to integrate would be the high schools, beginning in September 1957. Among these was Little Rock Central High School, which opened in 1927 and was originally called Little Rock Senior High School.
Two pro-segregation groups formed to oppose the plan: the Capital Citizens Council and the Mother’s League of Central High School.
Despite the virulent opposition, nine students registered to be the first African Americans to attend Central High School. Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas and Carlotta Walls had been recruited by Daisy Gaston Bates, president of the Arkansas NAACP and co-publisher of the Arkansas State Press, an influential African-American newspaper.
Daisy Bates and others from the Arkansas NAACP carefully vetted the group of students and determined they all possessed the strength and determination to face the resistance they would encounter. In the weeks prior to the start of the new school year, the students participated in intensive counseling sessions guiding them on what to expect once classes began and how to respond to anticipated hostile situations (Little 1-2).
Years later in an interview Melba Pattillo said: Really, there were 116 students, and then it sort of whittled down to nine by people being frightened and people being threatened because by this time, the White Citizens' Council had nominated a committee of white people to go door to door, contact you through your doctor, contact you through whomever to get to you to tell you, oh, now, you know, you don't want to integrate. But eventually, to qualify - in the beginning, to qualify, you had to have good grades, and you had to have a record of not fighting, not talking back, a record of being a good student behavior-wise and academically (Davies 1).
The group soon became famous as the Little Rock Nine.
On September 2, 1957, Governor Orval Faubus announced that he would call in the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the African-American students’ entry to Central High, claiming this action was for the students’ own protection. In a televised address, Faubus insisted that violence and bloodshed might break out if black students were allowed to enter the school.
The Mother’s League held a sunrise service at the school on September 3 as a protest against integration. But that afternoon, federal judge Richard Davies issued a ruling that desegregation would continue as planned the next day.
The Little Rock Nine arrived for the first day of school at Central High on September 4, 1957. Eight arrived together, driven by Bates.
Elizabeth Eckford’s family, however, did not have a telephone, and Bates could not reach her to let her know of the carpool plans. Therefore, Eckford arrived alone (Little 1-2)
Interviewed years later, Ernest Green divulged the following.
Daisy [Bates] called us all up and told us that we were going to go to school as a group … and to arrange to meet at her house and there were a number of ministers … that … I was not aware of [that] … had been involved in trying to lay a groundwork to have … the integration of the schools reasonably accepted … by the people … in the city. So that morning, eight of us gathered at … Daisy's house, Elizabeth wasn't there. And … we went by car to Central, to the corner of 14th Street and Park. Uh… it was about eight o'clock that morning. And we made an attempt to go though the troops and … were denied access to the front of the school. And … we went home after that. Elizabeth had missed the call … she didn't have a phone I think. And that morning she was at the other end, two blocks down 16th, where there was nobody, no supporters at least, none of the ministers, none of the people that …had helped us … provide transportation up to the school and that she was down there facing the mob by herself. None of us knew that until we got home after school.
…
We just made a cursory kind of attempt to, to enter school that morning. Elizabeth ... attempted to go through the guards and had the mobs behind her. So that was the first day… at Central (Eyes 1-2)
The Arkansas National Guard, under orders of Governor Faubus, prevented any of the Little Rock Nine from entering the doors of Central High. One of the most enduring images from this day is a photograph of Eckford, alone with a notebook in her hand, stoically approaching the school as a crowd of hostile and screaming white students and adults surround her.
Eckford later recalled that one of the women spat on her. The image was printed and broadcast widely, bringing the Little Rock controversy to national and international attention (Little 1-2).
Elizabeth Eckford
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. …
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.
… 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.
…
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 light bulbs 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.
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 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 (Margolick 1-3).
Works cited:
Davies, Dave, interviewer. “'They Didn't Want Me There': Remembering The Terror Of School Integration.” NPR: Fresh Air, January 15, 2018. Web.
“Eyes on the Prize Interview of Earnest Green. “ Washington University Digital Gateway Texts, August 26, 1979. Web. <
“Little Rock Nine.” History. Web.
Margolick, David. “Through a Lens, Darkly.” Vanity Fair. September 24, 2007. Web.
Civil Rights -- Little Rock Nine -- Elizabeth and Hazel
https://media.vanityfair.com/photos/5...
Who doesn’t know that face?
It’s the face of a white girl—she was only 15 years old, but everyone always thinks her older than that, and judges her accordingly—shouting at an equally familiar, iconic figure: a sole black school girl dressed immaculately in white, her mournful and frightened eyes hidden behind sunglasses, clutching her books and walking stoically away from Little Rock Central High School on Sept. 4, 1957—the date when, in many ways, desegregation first hit the South where it hurt.
