Vanity Fair has a fascinating look into the relationship between Elizabeth Eckerd and Hazel Bryan. David Margolick has done a wonderful job of reporting the fractured and strange braid of their relationship over the years, and how different real outcomes are from Hollywood outcomes. If you’re following the story of the Jena 6, there are lessons to be learned. Like how one picture can shape perceptions of who you are forever. Like how one news event changes nothing. Like how racism is unrepentant and fierce and runs so deep that when the cameras turn away and the reporters go to the next big story, nothing changes.

The hardest part of this story for me was reading about Elizabeth’s life in high school after the furor died down and she went about her daily life in 1957. Read that, and then go read some other stories of students being bullied in this current age. Some of those bullied students (white students, at that), took out their guns and shot up their schools for far less than Elizabeth endured. Some of those bullied students sue. Some of them kill themselves. Some of them just live with it, beaten down and discouraged, never recovering as adults.

Yet the hate marches on. Events in Jena prove that. The comments on Vanessa’s blog prove it. I can see it, but I have no idea how to change it. Do you?

…and the Jena 6, who has proven that the more things change, the more they stay the same...

Fables of Faubus, performed by the Moorpark College Jazz Band - Spring, 2006

Fables of Faubus First recorded on May 5, 1959 for Columbia Records, on Mingus Ah-Um. Orval E. Faubus was a governor of Arkansas who, in 1957, sent out the National Guard to prevent a few black children from entering Little Rock’s Central High School. Mingus’ condemnation of this action was apparently too strong for those in charge at Columbia Records, who prohibited Mingus and his drummer Dannie Richmond from singing the lyrics above…
(From Charles Mingus: More Than a Fake Book.)

Mingus website

Technorati Tags: racism, faubus, little rock nine, jena 6, mingus

This hospital is at the north end of the San Fernando Valley (Donna will know exactly where it is), and today is known as the Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center.

Here’s a Google Earth satellite rendering of the site today looking in approximately the same direction:

And here is the view in 1929 looking almost exactly due west toward Simi Valley (near sunset, I’m guessing from the light flares):

Technorati Tags: vintage photos, old photos, VA Hospital, 1929

How prophetic was that slogan? 19 1/2 cents per gallon in 1929, just right for a road trip, which my paternal grandparents and great-grandmother (pictured above) loved.

Fresh out of the scanner. More to come.