Two Women of Little Rock: 1957 and Beyond
By Lee A. Daniels
Their paths crossed for only a few moments that September day in 1957: Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan, two teenagers in Little Rock, Arkansas who were supposed to be on their way to school.
The same school, in fact – Central High School, an imposing edifice that looked like a Hollywood movie-set version of what a 1950s American high school should look like.
In a Little Rock, Arkansas and a United States of America different from the one that actually existed in 1957, Elizabeth and Hazel would have gone to school that day in routine fashion and, odds are, never have taken note of one another.
But because Elizabeth Eckford was black, and Hazel Bryan, white, their crossing paths on that sun-splashed September day fifty-four years ago was not routine. Instead, their momentary encounter produced one of the most iconic photographs in all of American history – a photograph that immediately and forever since defined the polar opposites of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Three newspaper photographers’ cameras actually caught the very instant of their encounter; but it was the specific picture