Will Counts (1931–2001) was a photographer and journalism professor at Indiana University. He is most famous for his photographic coverage of the 1957 desegregation battle surrounding Little Rock Central High School, for which he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Little Rock’s Central High School

Little Rock High School (Central High School National Historic Site) is a national symbol of the struggle over desegregation in the twentieth century. In 1957, three years after the U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” nine African American students—known as the Little Rock Nine—enrolled at Little Rock High School in Arkansas. During the first week of school, Governor Orval Faubus resisted President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s order to use the National Guard to protect the African American students, dismissing the troops and exposing the students to the mobs of angry white dissenters. However, when Governor Faubus refused to restore order to the school, President Eisenhower sent paratroopers to Little Rock and took federal control of the Arkansas National Guard. Under their protection, the “Little Rock Nine” finished out the school year.

This photo, named by the Associated Press one of the top hundred photos of the twentieth century, shows Elizabeth Eckford, a fifteen-year-old black student, outside Little Rock’s Central High School on the first day it was desegregated.