Elizabeth and Hazel

The photo tells a story of national shame: Elizabeth Eckford, a fresh-faced African-American girl resplendent in her homemade white outfit. Her expression veiled by sunglasses, she heads to her first day at Little Rock Central High School. Hazel Bryan, a Caucasian teenager in a sleek, tailored dress. Her face is contorted in hate as she screams racial epithets. The scene from September 1957 captures the anguish of desegregation—in Little Rock, Arkansas, and throughout the South. When it appeared in newspapers across the world, Johnny Jenkins’ photograph came to represent—and further to ignite—the civil rights movement.

In Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock, David Margolick tells the remarkable, intertwined story of these two very different women before, during and after the day their worlds collided. He explores how the haunting picture of Elizabeth and Hazel acquired iconic significance, and why neither woman has ever escaped its long shadow. And he tells the startling tale of the two women’s eventual friendship.

Widely regarded as the best high school in Arkansas, Little Rock Central was the first major Southern high school to be desegregated following the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Months of agitation among segregationist whites led Gov. Orval Faubus to order the National Guard to prevent the black students’ entry.

A shy, sensitive bookworm, born into a family that revered education, Elizabeth Eckford dreamed of becoming a lawyer and saw enrollment at Central as a key step toward a spot in law school. The 15-year-old sophomore was accepted as one of nine African-American students to enter the junior class. Within hours of their arrival at school, engulfed by the twisted faces and voices of hate, they would become known as the Little Rock Nine.

Fifteen-year-old Hazel Bryan was a budding actress who craved attention. She spent her early childhood in rural Arkansas, where she played—and prayed—with black children. Later, in Little Rock, she grew up in a house almost identical to the Eckfords’. Bryan’s interests, however, leaned decidedly toward boys rather than books. She was given to dramatic gestures, and her hateful behavior was little more than a gambit to get her picture in the paper and to get out of class. Little did she imagine the lifelong consequences.

Margolick follows the women’s painful journey from Hazel's tearful apology to Elizabeth's forgiveness to reconciliation and, amazingly, to friendship. He recounts Elizabeth’s struggle to overcome the psychological trauma of her ongoing harassment at school, and Hazel’s efforts to atone for her fateful mistake. Though their improbable friendship eventually foundered, the author reveals that the bond between Elizabeth and Hazel endures.