I.

On September 4, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford attempted to enter the school building, but was blocked by the Arkansas National Guard. Outside the classroom building, reporters had gathered. Will Counts of the Arkansas Democrat and Johnny Jenkins of the Arkansas Gazette set the tone for how the day would be remembered. Their almost identical photographs of the lone student’s stoic walk ahead of an angry crowd seemed to capture the way class and race were defined in the confrontation. Each of the photojournalists focused his lens on Eckford and the unnamed white girl behind her who was yelling insults, her face distorted. Eckford looked calm, was dressed modestly, and appeared earnest. Her white adversary wore a dress that was too tight, and as she propelled herself forward, menacingly, mouth agape, she projected the crude callousness of the recognized white trash type. That contrast was precisely what the photographers intended to record.

Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

II.

When it comes down to it, Counts’s famous photograph of Elizabeth Eckford is really more of Hazel Bryan: it is on Hazel that the eyes land, and linger. Despite the tricky lighting, her face is perfectly exposed: the early morning September sun shines on her like a spotlight. It hits her from the side, painting her face in a stark chiaroscuro that makes it look more demonic still. She’s caught mid-vowel, with her mouth gapingly, ferociously open. At that instant, and in perpetuity, Hazel Bryan, always the performer, has the stage completely to herself. Others played their own small parts in the picture, but “the mouth,” she later said, “was mine.” And dressing that morning as she had, trying to look all grown up and sexed up, she had masked how young she really was. She was only fifteen, but she would always be seen, and judged, as an adult. And then there was the solemnity and permanence of film itself, and of the era in which it had been exposed. Hazel’s act hadn’t been an expression of some grand, well-developed worldview; it had been tossed off, flippant, fleeting. But in a photograph—a stark, black-and-white photograph—it would appear premeditated, even ordained.

David Margolick, Elizabeth and Hazel, Two Women of Little Rock (2011)

III.

Benjamin Fine of the New York Times compared Hazel Bryan to one of the frenzied girls who attended Elvis Presley concerts. […] During the first attempt to usher the black students into the school, a student ran down the hall yelling, à la Paul Revere, “The niggers are coming.” Parents outside began screaming for their children to flee. A group of girls stood at a window, shrieking. Under the direction of teachers, the majority gradually filed out of the building, though some, including Hazel’s best friend, Sammie Dean Parker, later claimed to have leapt from the second-floor window.

Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)