It’s all in that white girl’s face, or so it has always appeared. In those raging eyes and clenched teeth is the hatred and contempt for an entire race, and the fury of a civilization fighting tenaciously to preserve its age-old, bigoted way of life. You know what the white girl’s saying, but you can’t print it all: commands to get out and go home —“home” being the place from which her forebears had been dragged in chains centuries earlier. That what that white girl was actually doing that day was more grabbing attention for herself than making any statement of deep conviction doesn’t really matter. Of anyone with that face, you simply assume the worst. You also assume she is beyond redemption, especially if, symbolically, she is more useful as is than further understood or evolved.
…
The black girl is Elizabeth Eckford of the Little Rock Nine. Moments earlier, she’d tried to enter Central High School, only to be repeatedly rebuffed by soldiers from the Arkansas National Guard placed there by Gov. Orval Faubus. A mob baying at her heels, Elizabeth is making her way, fearfully but determinately, toward what she hoped would be the relative safety of the bus stop a block away.
The face belongs to Hazel Bryan. Hazel, the daughter of a disabled war veteran, was largely apolitical, even on matters of race; while sharing the prejudices of her parents, she cared far more about dancing and dating. Being in that crowd that morning, making a ruckus, out-shouting all of her friends, was a way of getting noticed, and far more exciting than going into class. She’d thought nothing would come of what she’d done, and nothing ever would have had she not been captured in mid-epithet by Will Counts, a young photographer for the Arkansas Democrat (Margolick, “Lives” 1-2)
About Hazel Bryan, Vice Principal for Girls Elizabeth Huckaby recalled: 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 [her friends] 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 (Margolick, “Lens” 6-7).
If anyone in the picture, which reverberated throughout the world that day and in history books ever since, should feel aggrieved, it’s of course Elizabeth Eckford. What Counts had captured both symbolized and anticipated the ordeals that Elizabeth, a girl of unusual sensitivity and intelligence, would face in her lifetime. First came the hellish year she and other black students endured inside Central, and then decades in which the trauma from that experience, plus prejudice, poverty, family tragedy, and her own demons kept her from realizing her extraordinary potential.
With enormous courage and resiliency, Elizabeth ultimately made a life for herself and has largely come to peace with her past. Paradoxically, it’s been Hazel, who has led a life of far greater financial and familial security, who now feels wounded and angry. Someone who once embodied racial intolerance feels victimized by another form of prejudice, in which good deeds go unappreciated, forgiveness cannot possibly be won, and public statements of contrition breed only resentment and ridicule.
Concerned over her sudden notoriety, only days after the infamous photograph appeared, Hazel’s parents transferred her from Central to a rural high school closer to home. She never spent a day in school with the Little Rock Nine and played no part in the horrors to which administrators, either lax or actually sympathetic to a small group of segregationist troublemakers, allowed them to be subjected. And she left her new school at 17, got married, and began a family.
But Hazel Bryan Massery was curious, and reflective. Tuning in her primitive Philco with the rabbit ears her father had bought her, she heard the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and saw those black protesters getting hot coffee and ketchup poured on their heads at segregated lunch counters or being routed by fire hoses and German shepherds. Such scenes brought home to her the reality of racial hatred, and of her own small but conspicuous contribution to it. One day, she realized, her children would learn that that snarling girl in their history books was their mother. She realized she had an account to settle.
Sometime in 1962 or 1963—no cameras recorded the scene, and she didn’t mark anything down—Hazel, sitting in the trailer in rural Little Rock in which she and her family now lived, picked up the Little Rock directory, and looked under “Eckford.” Then, without telling her husband or pastor or anyone else, she dialed the number. Between sobs, she told Elizabeth that she was that girl, and how sorry she was. Elizabeth was gracious. The conversation lasted a minute, if that. In the South, in the ’60s, how much more did a white girl and a black girl have to say to one another (Margolick, “Lives” 3-7)?
Works cited:
Margolick, David. “The Many Lives of Hazel Bryan.” Slate, October 11, 2011. Web. < http://www.slate.com/articles/news_an...
Margolick, David. “Through a Lens, Darkly.” Vanity Fair, September 24, 2007. Web.
Who doesn’t know that face?
It’s the face of a white girl—she was only 15 years old, but everyone always thinks her older than that, and judges her accordingly—shouting at an equally familiar, iconic figure: a sole black school girl dressed immaculately in white, her mournful and frightened eyes hidden behind sunglasses, clutching her books and walking stoically away from Little Rock Central High School on Sept. 4, 1957—the date when, in many ways, desegregation first hit the South where it hurt.
