[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

Back around 1997, one of the colored girls who integrated Little Rock came back to Central High to give a speech. She noticed the black children were laying their heads on the desk and not listening.
She later said, in an interview that her thoughts were..”I put my life on the line for this?”

She put HER life on the line so black kids could go to white schools, put their heads on the desk and refuse to learn.

[Oliviaforever]

“Back around 1997, one of the colored girls who integrated Little Rock came back to Central High to give a speech. She noticed the black children were laying their heads on the desk and not listening.”

That is quite interesting and may be used by some to question Brown v. Board and the federal troops being used to desegregate Arkansas schools.

[Alberta's Child]

That was exactly what was behind Bill Cosby's infamous rant at the 2004 NAACP convention. If you remember the story, he went off on a lot of what passes for "black culture" in this country today. The whole thing was tied to the Brown v. Board of Education decision because that 2004 NAACP event commemorated the 50th anniversary of the decision.

Cosby's outrage was directed at all of those people -- primarily black parents and community leaders who were derelict in their responsibilities -- who allowed their children to waste the opportunities that the civil rights movement had given them 50 years earlier.

[Verginius Rufus]

One of the best known photos from the 1957 crisis shows a white girl yelling insults at the back of one of the black children who was attending Central High School. Both were 16 at the time. About 5 years later the white girl, Hazel Bryan Massery, now a young mother, realized that her kids would grow up and see that photo and that she would be the face of the hatred whites showed to blacks at that time, so she contacted the black young woman (Elizabeth Eckford) and apologized. Later the two became good friends for many years and would go shopping together, but later they drew apart.

A man named David Margolick wrote a book about the two of them--I saw a C-SPAN show about it several years ago. Perhaps the two women have made up by now. It appears that the other black people in Little Rock never were willing to forgive Hazel, and white people were unsympathetic too. Somehow she became the symbol of all that was bad about the old days. A lot of the white kids at Central High were unpleasant to the black kids but no one hears about the other ones, only about Hazel.