This article explores Hannah Arendt’s response to Will Counts’s wellknown photographs of the ‘crisis’ of Little Rock – photographs that prompted Arendt’s initial challenge to the broad liberal support for the civil rights campaign to end segregated schooling in the southern States. Read in the context of both contemporary and retrospective accounts of Little Rock, Arendt’s challenge is used to examine her insistence on: (1) the rights of children to be protected by adults from the burdens of political life; (2) the fundamental importance of adult rights to sexuality and sexual desire; and (3) the purchase of Arendt’s controversial distinctions between public, social and private life.
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