A LIFE IS MORE THAN A MOMENT

Photographer Counts took one of the defining images of the civil rights movement: Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine black students chosen to integrate Little Rock, Ark.’s Central High School in 1957, being taunted by a white female student. Counts returned to Central High 40 years later and with images from the late ’50s he juxtaposes those from the late ’90s: Eckford and her former tormenter, Hazel Bryan Massery, chatting amiably in front of the school building, black and white cheerleaders joining together at a basketball game, a popular black teacher leading an integrated class in trigonometry, black and white students graduating together in cap and gown. Accompanying essays recount the events so graphically illustrated in Counts’s photographs and put that fall day in 1957 in historical context. A hopeful reminider of how far we—ve come in four short decades.