The photograph, taken Sept. 4, 1957, is one of most memorable from the civil rights movement: Elizabeth Eckford, one of the "Little Rock Nine" African-American students, in her neat white dress, clasps her books to her breast and holds her head high, with her eyes obscured by sunglasses. Behind her, a well-dressed white girl, Hazel Bryan, shouts at her with rage.
Though the photograph captured only a moment, David Margolick's "Elizabeth and Hazel" shows how the episode cast a long shadow over the lives of both teenage girls and forever formed them.
As the years passed, Hazel reached out to Elizabeth in an act of reconciliation, and the two women became friends. But reality intruded on this Disney story, and Margolick, rather than sanitizing it, captures the full fraught sweep of history — with wounds so deep that friendship may never be possible.
'Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock'
By David Margolick
Yale University Press, 310 pages, $26