This month is the 50th Anniversary the historic 1957 desegregation of Little Rock Central High School. There is an
amazing article about this famous photo in Vanity Fair this month. The story centers around the lives of two women: 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford on her first day of school, and her most recognizable tormentor, Hazel Bryan (standing behind her in the photo). The story of how these two women struggled to reconcile and move on from the event is a remarkable journey through the last half-century of race relations in America.
Like millions of other people who have seen that photograph, I can't stop thinking about it. The hate on that woman's face. The indescribable fear and pain that a 15 year old girl facing that kind of hate must have felt.
The community of people trying to help her...It breaks my heart.
And, in 50 years we
haven't really come that far.
*photos from Vanity Fair
Like millions of other people who have seen that photograph, I can't stop thinking about it. The hate on that woman's face. The indescribable fear and pain that a 15 year old girl facing that kind of hate must have felt.
The community of people trying to help her...It breaks my heart.
And, in 50 years we haven't really come that far.
2 comments:
Such a good point. What the CNN article that you linked to doesn't say (unless you click on the full article) is the reason those kids (the jena 6) beat up the other kid. A black teenager sat under a tree at Jena High School that was a "white tree", so the next day, a group of white students hung several nooses from that tree. The students who did that were suspended, but no charges were brought against them. The protests were in response to the unfair treatment of the black students who subsequently beat up one of those white students. Our justice system tried to try them of attempted murder as adults.
Oh, thanks for adding that, I must have put up the wrong link. I'll check it out.
Awful story though, isn't it? One time Wade told me that every black man is afraid of being wrongly convicted of something and I thought that he was exaggerating but I have come to realize that he was being very serious. What a scary thought. What a crazy world we live in.
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