Analysis: A 1957 photo of Jerry Jones reminds us how recent America’s past is
On Sept. 9, 1957, Jones was one of a few dozen White teenagers who confronted a group of Black students outside the doors of North Little Rock High in Arkansas. A photograph of the encounter taken by a photographer from the Associated Press centers on two White students — one laughing, one with a cigarette in his snarl — staring down one of the Black students.
The past is never dead, as Faulkner said: It’s not even past. Jones is 80 now. Ruby Bridges, the little girl photographed in the company of U.S. marshals as she became the first Black girl to integrate a school in New Orleans in 1960, is. And many other Americans are old enough to have been part of that same history.
The Census Bureau releases data showing the population by age in any given year. The most recent data,, gives us a sense of how many people alive last year were also alive at the time the photo of Jones was taken. By 1957, the baby boom was already well underway, meaning that a lot of Americans were alive, but still children. About 1 in 20 Americans, though, either turned 13 that year or were already teenagers or older. In other words, more than old enough to understand what was happening.
A central achievement of the civil rights era came in 1964, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. That was the last year of the baby boom, meaning that the majority of the population surge that accompanied the boom had already occurred. So it was that, in 2021, more than a quarter of living Americans were born before the Civil Rights Act becoming law. More than 1 in 9 were teenagers or older.
Very, very few of those Americans participated in efforts to block school integration or were otherwise present at moments of history captured on film. The point, instead, is that they could have been. That Jones happened to be in that place at that time — and, it seems, of the predilection — to be among the students watching the Black kids get pushed away from the door. But 1 in 20 Americans alive in 2021 could have been there too.
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