Little Rock – 1957

The central image is of Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine African-American students who enrolled in a formerly segregated high school in Arkansas. On the first day of the incident Eckford walked alone through a gauntlet of hostile national Guardsmen and protesters. The shafts of in the sky are inspired by James Baldwins’s discussion of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, and Malcom X in a recent documentary. A goal of this piece is to explore the larger metaphorical context of this already powerful event.