Exploring Media: Little Rock Nine

In May of 1957 the U.S. Supreme Court declared that all segregated schools were deemed unconstitutional and ruled that schools should included both black and white students. This particular photo deals with a school in Little Rock, Arkansas which nine African American students enrolled and attended a white dominated school for the first time.

The African American lady in this photo is Elizabeth Eckford, who attempted to attend school on September 4th, 1957, along with 8 other African American peers. She was “stopped at the door by the Arkansans National Guard troops called up by Arkansas Goveror Orval Faubus” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Eckford). She and the eight others tried again without success to attend the school. Only until President Eisenhower sent U.S. Army troops to accompany the Little Rock Nine to school for protection did they manage to successfully attend class.

This photo presents an interesting dichotomy on social justice; on the one hand it depicts a black woman successfully attending a predominately white school for the first time. Yet on the other, we can see various forms of social injustice demonstrated by the scorn of the fellow white students in the background.

Exploring Media: Tank Man

This is tank man, a young anonymous protestor from China. The images of tank man standing in front of a long column of Chinese Type 59 tanks preventing their advance became overnight international phenomena. It has recently been featured in Life Magazines, “100 Photographs that Changed the World”. Almost nothing is known publicly about tank man’s identity, after all these years it remains a mystery. Some people believe he was picked up by Chinese secret police and summarily executed. This entire incident greatly embarrassed the Chinese government. It brought attention to the human rights violations perpetrated by the Chinese. To this day China censors the fact that this event occurred. An internet search for Tiananmen Square or tank man in the Chinese version of Google reveals no results pertaining to the incident.

Tank man is an incredible example of one man standing up to overwhelming state power during the student protests that took place in Beijing 1989. The Chinese government had called in the military to disperse the crowds and put an end to the pro democracy demonstrations. A riot broke out in Tiananmen Square where hundreds of students died. The catalyst for these demonstrations was the death of the death of pro-market and pro-democracy intellectual, Hu Yaobang, whom protesters wanted to pay tribute to. The protests themselves were unorganized; however, their motivations were generally clear and unified calling for democratic change and economic reform within the Chinese government.

This one photo of tank man standing defiantly up to the corrupt one party state of China perhaps did more to advance the cause of freedom and social justice than did the thousands of other protestors combined during that time in Beijing. This, if nothing else conveys the power and significance of the printed photograph and how one snapshot can come to represent and encapsulate an entire social movement.