Books |
Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock
David Margolick
By
Published: Jun 20, 2023
Category:
History
Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan were yoked together in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, when 15-year-old Elizabeth was one of nine African American students trying to integrate a high school and Hazel, a white girl standing right behind her, shrieked: “Go home, nigger! Go back to Africa!” At that exact moment, a photographer snapped their picture.
That instantly notorious photograph (above) sent a dual message: the racism of Southern whites, the saintliness of those who stood up for equal rights and opportunities. (Two days later, President Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne Division to escort the Little Rock Nine into Central High School.) But that photo wasn’t the end of this story — it was the beginning.
Fifty miles away, 11-year-old Bill Clinton was seeing the drama through Elizabeth Eckford’s eyes — and losing his racial prejudice. In l963, when Elizabeth was 21, a chastened and changed Hazel called her to apologize. They met. Appeared together on Oprah. Became poster girls for racial reconciliation.
Well, yes. And no.
In “Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock,” veteran journalist David Margolick gets extraordinary access to both women and, for the first time, tells a story that is almost novelistic in its complexity. It’s not about race, really. Or issues. This story is about two women who are as complex as we like to think we are — and how a split second did and didn’t define their lives. [To read an excerpt, click here. To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Update, from the Times review:
After Central, Elizabeth had dropped out of college and spent five years in the Army. She eventually earned a history degree from Central State University in Ohio, and found work back in Little Rock. Wary of men, by 1980 she was a single mother of two sons and on disability for recurrent depression. Overwhelmed, she sometimes “couldn’t stand to be around her children,” we learn; they spent time in foster care. One of her sons, also depressed, would later be killed by police bullets after firing a weapon aimlessly in the street. Elizabeth, the author tells us, was often “morose and antisocial,” and received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Elizabeth and Hazel seemed in sympathy when they appeared on “Oprah” together in 1999. They left the studio “feeling equally abused” by the show’s host, according to Margolick. In his telling, Oprah Winfrey was brusque, telegraphing her disapproval of any friendship between the women. She “had gone out of her way to be hateful, Elizabeth felt.”
Life leaves memories and scars: who really moved on?
And then a big one for us: We know how deep the racial divide is in this country — how do we move on?
