David Margolick’s book Elizabeth and Hazel (my thoughts) is a fascinating book about two fascinating women. The book tackles tough and sensitive issues while following the trials and tribulations of Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan were captured for prosperity in a photograph by Will Counts while on Elizabeth’s first day at the newly desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, AR. Q. What prompted you to write Elizabeth and Hazel? A. I had known and been fascinated by the famous photograph of Elizabeth and Hazel, taken in front of Little Rock Central High School during the desegregation crisis of 1957, as long as I can remember. Who, after all, doesn’trecognize Hazel’s hate-filled face? It has come to represent all of the malice and racism of the South during the early days of the Civil Rights movement, while Elizabeth, dignified and stoic, personifies the great courage of blacks fighting bigotry. So when I went to Little Rock in 1999 and learned, from a poster at the Central High School National Historic Site showing the two of them, as grown women, apparently reconciled — they were smiling and seeming at ease with one another — I wanted to know how something so improbable had ever come to pass. So I started…
