Taken a half-century ago, these photographs depict the desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was so moved at the beating of veteran Alex Wilson that he ordered 1,200 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne to Little Rock, and federalized the Arkansas National Guard to quell the "disgraceful occurrences." "A Life Is More Than a Moment" carries us back to those painful and turbulent times, but it does not leave us there. In addition to these immortal photos, photographer Will Counts also took new portraits of many of the original subjects when he returned to Little Rock in 1997. Essays by Robert S. McCord, Ernest Dumas, and Will Campbell chart the path leading to the crisis and define its impact on the civil rights movement. This book shows an ugly hatred, but in the end, it is also a book of hope and reconciliation.
Will Counts decided to make photojournalism his career while studying in Miss Edna Middlebrook's journalism class at Little Rock High School (now Little Rock Central High) . During the Central High integration crisis between 1957 and 1960 he worked as a photographer for The Arkansas Democrat where his photographs were runner-up for the 1957 Pulitzer prize in photography. In 1960 he became a photo editor for the Associated Press in Chicago and later an AP photographer in Indianapolis. He is Professor Emeritus of the Indiana University School of Journalism where he directed the School's photojournalism sequence from 1963 to 1995. In 1997, while teaching as a Visiting Professor at his undergraduate alma mater, The University of Central Arkansas, Counts returned to Central High to document the school 40 years after the integration crisis. He and his wife, Vivian, also a native Arkansawyer, live in Bloomington, Indiana.
Robert S. McCord, a native of Arkansas, has spent 50 years working on Arkansas newspapers. At the time of the crisis at Central High School, he was the Sunday Magazine editor of the Arkansas Democrat and Will Count's boss. Later he became editor and publisher of the North Little Rock Times, returned to the Arkansas Democrat as executive editor and retired in 1991 as columnist and senior editor of the Arkansas Gazette. McCord is a graduate of the University of Arkansas and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Ernest Dumas is a native Arkansawyer who has spent his entire life in the state except for short sojourns at the University of Missouri and in the U.S. Army. He was reared in the piney woods of South Arkansas, then a citadel of segregation and a home to the white citizens councils. He spent thirty-one years at the Arkansas Gazette, one of the nation's great newspapers until its demise in 1991, half that time as a State Capitol and political reporter and later as associate editor and editorial writer. He continues to write a column for the Arkansas Times and several other Arkansas newspapers and teaches journalism at the University of Central Arkansas at Conway. In 1992 he edited a book, The Clintons of Arkansas.
Will Davis Cambell, author of Brother to a Dragonfly, was born in southern Mississippi in 1924, ordained a Baptist preacher at 17, briefly attended Louisiana College, and served as a medic in the South Pacific during World War II. After the war he married Brenda Fisher, attended Tulane University, and graduated from Wake Forest University and Yale Divinity School. First as a University Chaplain at Ole Miss, then as race relations troubleshooter for the National Council of Churches, and finally as director of an activist organization called the Committee of Southern Churchmen, Will Campbell was among the most conspicuous of white Southerners for social justice in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. Besides the many books he has written, he has been the subject of two biographies and numerous magazine profiles in such magazines as Rolling Stones, LIFE, The Progressive, Esquire. Will and Brenda Campbell live on a farm near Mt. Juliet, Tennessee.
