Eyes on the Prize

This song post-dates the 1940s—it’s a Civil Rights movement version of a traditional song—but it sounds right for a story about being the first to integrate a workplace that doesn’t want you there, as my characters Viola Allen and Azulee Smith do in the first few chapters of Hastings Street Blues. When I wrote these chapters I thought of this photograph from Little Rock in 1954—Elizabeth Eckford, icily calm as the crowd raged behind her.