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Two Women of Little Rock
Yale University Press
October 2011
On Sale: October 4, 2011
360 pages ISBN: 0300141939 EAN: 9780300141931 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction History
The names Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery may not
be well known, but the image of them from September 1957
surely is: a black high school girl, dressed in white,
walking stoically in front of Little Rock Central High
School, and a white girl standing directly behind her, face
twisted in hate, screaming racial epithets. This famous
photograph captures the full anguish of desegregation—in
Little Rock and throughout the South—and an epic moment in
the civil rights movement. In this gripping book, David Margolick tells the remarkable
story of two separate lives unexpectedly braided together.
He explores how the haunting picture of Elizabeth and Hazel
came to be taken, its significance in the wider world, and
why, for the next half-century, neither woman has ever
escaped from its long shadow. He recounts Elizabeth’s
struggle to overcome the trauma of her hate-filled school
experience, and Hazel’s long efforts to atone for a fateful,
horrible mistake. The book follows the painful journey of
the two as they progress from apology to forgiveness to
reconciliation and, amazingly, to friendship. This
friendship foundered, then collapsed—perhaps inevitably—over
the same fissures and misunderstandings that continue to
permeate American race relations more than half a century
after the unforgettable photograph at Little Rock. And yet,
as Margolick explains, a bond between Elizabeth and Hazel,
silent but complex, endures.
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