Little Rock Girl 1957

Little Rock Girl 1957: How a Photograph Changed the Fight for Integration by Shelley Tougas

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Little Rock Girl 1957: How a Photograph Changed the Fight for Integration, by Shelley Tougas, tells the story of how the photograph of 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford trying to enter Little Rock Central High School amidst jeers of white students and other white people from the community captured the racially charged moment for all of history.   Photographer Will Counts, a local newspaperman, dressed deceptively in a plaid shirt instead of a suit, was able to move in very close to his subjects.  He recounts, when he “saw Hazel Bryan’s contorted face in the camera’s viewfinder; I knew that I had released the shutter at an important moment.”  The other black students who were assigned to integrate Little Rock Central High were called collectively “The Little Rock Nine.”  They were eventually successful in entering the school that year, but paid a great price because of the way they were treated at the school.   The book also covers the fact that years later, Hazel Bryan, the white teen yelling racial slurs at Elizabeth in the picture, tried desperately to redeem herself from the damaging photo by trying to befriend Elizabeth Eckford.  This powerful non-fiction book would make a great Common Core pairing with Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis. 



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