1957 School Crisis Primary Documents: Counts

The civil rights movement produced some of the most iconic photographs of the twentieth century. Ira Wilmer Counts’ famous image of Elizabeth Eckford’s first day at Central High, being chased and howled at by a white mob, is one of them. You can see Counts’ photograph, and find more primary sources about the 1957 desegregation of Central High, and other landmark events in the civil rights movement, in my new book, The Civil Rights Movement: A Documentary Reader, published this month by Wiley Blackwell. The book tells the story of the civil rights movement in the United States through more than 120 carefully selected and edited primary documents, each with its own introductory headnote for context and explanation.