Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock
Yale University Press, 2011

About: Elizabeth and Hazel is about the lives of the two central figures in one of the most harrowing and instantly recognizable photographs of the civil rights era: the picture, taken on September 4, 1957, of Elizabeth Eckford, immaculate in a handmade white piqué dress, trying to enter, and desegregate, Little Rock Central High School, while an angry white girl, Hazel Bryan, shouts racial epithets at her from behind. The book traces the worlds, completely separate but in some ways very similar, from which these two 15-year-old girls came; the racial attitudes that permeated those worlds; how the famous picture came to be taken (and by whom), and the impact it would have, far beyond Little Rock and in the lives of the two women themselves. It recounts the nightmarish experience that Elizabeth, one of the “Little Rock Nine” who desegregated Central High, went on to have that year and the ways in which it has haunted her ever since. And it relates the very different way in which it affected Hazel, who tried mightily to transcend the photograph but could never fully escape its shadow.

Praise: “The story of Elizabeth Eckford, the heroic poster child of the struggle to desegregate Little Rock’s Central High, which so many have forgotten, and of her tormentor, Hazel Bryan, which so few ever knew, needed to be told. David Margolick has done so masterfully, in a narrative so gripping that one has difficulty putting down his book before arriving at the last page. His Elizabeth and Hazel is required reading for every American who wants to understand why the wounds inflicted by the heritage of slavery and Jim Crow remain unhealed.” —Louis Begley, author of Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters