A Life Is More Than A Moment: The Desegregation of Little Rock's Central High.

Will Counts. A Life Is More Than A Moment: The Desegregation of Little Rock's Central High. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999. 76 pp. $29.95.

In a recent informal survey, members of the Arkansas Historical Association selected the Little Rock school desegregation crisis of 1957 as the most important event of the twentieth century in Arkansas. The most famous of thousands of photographs taken during that tumult was one of a pretty black girl in a starched white dress walking just ahead of an angry pack of white people. A white girl is yelling, and her pretty face is hatefully distorted. Over four decades, that picture has been reproduced endlessly around the world, and with each reproduction the black girl keeps walking in dignity and the white girl keeps yelling in fury.

The photographer, Will Counts, has collected the best of his pictures from the fall of 1957 in this book and has written a cogent, nostalgic account to go with the pictures and to recall his part in recording the story for his then-employer, the Arkansas Democrat. The press of Indiana University, where Counts spent thirty-two years teaching his craft, has made a valuable contribution to history in publishing the collection.

Frightening images, almost forgotten, are included here. There is the collage of thirteen camera clicks covering not over a minute or two during which Alex Wilson, a black newsman, is shown first walking toward Central High, then overtaken by half a dozen jeering white men, and then punched and kicked, and finally ridden to the ground walking, not hurrying, steadfastly refusing to surrender to his assailants' command, "Run, nigger, run!"

There are the soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division, forever young, sent by President Eisenhower to protect the nine black students whose integration of Central High so angered the segregationist mobs. The nine youngsters are there with their mentors, L. C. and Daisy Bates, heads bowed in prayer at Thanksgiving dinner, and the other principals of the conflict--Governor Orval E. Faubus, who precipitated the crisis by sending the National Guard to block the nine students; suave and youthful Thurgood Marshall, then just a lawyer arguing for the black youngsters; Virgil Blossom, the embattled school superintendent whose ambitions overrode his judgment.

A viewer is startled at how wholesome all the kids look--white as well as black. And as if to remind us that wholesomeness and hope are very hard to kill, even in the presence of hatred, there is one last collection of photographs of the two girls in the most famous picture. Counts learned that the white girl, Hazel Bryan, had contacted the black girl, Elizabeth Eckford, years ago to express her shame and remorse. Nothing more came of it until the photographer persuaded the two of them, forty years later, to be photographed arm in arm in front of the famous old school. He tells us in the text that the two women have become friends. It is also worth noting that Ms. Eckford has since then emerged from decades of silence and become active in a number of public endeavors.

Added to the text are essays by three men who knew the story well. Will Campbell, a Baptist minister from Mississippi, was one of the few white people to walk with the black students on the day they tried to integrate Central High. He still sees race as "an aneurysm on the heart and soul of America." Ernest Dumas and Robert McCord, two of Arkansas's most distinguished journalists, write of Central High's history and of the fateful autumn of 1957. Counts's own essay, aside from a seriously garbled account of the ownership and sale of the Arkansas Gazette some years after the school crisis, adds a valuable note of intimacy and contemporaneity to the story of Little Rock. If Counts's words did nothing else, they would be worth having for his vivid account of how one fearful, inexperienced photographer, barely out of boyhood, managed to work quietly amidst the roar and the passion to show the world what history looked like on a few fall days a long time ago.