WHAT IS HISTORY? AN ECHO OF THE PAST INTO THE FUTURE
What does the past teach us about our future?
This was today in 1957.
Fifteen-year old Elizabeth Eckford walked amongst an angry mob screaming at her and threatening her at Little Rock Central High School as she walked to class.
Decades from now in the history books of this pandemic, the anti-mask/anti-vaccine crowd will be seen in the same light as the people in that crowd, like Hazel Bryan who became the face of white segregationism in this iconic photo of that day.
Personal liberty, constitutional freedoms and the fictitious spectre of government overreach were all arguments used by the segregationists in the wake of the Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education that ruled segregation was unconstitutional.
These are the same arguments I have heard from the anti-mask/anti-vaccine contingent that are perpetuating not just the lies and disinformation, but are lengthening this pandemic and exhausting those of us in health care as we deal with hospitals full of primarily unvaccinated and school boards' continued intransigence in protecting not just children but the communities of those children and their families.
And that girl behind Elizabeth Eckford?
Hazel Bryan's parents pulled her out of Little Rock Central High shortly after this photo was in every newspaper in America. She dropped out of high school at 17 and got married.
One day Hazel Bryan realized her own children would learn their mother was that screaming girl in the photo. She became a peace activist and a social worker working with the African American community. Bryan hoped to rehabilitate her reputation.
On the 40th anniversary of the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in 1997, the reporter who took the original photo, Will Counts, brought Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan together. Bryan apologized and surprisingly a friendship developed between the two women.
While we would all love a happy ending, it was not to be and perhaps Hazel Bryan's heart didn't really change.
Their friendship frayed and eventually dissolved after Elizabeth Eckford wrote at a ceremony at Little Rock Central High School in 1999, "True reconciliation can occur only when we honestly acknowledge our painful, but shared, past."
The above photo was just a few days ago in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, when an angry anti-mask mob attempted to storm a school board meeting.
This pandemic is a watershed moment in our nation's history that will not only have repercussions in healthcare for decades to come as we deal with the medical problems of COVID survivors, but also in those who have stridently fought under false premises of personal liberty and constitutional freedoms. Communities have been fractured and chasms opened with their selfish resolve to treat what is best for all of us as a personal inconvenience and affront to their privilege.
“What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past.”
-Victor Hugo
History is the harshest of judges.