Skip to main content

Elizabeth and Hazel Two Women of Little Rock

 

Trauma, Hate, and Barriers to Reconciliation

 Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock

by David Margolick

Reviewed by  Geoffrey W. Sutton

Elizabeth Ann Eckford is 15 in the classic photo of her silently walking toward Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. But she’s not alone. A loud white mob screams hate. With an unforgettable open mouth, Hazel Massey appears over Elizabeth’s right shoulder and comes to represent the hot white objection to desegregating the all-white High School.

 

The story of Elizabeth and Hazel is painful to read. David Margolick makes the black and white images come alive as much as possible for those of us at a distance in time and place from the lived events. In addition to the stories recalled by each woman, we gain additional insights from school records and the way various reporters retold the stories over several decades.

 

Margolick offers insight into human emotion and personality traits as well as the toll on mental health of traumatic experience Thus we can trace the effects of racism that bears down on Elizabeth's wellbeing for decades. We also see the contrast with Hazel's struggle to recover from the persistent image of hate and establish a credible change from representing white hostility to a woman who seeks a path to reconciliation in a context where few Blacks and Whites are willing to affirm her new attitude.

 

The author's nuanced telling of the effects of apologies and attempts at forgiveness and reconciliation are worth pondering as we see the real world problems of bridging  the Black-White chasm widened by verbal and physical violence inflamed by government orders to desegregate the schools.


 Elizabeth and Hazel


What's missing in the story is an appreciation of the problems with human memory when it comes to recalling personal experiences. I would not expect the author to be a neuropsychologist, but there were useful resources and experts available at the time he was writing to help with this important component of recounting what really happened in Little Rock in 1957 and what happened at various points in the decades covered by the book.

Biographers rely on interviews, news stories, and notes. Margolick artfully weaves these disparate sources into a meaningful narrative that keeps us wanting to turn the pages to learn what happens next. That’s good writing. But I’d like to see him wrestle a bit more with the evidence. How does he decide to weigh this memory or that recollection? How do biases affect the memories of the victims and the perpetrators? Are there false memories too—things that never happened?

 

Despite my desire for a deeper analysis, I recommend this book for readers who want to better understand the struggles of African-Americans during the early years of desegregation and those who want to think about interracial apologies, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

Cite this review

Sutton, G.W. (2022). Trauma, hate, and barriers to reconciliation: A review of Elizabeth and Hazel-two women of Little Rock. Sutton Reviews. Retrieved from https://suttonreviews.suttong.com/2022/01/elizabeth-and-hazel-two-women-of-little.html 


Reference

Margolick, D. (2011). Elizabeth and Hazel: Two women of Little Rock. New Haven: Yale. 

Available on AMAZON

Book Author

David Margolick is an author of several books. He has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

Reviewer

Geoffrey W. Sutton is a psychologist and author who studies and writes about psychology and culture. Read more at suttong.com

 Resources

Videos of Elizabeth Eckford and the Little Rock Nine

Photos of Elizabeth, Hazel, and the LIttle Rock Nine

 

 Books about the Little Rock Nine






Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Changing Our Mind by D. Gushee - Review

Changing Our Mind   by David P. Gushee    Reviewed by Geoffrey W. Sutton Changing Our Mind by David P. Gushee is a transformative book that explores the author's evolving views on LGBTQ inclusion within Christianity. Gushee, a prominent Christian ethicist, shares his journey from holding traditional evangelical views to advocating for full acceptance of LGBTQ Christians in the church. He examines biblical texts and theological positions, encouraging readers to reconsider their beliefs in light of new understandings and the lived experiences of LGBTQ individuals. The book is a call for empathy, inclusivity, and a more loving faith community. ***** I read the Kindle version of the third edition of Changing Our Mind as part of my research into Christian worldviews focused on Christian moral perspectives toward people who identify as LGBTQ. I had previously addressed the topic from the perspective of moral psychology in A House Divided (2016) and in a few research studies co...
Post a Comment
Read more

Denial of Death and the Meaningful Life- Book Review

  The Denial of Death   by Ernest Becker A Review by Geoffrey W. Sutton The prospect of death, Dr. Johnson said, wonderfully concentrates the mind. The main thesis of this book is that it does much more than that: the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.  — Ernest Becker, xvii I completed a recent reading of this old classic yesterday (13 December, 2015) because I was interested in Becker’s contribution to Terror Management Theory, which I find so helpful in understanding the ways U.S. leaders are publicly responding to terrorist activities. Becker’s ideas are more than forty years old and many have not withstood the test of time. However, his basic premise that we deny the reality of death in many ways...
3 comments
Read more

JESUS AND JOHN WAYNE - A book review

  JESUS AND JOHN WAYNE How White Evangelicals        Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation By    Kristin Kobes Du Mez Reviewed by    Geoffrey W. Sutton   Kristin Kobes Du Mez begins and ends her assault on militaristic white American evangelical men with their contemporary sociopolitical leader, former president, Donald Trump. In the Introduction we learn the short doctrinal list of what it means to be a Bible-believing evangelical, but the author posits that American evangelicals are more than a set of theological statements. Instead, since the early 1900s they have embraced a John Wayne view of what it means to be a Christian man—a powerful warrior for country and God—a man who leads his troops into battle to uphold the values of God’s chosen people, the Americans. It was the title, Jesus and John Wayne , that was off-putting. I didn’t grow up with John Wayne films or a love of American westerns. I was after...
Post a Comment
Read more