'Life is more than a moment'

Once adversaries, 'Little Rock two' to bring message of racial reconciliation to IUB campus

By Jayne Spencer

On Labor Day 1957, photojournalist Will Counts was on the scene when a young black woman named Elizabeth Eckford, textbooks in arms, made her way through a hostile crowd at Little Rock, Ark., Central High School. Behind her, a young white woman named Hazel Bryan shrieked with disdain.

Will Counts' 1957 photograph of Elizabeth Eckford (upper frame, foreground) is one of the 100 top photographs of the century, according to the Associated Press. Counts photographed Eckford and her former tormenter, Hazel Bryan Massery (at left, in front of Little Rock's Central High School) at the 40th anniversary of the school desegregation effort. The two women will speak at IUB Monday.
The 15-year-old Eckford had just been turned away by Arkansas National Guardsmen after she attempted to enroll at the all white high school. Counts snapped the photograph.

The image of the two young women is now considered one of the top 100 photographs of the century by the Associated Press.

And it was Counts, a professor emeritus of journalism at Indiana University, who arranged for the two to meet face to face for the first time.

The occasion was the 40th anniversary commemoration of the desegregation of Little Rock's Central High, an event that Counts once again documented on film. President Bill Clinton and Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee symbolically opened the doors of Central High to the original "Little Rock Nine," the courageous teenagers who had withstood the racial hatred of the times to desegregate the school.

Years before the anniversary meeting, Hazel Bryan Massery had called Eckford to apologize for her actions in 1957. Massery said she had felt like "the poster child for the hate generation, trapped in the image captured in the photograph...and I (knew) that my life was more than a moment."

Eckford and Massery will take to the stage of Whittenberger Auditorium at the Indiana Memorial Union in Bloomington, Monday (Oct. 25) at 7 p.m. for a public appearance, preceded by a short presentation by Counts. The two will be meeting with journalism classes, Wells Scholars and those involved in the Minority Achievers Program during their visit.

Both women still live in Little Rock, Eckford in the family home where she lived in high school, only blocks from where Counts, a Little Rock native himself, had lived. Eckford and Massery have attended a workshop on racial healing together and have made joint public appearances to sign a poster featuring Counts' photograph of their reconciliation.

Counts had been with the Arkansas Democrat for only three months on Labor Day 1957. Dressed in a "blend-in" flannel shirt and armed with his beloved 35mm camera, he was able to move freely through the crowds and was accepted as a native son--unlike the three Life magazine staffers who were attacked by the mob and arrested by the police. His photographs were runners-up for the Pulitzer Prize that year.

A Life Is More Than a Moment: The Desegregation of Little Rock's Central High recently has been published by the IU Press and contains many of the 1957 photographs, as well as recent photographs of many of the protagonists of the earlier shots. Counts' work is supplemented with essays by journalists Robert McCord and Ernest Dumas, with an introduction by the Rev. Will Campbell, one of the ministers who walked with the black students as they attempted to enter the high school.