It’s all in that white girl’s face, or so it has always appeared. In those raging eyes and clenched teeth is the hatred and contempt for an entire race, and the fury of a civilization fighting tenaciously to preserve its age-old, bigoted way of life. You know what the white girl’s saying, but you can’t print it all: commands to get out and go home —“home” being the place from which her forebears had been dragged in chains centuries earlier. That what that white girl was actually doing that day was more grabbing attention for herself than making any statement of deep conviction doesn’t really matter. Of anyone with that face, you simply assume the worst. You also assume she is beyond redemption, especially if, symbolically, she is more useful as is than further understood or evolved.
…
The black girl is Elizabeth Eckford of the Little Rock Nine. Moments earlier, she’d tried to enter Central High School, only to be repeatedly rebuffed by soldiers from the Arkansas National Guard placed there by Gov. Orval Faubus. A mob baying at her heels, Elizabeth is making her way, fearfully but determinately, toward what she hoped would be the relative safety of the bus stop a block away.
The face belongs to Hazel Bryan. Hazel, the daughter of a disabled war veteran, was largely apolitical, even on matters of race; while sharing the prejudices of her parents, she cared far more about dancing and dating. Being in that crowd that morning, making a ruckus, out-shouting all of her friends, was a way of getting noticed, and far more exciting than going into class. She’d thought nothing would come of what she’d done, and nothing ever would have had she not been captured in mid-epithet by Will Counts, a young photographer for the Arkansas Democrat (Margolick, “Lives” 1-2)
About Hazel Bryan, Vice Principal for Girls Elizabeth Huckaby recalled: 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 [her friends] 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 (Margolick, “Lens” 6-7).
If anyone in the picture, which reverberated throughout the world that day and in history books ever since, should feel aggrieved, it’s of course Elizabeth Eckford. What Counts had captured both symbolized and anticipated the ordeals that Elizabeth, a girl of unusual sensitivity and intelligence, would face in her lifetime. First came the hellish year she and other black students endured inside Central, and then decades in which the trauma from that experience, plus prejudice, poverty, family tragedy, and her own demons kept her from realizing her extraordinary potential.
With enormous courage and resiliency, Elizabeth ultimately made a life for herself and has largely come to peace with her past. Paradoxically, it’s been Hazel, who has led a life of far greater financial and familial security, who now feels wounded and angry. Someone who once embodied racial intolerance feels victimized by another form of prejudice, in which good deeds go unappreciated, forgiveness cannot possibly be won, and public statements of contrition breed only resentment and ridicule.
Concerned over her sudden notoriety, only days after the infamous photograph appeared, Hazel’s parents transferred her from Central to a rural high school closer to home. She never spent a day in school with the Little Rock Nine and played no part in the horrors to which administrators, either lax or actually sympathetic to a small group of segregationist troublemakers, allowed them to be subjected. And she left her new school at 17, got married, and began a family.
But Hazel Bryan Massery was curious, and reflective. Tuning in her primitive Philco with the rabbit ears her father had bought her, she heard the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and saw those black protesters getting hot coffee and ketchup poured on their heads at segregated lunch counters or being routed by fire hoses and German shepherds. Such scenes brought home to her the reality of racial hatred, and of her own small but conspicuous contribution to it. One day, she realized, her children would learn that that snarling girl in their history books was their mother. She realized she had an account to settle.
Sometime in 1962 or 1963—no cameras recorded the scene, and she didn’t mark anything down—Hazel, sitting in the trailer in rural Little Rock in which she and her family now lived, picked up the Little Rock directory, and looked under “Eckford.” Then, without telling her husband or pastor or anyone else, she dialed the number. Between sobs, she told Elizabeth that she was that girl, and how sorry she was. Elizabeth was gracious. The conversation lasted a minute, if that. In the South, in the ’60s, how much more did a white girl and a black girl have to say to one another (Margolick, “Lives” 3-7)?
Works cited:
Margolick, David. “The Many Lives of Hazel Bryan.” Slate, October 11, 2011. Web. < http://www.slate.com/articles/news_an...
Margolick, David. “Through a Lens, Darkly.” Vanity Fair, September 24, 2007. Web.
Civil Rights -- Little Rock Nine -- Elizabeth and Hazel -- Part Two
What the local black newspaper wrote about Elizabeth [Eckford] 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.
…
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 (Margolick, Lens 12).
Living in Little Rock during the summer of 1963, Elizabeth received a telephone message from 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 (Margolick, Lens 13-15).
