(Photo: Will Counts Collection/Indiana University Archives.)

This is simply exceptional long-form journalism. Writing for the Vanity Fair's website, David Margolick has several thousand words on the iconic photo above. Elizabeth Eckford is the young black woman in the white dress, and picture was taken by photographer Will Counts on the day that Eckford started the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School in 1957. In rich and luscious detail, Margolick, traces the lives of both Eckford and Hazel Bryan, the white woman center-left whose face is twisted with hate. It's the complicated history of an era, of a country, and of two of history's actors. No excerpt can do this complex piece justice, but here's one anyway:

Less than a week into school, Mrs. Huckaby later wrote, Elizabeth came into her office "red-eyed, her handkerchief in a damp ball in her hands." The harassment was so bad that she wanted to go home early. But things only got worse, as the disciplinary files, in the collection of Mrs. Huckaby's papers at the University of Arkansas, reveal. Sometime in October: Elizabeth hit with a shower of sharpened pencils. October 28: Elizabeth shoved in hall. November 20: Elizabeth jostled in gym. November 21: Elizabeth hit with paper clip. December 10: Elizabeth kicked. December 18: Elizabeth punched. January 10: Elizabeth shoved on the stairs. January 14: Elizabeth knocked flat. January 22: Elizabeth spat upon. January 29: Elizabeth attacked with spitballs. January 31: Elizabeth asks grandfather to take her home after girls serenade her with humiliating songs in gym class. February 4: Elizabeth has soda bottle thrown at her. February 14: Elizabeth attacked with rock-filled snowballs. March 7: Elizabeth hit by egg. March 12: Elizabeth hit by tomato. "She said that except for some broken glass thrown at her during lunch, she really had had a wonderful day," Mrs. Huckaby wrote at one point, apparently with a straight face.

My good friend Adam Conner send me a link to the Margolick article and he's got a great post digging up quotes on the Little Rock Nine from Bill Clinton, Mike Huckabee, and others. Read Adam's post and, I beg of you, read Margolick's "Through a Lens, Darkly."