Elizabeth eckford and hazel bryan massery
What was she worried about before her first day?!
Hazel bryan apology
You’ve probably seen the photo: a young African American girl walks to school, her eyes shielded by sunglasses. She is surrounded by a hateful crowd of angry white people, including a girl caught mid-jeer, her teeth bared and her face hardened with anger.
It’s one of the most famous images of the civil rights era, but it turns out that the story of the young women in the photo is even more complicated than the racial drama their faces portray.
Hazel Bryan was just 15 when the photo was taken, but her actions on September 4, 1957—and the hatred on her face—turned her into an infamous symbol of the bigotry of Jim Crow and the intolerance faced by the students who tried to go to school that day.
Integration of Central High School
It was the first day of school in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Elizabeth Eckford, also 15 and the girl Bryan was screaming at, was headed to class at Little Rock Central High School.
That fact alone was anything but normal: Eckford and eight other Black stu