Hazel [had] never stopped thinking about the picture and making amends for it. She severed what had been her ironclad ties to an intolerant church. She taught mothering skills to unmarried black women, and took underprivileged black teenagers on field trips. She frequented the black history section at the local Barnes & Noble, buying books by Cornel West and Shelby Steele and the companion volume to Eyes on the Prize. She’d argue with her mother on racial topics, defending relatives who’d intermarried.
… Secretly, Hazel [had] always hoped some reporter would track her down and write about how she’d changed. But it didn’t happen on its own, and she did nothing to make it happen. Instead, again and again, there was the picture. Anniversary after anniversary, Martin Luther King Day after Martin Luther King Day, Black History Month after Black History Month, it just kept popping up. The world of race relations was changing, but to the world, she never did.
Finally, on the 40th anniversary of Central’s desegregation in 1997, Will Counts returned to Little Rock and arranged for Elizabeth and Hazel to pose for him again. Hazel was thrilled, Elizabeth, curious. Their first meeting was predictably awkward, but the new picture, showing the two women smiling in front of Central, revealed only the barest hint of that. It all but took over the next day’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and very nearly upstaged President Clinton’s speech the next day, in which he worked in a reference to them both. Soon, a poster-sized version of the picture was available: “Reconciliation,” it said. Everyone rejoiced; Thanks to Elizabeth and Hazel, Little Rock, maligned for 40 years, bathed in instant absolution.
Then, quietly, Elizabeth and Hazel discovered something quite miraculous: They actually liked each other. For all their differences—Elizabeth was better-read, Hazel’s life far better-balanced—they shared a good deal. Both were introspective, skeptical, a bit isolated; neither fit in anywhere, including in their own families. They visited one another’s homes, took trips together, spoke to schools and civic groups. In the process, Hazel helped pull Elizabeth out of her shell, then to blossom. Unemployed, on mental health disability for years, Elizabeth soon returned to work, as a probation officer for a local judge. Two years after they’d first met, the pair even appeared on Oprah.
Winfrey hadn’t bothered hiding her incredulity, even disdain, that day: Of all people, these two were now friends? But as rude as both felt her to have been, she’d been on to something. The improbable relationship had already begun to unravel.
A student of, and stickler for, history, Elizabeth looked for—and, she thought, spotted—holes in Hazel’s story. How, for instance, could Hazel have undertaken something so cruel so casually, then remembered so little about it afterward? And why, after all these years, did she absolve her parents from any blame? At their joint appearances, Elizabeth could treat Hazel impatiently, peremptorily. Meantime, others in the Little Rock Nine either shunned Hazel or complained of her presence at various commemorations.
But resentment came as well from whites, particularly whites who’d attended Central, particularly those from better families, who’d thought that, even by always looking the other way, they’d done absolutely nothing wrong during those dark days and, truth be told, considered Hazel and her ilk “white trash.” Forty years earlier she’d given them all a black eye; now, she was back, more conspicuous, and embarrassing, than ever. At a reunion she foolishly, or naively, attended, she felt their cold shoulder, and could hear their snickers. None of them had ever apologized for anything they’d done or not done, and, as far as Hazel could tell, they’d been none the worse for their silence.
Ultimately, it grew too much for Hazel. She cut off ties with Elizabeth—for her, Sept. 11, 2011, marked another anniversary: 10 years had passed since they’d last spoken—and stopped making public appearances with her. Her interviews with me—granted only with great reluctance—will, she says, be her last. When I asked the two women to pose together one last time (Elizabeth turned 70 last Tuesday; Hazel will in January) Elizabeth agreed; Hazel would not. Hazel was poised to vote for Obama in 2008; after all, even her own mother did. But so deep was her hurt that she found some excuse not to (Margolick, Lives 11-13).
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.
…
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.
…
… 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.)
…
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" (Margolick, Lens 13-15).
So the famous photograph of 1957 takes on additional meaning: the continuing chasm between the races and the great difficulty, even among people of good will, to pull off real racial reconciliation. But shuttling back and forth between them, I could see that for all their harsh words …, they’ve only dug in their heels—they still missed one another. Each, I noticed, teared up at references to the other. Perhaps, when no one is looking—or taking any pictures—they’ll yet come together again. And if they can, maybe, so too, can we (Margolick, Lives 14).
Works cited:
Margolick, David. “The Many Lives of Hazel Bryan.” Slate, October 11, 2011. Web. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_an....
Margolick, David. “Through a Lens, Darkly.” Vanity Fair, September 24, 2007. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/...
…
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 (Margolick, Lens 12).
Living in Little Rock during the summer of 1963, Elizabeth received a telephone message from 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 (Margolick, Lens 13-15).
