Influential Photos

Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Massery, Will Counts, 1957

This is a photo of Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Massery. Elizabeth was one of the first black students admitted to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Hazel is shown shouting at Hazel, with many other disgusted classmates, just because she is the only black kid. Now, apparently, Hazel has deep regret for her actions. Who knows, she might just have been bullied into feeling this way. This photo was taken in 1957, it shows how unfair our white grandparents and parents were to black people in their time, and some still are to this day. Some white people of OUR generation are still unfair to black people to this day. Current events sort of show how stuck people are in their mentality that their race is the greatest and that no one else’s existence matter. But that isn’t fair; our world should be a world of equal opportunity, not unfairness.

Hurricane Katrina aftermath, 2005

What happened to the city of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina was absolutely tragic, New Orleans was ruined. This photo is of an abandoned home during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it shows how they suffered through one of the biggest natural disasters in American history. Plenty of people had lost their homes and they had nothing to go to after the hurricane. After Katrina the homeless population in New Orleans doubled. I feel as though if the rest of the United States actually tried to help more, then New Orleans would have had such a smoother and quicker recovery. But now that the city worked hard to recover they also grew together and the tourist rate in New Orleans is back to 80 percent of what it was back before Katrina hit. The whole Hurricane Katrina thing sort of boggles my mind because it seems as if the US government didn’t help New Orleans to recover at all. I don’t remember hearing about Katrina besides maybe when it first happened, back when I was 7, but it has taken them up until now to reach full recovery. It’s not fair that people weren’t talking about this and helping them out, I bet the recovery time would have been even faster if New Orleans didn’t have to rely on itself in such a dismal time.

Birmingham Beatings, Charles Moore, 1963

The black protestors in Birmingham, Alabama faced near-constant torment during the fight for equality. White people clearly didn’t want equality from the start, because they knew this movement would win, so they fought back with violence. Their goal was to scare the protestors from protestor, but of course they beyond brave for fighting through all of that for the equality of their children and themselves. While the constant violent acts that the whites performed on the blacks may have stalled the movement, it did not stop the movement and of course the good guys always wins, so black people won their equality. While typing this out and while thinking about this photo, and its description, I realized how truly brave the black people who fought for their equal rights were and exactly how cowardly white people have been over the centuries. I’m impressed.