For my grad seminar this week we read Danielle Allen's Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education. For Allen, the key issue of democratic citizenship is trust, which she suggests is about "believing that others will not exploit one's vulnerabilities, and that one's agency is generally secure, even when one cedes some elements of it to others" (p. 132). Allen begins her argument about citizenly habits of trust with the story and photograph of Elizabeth Eckford and the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, AR in 1957 (for more info it's definitely worth reading/viewing this). For Allen, Hazel Bryan's cursing of Elizabeth Eckford, forever frozen in time via Will Counts's iconic photograph, visibly performed citizenship circa 1957 and called (white, northern) Americans' attention to hatred and distrust.
When I first taught Allen's book, in 2006, I thought it notable and perhaps unfortunate that a book grounded so much in the visual came with a cover dominated by words:
It's hard to see in the image above, but words like "friendship," "recognition," "transformation" and "dialogue" appear in white on the cover. Some (though, curiously, not all) of these terms are taken up and theorized in Allen's book. I showed up in class yesterday assuming we would begin our conversation by exploring the words on the cover.
But when I got to class, the students' paperback versions of the book had this cover:
Given Allen's interest in citizenship and childhood (her title comes from the common admonition to children not to "talk to strangers"), this new cover is certainly compelling and more along the lines of what I might have expected to see in the first edition. It visually references Allen's marking of Brown v. Board as a "reconstitution" of the U.S. and suggests something of her interest in habits of citizenship as well. Annoyingly, University of Chicago Press offers no credit info for the cover photo that I could find, simply noting it came from Corbis (my blogthoughts on Corbis's misrepresentation of its "ownership" of historical images here. Grr...). As an aside, I did locate the same image on the cover of a 2004 book for children on school integration by Toni Morrison (who, in a nice circularity, blurbed Allen's book). So the photograph seems to have some public traction as an image of the tensions (to say the least) of school integration in the late 1950s.
Googling around during our class break, one of the students found yet a third cover image, again something I hadn't seen. I have no idea if the book was ever published with this image or if it was a prototype cover that was later retracted:
A bit hard to see here, but the cover still has words in the background, but features circular cut-outs of the Will Counts photograph: Hazel Bryan (on the left) cursing Elizabeth Eckford on Sept. 4, 1957. Chicago, and many other presses, works pretty closely with authors on book covers, so this one's a bit surprising. Technically it does point quite directly to the argument of the book. But given that Allen's argument is about the need to cultivate citizenly habits that are not akin to Hazel Bryan's curse, I would be surprised if this was Allen's favorite.