Elizabeth and Hazel: The Legacy of Little Rock

For February 2012, we are reading Elizabeth and Hazel, written by David Margolick. It explores desegregation and the civil rights movement--and particularly the desegregation of public schools through Brown vs the Board of Education--by examining the lives of the two girls in a famous photograph taken when nine African American students first entered the previously all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

This book builds on a growing interest of book club members in the work of HRW on human rights and specifically women's human rights in the US. In the past, we have read about incarceration of war on terror suspects in Guantanamo from the perspective of a young woman law student and first generation American from a Pakistani family; we read about young women in New York City pressured or forced into prostitution (the issues of child prostitution and the criminalization of juvenile prostitutes is a pressing one in the Los Angeles area, too), and following up on that, we read about the history of the juvenile justice and incarceration system in the US.

Following up on that topic, at the beginning of January, HRW released a report on youth offenders serving life without parole in the United States, Against All Odds. Young people, because of their age, physical size and lesser experience in the corrections system, are more vulnerable to violence and coercion; female prisoners are particularly vulnerable, and juvenile female prisoners are extremely vulnerable. For more, check out this (below) video, and share widely.

Issues of race, class, and toleration of difference are pressing issues in the US.  We know that race and poverty shape incarceration and punishment patterns in the US. The effect of these patterns of prejudice extend far beyond issues of policing, prisons, and juvenile justice: they shape immigration policy, the US tradition of religious toleration, and importantly, general respect for human rights, civility and international law. These issues have a long history, and hopefully, we will be able to explore this a little through the story of the relationship between Elizabeth and Hazel.

This story also brings up serious questions of responsibility and the use of visual documentation in the media. Both of these women's lives were dramatically changed because of this one photograph. They became symbols of a painful and violent time in US history, and it is a useful and important lesson to revisit that when we look at dramatic photos of human rights abuse, of 'anonymous' victims and perpetrators and bystanders, these are also photos of real people--whose lives may be changed in unforeseen ways because of our gaze and because this moment in their lives has now been documented in a specific and powerful way.

For some background on the story, watch this PBS video. Importantly, Elizabeth and Hazel were only 15 years old when the photo at Little Rock Central High School was taken.  

Education and Human Rights
Education is a human right: in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is Article 26. The idea that everyone has the fundamental right to education is still questioned and challenged, however. A new documentary on the Baha'i in Iran, Education Under Fire, addresses how the Iranian government has methodically excluded Baha'i Iranians from technical and higher educational opportunities, and has repeatedly disrupted the Baha'i community's attempts to educate themselves.

In a 'back to the future' sort of serendipity, recent reports of white students bullying Hispanic students have emerged recently, in the wake of the Alabama law HB56 that was designed to encourage "self repatriation" by requiring that state residents deny illegal immigrants access to any social service or business transaction.

HRW has recently issued a document specifically on the way that schools have turned into battlegrounds in many countries including Afghanistan, Thailand, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India. This kind of violence can permanently disrupt and destroy access to education for entire communities. More recently, HRW has reported on the Separate and Unequal access of handicapped children in Nepal to education. A quick search of the 2012 World Report reveals:

• ongoing segregation of Roma from schools in eastern Europe (p46, 431, 448);
• that only one in 45 child domestic workers in Indonesia is attending school (p62);
• the use of schools in Ethiopia for political indoctrination (p124);
• attacks on schools in Somalia and the forced recruitment of children into militias (p161);
• a general inability of accessible education in south Sudan, where less than half of all children are in school (p176);
• the worsening of access to education in Haiti after the earthquake (p156);
• the ongoing targeting of schools, and particularly school girls, in Afghanistan (p291-2);
• China's closing of private schools that catered to illegal internal migrants in cities like Beijing (p323);
• insurgent attacks on schools in the border regions of India (p330);
• Malaysia's practice of taking 'effeminate' schoolboys out of school and putting them into correctional camps (p345);
• inaccessibility of schools in Tibet to children with disabilities (p353);
• expulsion of students because of their religious affiliation in Pakistan (p365);
• a serious lack of investment in education in Papua New Guinea (p394);
• the use of children as soldiers and the use of schools for military purposes in the Philippines (p380);
• the killing of government school teachers by insurgent groups in Thailand as well as the use of schools as barracks (p397-8);
• the blocking of migrant workers' children from school in Kazakhstan by Philip Morris Kazakhstan (p469);
• the exclusion of girls who do not wear the headscarf from school in Chechnyya (p485);
• Uzbekistan's policy of forcing children to miss school for months to work the cotton harvest (p426);
• the exclusion of minority Bidun children from government schools in Kuwait (p584).

Clearly, access to education is a serious problem all over the world. And it is often something that is taken away based on gender, ethnicity, religion, or sexuality.