Reflections on Hannah Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock” Roger Berkowitz
Hannah Arendt wrote “Reflections on Little Rock” in the fall of 1957, occasioned by a picture in The New York Times. There were actually two pictures in the Times on 4 September 1957. It is widely assumed that Arendt refers to the photo of Elizabeth Eckford, a 15-year-old black girl being taunted by a white mob of adults after she was refused entrance to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. But it is as likely that she describes the other photo, which shows Dorothy Counts, another 15-year-old black girl also being harassed by a mob of white students as she and a family friend walk toward Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. Arendt speaks of only one photograph: “I think no one will find it easy to forget the photograph reproduced in newspapers and magazines throughout the country, showing a Negro girl, accompanied by a white friend of her father, walking away from a school, persecuted and followed into bodily proximity by a jeering and grimacing mob of youngsters.”1 Arendt seemingly combined the two photographs in her mind’s eye, describing the scene in North Carolina while attributing it to Little Rock. Arendt makes several factual errors in her account of the photograph. She mistakenly refers to the man accompanying Dorothy Counts, Dr. Edwin Thompkins, as a white friend of her family; but Dr. Thompkins is black.2 She writes that Dorothy Counts’s father was absent, when in fact he had driven her to school. And Arendt criticizes the NAACP and other adults who she says were wrong to foist that struggle on their young children. But Dorothy Counts had prepared for this struggle. She had spent weeks in a white summer camp to prepare for racism at Harding High. And Counts willingly and courageously took on her role as a civil rights warrior, one she continued to embrace throughout her life. Arendt’s critics contend that her “several errors of judgment, coupled with factual errors” discredit her essay and show Arendt to be biased and even racist in her judgments.3 For Kathryn T. Gines, Arendt has already made up her mind that the black parents and the NAACP are “neglectful and opportunistic.”4 Anne Norton agrees, writing that Arendt deprecates the intellectual reasons for integrating the schools. For Norton, black families “are moved by need, and so, according to Arendt’s strict dichotomies, they operate in the realm of necessity, not in the realm of freedom and will.”5 Patricia Owens believes that “Arendt’s anti-black racism is rooted in her consistent refusal to analyze the colonial and imperial origins of racial conflict in the United States.”6 And Michael D. Burroughs writes, ”Arendt is yet another racist Reflections on Hannah Arendt’s “Reflections on Little Rock”
Roger Berkowitz
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