The Story Behind the Famous Little Rock Nine ‘Scream Image’

You’ve probably seen the photo: a young African-American girl walks to school, her eyes shielded by sunglasses. She is surrounded by a hateful crowd of angry white people, including a girl caught mid-jeer, her teeth bared and her face hardened with anger. It’s one of the most famous images of the civil rights era, but it turns out that the story of the young women in the photo is even more complicated than the racial drama their faces portray.

Hazel Bryan was just 15 when the photo was taken, but her actions on September 4, 1957—and the hatred on her face—turned her into an infamous symbol of the bigotry of Jim Crow and the intolerance faced by the students who tried to go to school that day.

It was the first day of school in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Elizabeth Eckford, also 15 and the girl Bryan was screaming at, was headed to class at Little Rock Central High School. That fact alone was anything but normal: Eckford and eight other black students were recruits sent to the all-white school to test Arkansas’ supposed intention to integrate its schools.

Three years earlier, the Supreme Court ruled the segregation of public schools unconstitutional. But in a South ruled by the brutality of Jim Crow, many whites clung to segregation. Like other Southern states, Arkansas dragged its feet, and when the Supreme Court tried to force integration with a second landmark decision, the Little Rock school board decided it would integrate its schools over a period of many years.

Technically, Little Rock Central High School was to be the first to integrate. Eckford and her fellow black students were entitled to attend Central High under the law, but city officials gerrymandered the district in a way that would have forced the majority of black students to attend a different school than whites. The NAACP decided to defy those rules and desegregate Central High on its own. The group recruited students, then registered them at the school.

But on the first day of school, a mob of furious white people assembled to make sure they couldn’t get in. The black students had trained for this moment. But nothing could prepare Eckford for the screaming, taunting crowd that surrounded the school. They called out for her to be lynched and yelled slogans like “Two, four, six eight, we don’t want to integrate!” In the midst of the horde, reporters and …

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