There’s certainly a hero in this photo. But is there a villain? This is
a story of how 14-year-old Hazel Bryan was cast throughout the
world as a racist due to this infamous photo—for parroting things
she learned at home, and despite making amends with Elizabeth
Eckford, the black schoolgirl in this photo. (Photo: Will Counts, The
Arkansas Democrat.)
You’ve probably never heard of Elizabeth Eckford, so
let me tell you about her. On the morning of September
4, 1957, her only goal was to attend her first day of
high school, wearing the nice homemade dress she and
her mom had picked out the night before. Little Rock’s
downtown shops had nice clothes, too, but it wasn’t
worth going to those stores if you were black. Properly
dressed, she left her home for school.
Crowds lined the streets. Armed guards were
everywhere. So were reporters. So were people who
didn’t want to see the integration of their precious,
all-white school.
“Lynch her. Lynch her!” the mobs shouted at the
young girl. “No nigger bitch is going to get in our school!”
Looking for a comforting face, she turned to an old
white woman, who promptly spat on her.
Three young white girls walked behind her. “Two,
four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate!” they shouted.
Hazel Bryan, one of those three girls, screamed, “Go
home, nigger!” Hordes of photographs captured her
contorted face and inner rage. In a matter of days, the
disturbing events in Little Rock, Arkansas reached all
corners of the world.
For quite a while, I have had the topic of “rednecks”
on my Americana list, holding it in reserve for that
month when I felt like offering lighter fare. But I can’t
write fluff about The Beverly Hillbillies, The Dukes of
Hazard, Honey Boo Boo, or of those comediennes who
have made so many laugh with their “redneck” stories.
My moment of epiphany arrived when I came across the
standard opening patter of the popular “redneck humorist,”
the late Lewis Grizzard.
“And how many of you boys are Methodists?”
he’d ask, waiting for the laughter.
“And how many of you boys are Baptists?” he’d
ask after the first round of guffaws had died.
“And how many of you boys are gay?” he’d
smirk, and the white banquet halls would howl.
Let’s set the record straight. There is nothing
amusing or glorious about the true nature of the Old
South, no better exemplified than by the actions of
Hazel Bryan on that fateful Little Rock morning.
Tighten your saris. Put an extra shot of cinnamon
in that cup of chai. If you are hiding a flask from your
husband, now is the time to break it out. This is the
longer story of how Hazel Bryan came to shout, “Go
home, nigger,” and we’re taking no prisoners.
God created all men equal, or so the Christian
narrative goes, but no proof of could be found in 16th-
17th century London. Its streets and prisons were
clogged with the filthy, the crippled, and the hopeless,
and the privileged upper classes were tired of dealing
with the “human waste.” More than a century before
the British created their Australian penal colonies, they
did the same in America, as they forcibly shipped as
many as 60,000 destitute men, women, and children to
the New World.
Think I am exaggerating about the exodus? The famous
poet John Donne wrote of the New World as Britain’s
spleen and liver, draining the “ill humours of the
body…to breed good blood.”
To exploit the new land, the British set in place
the same class structures of land and privilege of their
London world. Rich and titled men owned the land,
poor people could not. Colonies in Virginia, South
Carolina, and Georgia soon became profitable, due
mostly to the advantages of their ocean ports, and in
part to strong British oversight.
North Carolina, on the other hand, did not have
an advantageous port or any form of leadership. As
Nancy Isenberg writes,
North Carolina, which came to be known
as “Poor Carolina,” went in a very different
direction from its sibling to the south. It failed
to shore up its elite planter class…it became
a swampy refuge for the poor and homeless.
Populated by what many dismissed as
“useless lubbers,” North Carolina forged a
lasting legacy as what we might call the “first
white trash colony.”
Cheap white labor is good, but if you are a profit-seeking
plantation owner, free labor is better.
By 1700, the Carolina colony was half populated by
slaves, a number that increased to 72 percent by 1740.
Concerned by the widening imbalance, a series of laws
were passed that for every six slaves an owner purchased,
he had to acquire one servant. It was not a popular
measure. Plantation owners knew that black women
produced more babies than their white counterparts.
Let others rhapsodize and romanticize about those
“good ole days.” They didn’t exist in the South, unless
you were a plantation owner.
White people were either indentured servants, or
trying to scratch out a living on land they couldn’t own.
Black people were slaves.
Plantation owners used racial prejudices to maintain
loose “alliances” with their white trash. At some
future date a Civil War would be fought, and these sad
sacks of people would be needed as soldiers to defend
the “glorious ways” of the Old South. And when that day
of reckoning arrived, and when the white trash deserted
the Confederate army in huge numbers, we want to
shout at the Southern general, Robert E. Lee, sir, why are
you so surprised? Isenberg adds,
In Georgia, late in the war it had reached the
point that deserters were threatening to kidnap
slaves or worse, conspire with runaways. In
1865, the wives of Okefenokee renegades taunted
authorities by claiming that their husbands
would raise out of the swamp, armed and ready
to steal as many slaves as they could round up,
and then sell them to the Union navy.
Even when forward thinking presidents such as
Thomas Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt wished
to help our poor white trash with initiatives ranging
from land ownership to federal training and jobs programs,
their plans never really garnered enough widespread
support to be effectively implemented. People
with no money rarely win in America, a brutal bit of
Darwinism that came into vogue in the early 20th
century. Many viewed our country’s economic system
within this “survival of the fittest” paradigm, meaning
the struggles of our white trash, such as Hazel Bryan,
were just part of “the system.”
Hazel’s mother had married at age 14 to a man
twice her age. Neither one of her parents had earned
even a high school degree. Her father often worked in
a traveling circus. The principal at Central High School
suspected that her father was physically abusive toward
his daughter.
The events of September 4 made international
news. Elizabeth, one of the “Little Rock Nine” of fellow
black students who braved those early days of integration,
would become famous. Fame of a different sort
would come to poor Hazel.
A few years after the event, the Times Literary Supplement
acknowledged that it was the “ugly faces” of
“rednecks, crackers, tar-heels, and other poor white
trash” that would be forever remembered from Central
High. One Southern reporter wrote, “Hell, look at them.
They’re just poor white trash, mostly.”
In the early 1960s, Hazel picked up the Little Rock
directory, and looked under “Eckford.” Then, without
telling anyone of her actions, dialed the number. “I am
that girl,” she told Elizabeth, and told her how sorry
she was. In the passage of time, the pair would draw
closer together, once appearing on Oprah together, another
time for a forty-year reunion photograph. Then
at other times, mistrust and suspicion would lead to
separation. David Margolick, author of Elizabeth and
Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock, writes,
Still, Hazel never stopped thinking about the
picture and making amends for it. She severed
what had been her ironclad ties to an intolerant
church. She taught mothering skills to unmarried
black women, and took underprivileged
black teenagers on field trips…she’d argue with
her mother on racial topics, defending relatives
who’d intermarried.
Secretly, Hazel always hoped some reporter
would track her down and write about how
she’d changed. But it didn’t happen on its own,
and she did nothing to make it happen. Instead,
again and again, there was the picture. Anniversary
after anniversary, Martin Luther King Day
after Martin Luther King Day…it just kept popping
up. The world of race relations was changing,
but to the world, she never did.
On September 4, 1957, two very young girls had their
lives changed forever. One will be forever memorialized
for the walk she completed, the other for a photograph
that no longer applies. God bless two very remarkable
women, uneasy partners in life and American history.
Americana is a monthly column highlighting the cultural and historical nuances of this land through the rich story-telling of columnist Bill Fitzpatrick, author of the books, Bottoms Up, America and Destination: India, Destiny: Unknown.