About this item
The names Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan Massery may not be well known, but the image of them from September 1957 surely is a black high school girl, dressed in white, walking stoically in front of Little Rock Central High School, and a white girl standing directly behind her, face twisted in hate, screaming racial epithets. This famous photograph captures the full anguish of desegregationin Little Rock and throughout the Southand an epic moment in the civil rights movement.In this gripping book, David Margolick tells the remarkable story of two separate lives unexpectedly braided together. He explores how the haunting picture of Elizabeth and Hazel came to be taken, its significance in the wider world, and why, for the next half-century, neither woman has ever escaped from its long shadow.
About the Author
David Margolick is a long-time contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He has held similar posts at Newsweek and Portfolio. For fifteen years he was a legal affairs correspondent for the New York Times, for which, among many other assignments, he covered the trial of O.J. Simpson. "Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns" originated in a conversation he had more than forty years ago while a student at Loomis, a prep school in Connecticut, and involved extensive conversations with Burns's former students as well as a review of his remarkable wartime correspondence. Margolick's prior books include "Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock," a study of the iconic photograph taken outside Little Rock Central High School during the desegregation crisis of 1957 (Yale University Press) ; "Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling, and a World on the Brink" (Knopf) ; and "Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song." (Harper Collins) . In addition, for Kindle Singles he has written "A Predator Priest." He is now working on a study of Sid Caesar and the seminal television comedy program "Your Show of Shows" for Nextbook/Schocken.
