You’ve probably seen the photograph of Elizabeth Eckford, even if you didn’t know that was the woman’s name. In a way, it’s a chilling image. It, and the Little Rock Nine, remain a prominent feature in any history of the civil rights movement in the United States. Elizabeth Eckford, a young African American with large glasses, walks calmly while surrounded by an angry mob of white people. Behind her, a young high school student, face twisted in hatred, snarls. (Link to photo here.)
What is the context of this photo? Eckford was one of the Little Rock Nine. This was a group of students, all African American, who desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. This came only three years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision. This Supreme Court decision, which declared that segregated schools were not constitutional, had put the South into an uproar.
Today, one cannot understate the virulence with which southerners detested the Brown decision. A former colleague from Alabama who had been part of the civil rights movement once told me that it was THE most important event of the entire movement in his eyes. Why?
The Little Rock Nine and Massive Resistance
After the Brown decision, Southern politicians pledged “Massive Resistance” to school desegregation. Nearly all of them in Congress signed the so-called Southern Manifesto. (Future president Lyndon Johnson was among the handful of Southern leaders who did not sign.) These documents pledged the signees to resist the Brown decision by all means short of outright violence. James Eastland, the racist senator from Mississippi, said of Brown, “The South will not abide by nor obey” the decision.
Why this anger? After all, the rest of the US had desegregated schools, and civilization had not collapsed. The greatest fear of southerners, it seems, was miscegenation. Segregation was about controlling sex just as it was about controlling the lives of African Americans in other ways. Maintaining the perceived purity of white women, safeguarded by white men, required keeping white and black students apart.
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Elizabeth Eckford and others escorted to class, 1957.Elizabeth Eckford in 1957
This helps explain the rage that greeted the Little Rock Nine on September 4 when they tried to enter Central High School. A mob of students and community members was on hand to repel them. Not only that, but Orval Faubus, governor of Arkansas, had called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the students from entering the school.
Then Elizabeth Eckford arrived. The plan was that she would walk to class with the other eight students, so they could stay together. Safety in numbers, they hoped. But the meeting place had changed the night before. Eckford’s family had no telephone, so she never got the message. This left her to face the mob, alone. She was fifteen.
This set the stage for the iconic photograph of Eckford walking with composure while a howling throng of onlookers threatened her.
The Little Rock Nine eventually attended classes. It took about three weeks, but after President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent paratroopers to Little Rock, the students entered the school. Which is not to say that things were calm after that, but Central High School achieved integration. Civilization did not collapse.
Who Was the Other Woman Shouting at Elizabeth Eckford?
We know the identity of the young lady screaming at Eckford. Her name is Hazel Bryan, now Hazel Bryan Massery. She, too, has a story. According to interviews she gave later, this became a turning point in her life. Within a few years, she realized that her children would see the photograph someday. Bryan didn’t want this to be what defined her life, so she changed her attitude toward the civil rights movement. She entered a career in social work, and some of her efforts went toward helping African Americans.
In 1997, the two women met on the 40th anniversary of the Little Rock Nine’s attempt to attend Central High School. Bryan apologized and tried to explain how she’d spent much of her life trying to do better. The two women spent a little time together, but after about two years stopped seeing each other, giving the story an almost, but not quite, happy ending.
Bill Clinton Speaking at Little Rock Central High.
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