October 6, 2001

Photojournalist Will Counts, who is best known in Arkansas for his photograph of Elizabeth Eckford being harassed during the desegregation of Little Rock Central High in 1957, died of cancer. Counts, who was born in Little Rock (Pulaski County) to sharecropper parents, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and one of his photographs was selected as one of the world’s fifty most memorable news pictures of the last fifty years. He graduated from Little Rock High School, earned a BA at Arkansas State Teachers College (now the University of Central Arkansas), and a master’s and a PhD at Indiana University. He was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame in 1996. Early in his career, Counts worked at both the Arkansas Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat.