On This Day in History: September 4

Desegregation at Little Rock High School

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The 1954 United States Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education may have been a win for desegregation, but it was far from the waving of a magic wand. Many decades of resistance followed, with the town of Cleveland, Mississippi, not desegregating until 2016. This is about one specific incident in the long road to desegregation.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: September 4, 1957--

The self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức. Mary Ann Vecchio crying over the body of Jeffrey Miller at the Kent State Massacre. “Napalm girl” Phan Thị Kim Phúc. The drowned body of three-year-old Syrian boy Alan Kurdi. These are images that tell powerful stories about our world, sometimes effecting change.

On the morning of September 4, 1957, more than three years after the landmark Supreme Court decision, nine Black students entered Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas for the first time. They did not receive a welcoming audience, and photographers were there to capture the moment. Chants of “Two, four, six, eight! We don’t want to integrate!” echoed as Black student Elizabeth Eckford, in the center of another such iconic photo, held her book and walked resolutely into the school. The image showed a screaming girl behind her, Hazel Bryan, shrieking curses of “Go home, [n word]! Go back to Africa!”

After the photo was published, Hazel received some critical attention which didn’t bother her, but it caused her parents to pull her from school. She married and took the name Hazel Massery, starting a family. Later, as her photo became published in history books, she realized that her children may come to wonder about who that screaming girl was. Hazel felt guilty, and having changed her mind on integration and her attitude toward civil rights, contacted Eckford in 1963 and apologized. They then went their separate ways.

Forty years after the photo of “hate assailing grace” was taken, Massery, still feeling the damage to her reputation, hoped to settle accounts. The original photographer arranged for the two women to meet again, and for a time they became friends. But once the honeymoon was over, Eckford said that Massery “wanted me to be cured and be over it . . . so that she wouldn’t feel responsible anymore.” The friendship fizzled after a year under the realization that such painful slates don’t wipe clean so easily. Forgiveness is not a right; it is a gift of the giver.

Today, segregation in the United States remains a harsh reality via economic means, with many white families choosing to send their children to private schools that Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) families often cannot afford due to systemic racism that provides far more economic opportunities to white people.

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