Hazel [had] never stopped thinking about the picture and making amends for it. She severed what had been her ironclad ties to an intolerant church. She taught mothering skills to unmarried black women, and took underprivileged black teenagers on field trips. She frequented the black history section at the local Barnes & Noble, buying books by Cornel West and Shelby Steele and the companion volume to Eyes on the Prize. She’d argue with her mother on racial topics, defending relatives who’d intermarried.
… Secretly, Hazel [had] always hoped some reporter would track her down and write about how she’d changed. But it didn’t happen on its own, and she did nothing to make it happen. Instead, again and again, there was the picture. Anniversary after anniversary, Martin Luther King Day after Martin Luther King Day, Black History Month after Black History Month, it just kept popping up. The world of race relations was changing, but to the world, she never did.
Finally, on the 40th anniversary of Central’s desegregation in 1997, Will Counts returned to Little Rock and arranged for Elizabeth and Hazel to pose for him again. Hazel was thrilled, Elizabeth, curious. Their first meeting was predictably awkward, but the new picture, showing the two women smiling in front of Central, revealed only the barest hint of that. It all but took over the next day’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and very nearly upstaged President Clinton’s speech the next day, in which he worked in a reference to them both. Soon, a poster-sized version of the picture was available: “Reconciliation,” it said. Everyone rejoiced; Thanks to Elizabeth and Hazel, Little Rock, maligned for 40 years, bathed in instant absolution.
Then, quietly, Elizabeth and Hazel discovered something quite miraculous: They actually liked each other. For all their differences—Elizabeth was better-read, Hazel’s life far better-balanced—they shared a good deal. Both were introspective, skeptical, a bit isolated; neither fit in anywhere, including in their own families. They visited one another’s homes, took trips together, spoke to schools and civic groups. In the process, Hazel helped pull Elizabeth out of her shell, then to blossom. Unemployed, on mental health disability for years, Elizabeth soon returned to work, as a probation officer for a local judge. Two years after they’d first met, the pair even appeared on Oprah.
Winfrey hadn’t bothered hiding her incredulity, even disdain, that day: Of all people, these two were now friends? But as rude as both felt her to have been, she’d been on to something. The improbable relationship had already begun to unravel.
A student of, and stickler for, history, Elizabeth looked for—and, she thought, spotted—holes in Hazel’s story. How, for instance, could Hazel have undertaken something so cruel so casually, then remembered so little about it afterward? And why, after all these years, did she absolve her parents from any blame? At their joint appearances, Elizabeth could treat Hazel impatiently, peremptorily. Meantime, others in the Little Rock Nine either shunned Hazel or complained of her presence at various commemorations.
But resentment came as well from whites, particularly whites who’d attended Central, particularly those from better families, who’d thought that, even by always looking the other way, they’d done absolutely nothing wrong during those dark days and, truth be told, considered Hazel and her ilk “white trash.” Forty years earlier she’d given them all a black eye; now, she was back, more conspicuous, and embarrassing, than ever. At a reunion she foolishly, or naively, attended, she felt their cold shoulder, and could hear their snickers. None of them had ever apologized for anything they’d done or not done, and, as far as Hazel could tell, they’d been none the worse for their silence.
Ultimately, it grew too much for Hazel. She cut off ties with Elizabeth—for her, Sept. 11, 2011, marked another anniversary: 10 years had passed since they’d last spoken—and stopped making public appearances with her. Her interviews with me—granted only with great reluctance—will, she says, be her last. When I asked the two women to pose together one last time (Elizabeth turned 70 last Tuesday; Hazel will in January) Elizabeth agreed; Hazel would not. Hazel was poised to vote for Obama in 2008; after all, even her own mother did. But so deep was her hurt that she found some excuse not to (Margolick, Lives 11-13).
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.
…
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.
…
… 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.)
…
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" (Margolick, Lens 13-15).
So the famous photograph of 1957 takes on additional meaning: the continuing chasm between the races and the great difficulty, even among people of good will, to pull off real racial reconciliation. But shuttling back and forth between them, I could see that for all their harsh words …, they’ve only dug in their heels—they still missed one another. Each, I noticed, teared up at references to the other. Perhaps, when no one is looking—or taking any pictures—they’ll yet come together again. And if they can, maybe, so too, can we (Margolick, Lives 14).
Works cited:
Margolick, David. “The Many Lives of Hazel Bryan.” Slate, October 11, 2011. Web. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_an....
Margolick, David. “Through a Lens, Darkly.” Vanity Fair, September 24, 2007. Web. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/...
