School Integration in Little Rock

• DCer
  September 26th, 2007 at 10:23 am

  Hazel Bryan, not Brown.

• Miss Cellania
  September 26th, 2007 at 10:27 am

  Thanks, DCer. I must’ve had a brain fart. Corrected.

• cuimhne
  September 26th, 2007 at 10:27 am

  Read the whole thing start to finish, it’s a shock to realise that things were like this not that long ago! I can’t even imagine living somewhere like that.

• matt
  September 26th, 2007 at 11:09 am

  I wonder if Hazel Bryan is still alive today, and how she would feel about her choices and opinions she had back then.

• SiteSeer
  September 26th, 2007 at 11:18 am

  @Miss Cellania,

  or a Freudian Slip?

• Miss Cellania
  September 26th, 2007 at 11:31 am

  SiteSeer, I didn’t think about it until you mentioned it, but my subconcious could have been thinking of Brown vs. Board of Education (1954)!

  matt, its a long read, but the article addresses that.

• donna
  September 26th, 2007 at 11:49 am

  cuimhne,

  Read up on the Jena 6

  Things are STILL like that….

  Hatred and racism take a long, long time to die out, sadly enough.

• nifty_lobster
  September 26th, 2007 at 11:55 am

  Eckford was one of the first. Not the first.
  There were nine black students selected to be integrated into Central high and they all started on the same day, September 24th when Eisenhower chose to enforce the Supreme court’s decision with Brown v. Board.
  The students had planned to enter the school together, but Elizabeth Eckford’s family didn’t have a phone so she didn’t get the message. She attempted to enter the school on her own, only to be turned back by Gov. Faubus’s soldiers.
  The students didn’t even enter the building until September 23rd, three weeks after the beginning of school, when they slipped through a side door (only to be forced out due to the mob outside).
  September 24th president Eisenhower sent federal troops in to stop the mob and escort the children safely to their classes.

• Britt
  September 26th, 2007 at 12:38 pm

  Thanks for posting this. I read the whole thing.

• Chad Cloman
  September 26th, 2007 at 8:56 pm

  Wow. I read the whole thing, even though it was long. Not my normal internet behavior.

  One quote really got me: ‘Gangs now roam her [Elizabeth's] neighborhood. Young black toughs “have killed more of our people than the K.K.K. did,” she says.’

• Jordan
  September 26th, 2007 at 9:05 pm

  @matt: Hazel is still alive and doing quite well — one of the kindest, most thoughtful people you’ll ever meet, too. She’s my father’s wife’s mother, and I’ve spent some time with her.

  I won’t speak to her beliefs currently, as I’ve never spoken with her directly about the events of this fateful photograph, but I know from both the article and second-hand information that she moved beyond that “moment in time” quite a long time ago. Per the Wikipedia article about her (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazel_Massery), she has since apologized to the girl in the photo (Elizabeth Eckford).

  Keep in mind that she is only one face among the hundreds who were there at the time — she just had the dubious distinction of being the one who was caught on camera at the right moment.

• Rudd
  September 27th, 2007 at 12:45 am

  That was a fantastic read. Great post!

  - R

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