Ira Wilmer Counts Jr.

Ira Wilmer Counts Jr. (August 24, 1931 — October 6, 2001), known as Will Counts, was an American photojournalist most known for drawing the nation's attention to the desegregation crisis that was happening at Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. Documenting the integration effort in the 1950s, he captured the harassment and violence that African Americans in the South were facing at this time. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for these photographs.

Early life Will Counts was born in Little Rock on August 24, 1931. During the Depression he, his brother, and his parents (Ira Counts Sr. and Jeanne Frances Adams Counts) were sharecroppers in White County, outside the town of Rose Bud and in Lonoke County, outside of Cabot, before they relocated in 1936 to the Plum Bayou Homesteads, a New Deal project, in Jefferson County. Later, the family returned to Little Rock where Counts attended Little Rock High School (now Central High). It was there that his journalism teacher, Edna Middlebrook, spurred his interest in photography.

During his junior year, Counts asked his mother for a Speed Graphic camera for Christmas after he had seen one advertised in Boys' Life magazine. However, with his father still away fighting in World War II, his mother could only afford to buy a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye.

Only a few weeks after the famous photograph of Elizabeth Eckford was taken, Counts photographed black journalist Alex Wilson, a reporter for the Memphis-based Tri-State Defender, being kicked in the face by a brick-wielding white man while a crowd watched. Counts won a first place award by the National Press Photographer's Association and first place in the spot news category for the fifteenth annual "News Picture of the Year Competition" for his photo of Alex Wilson. The image was also selected by the Encyclopædia Britannica as one of the world's fifty most memorable news photos in the last fifty years. The photograph was said to have led President Dwight D. Eisenhower to send federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas to protect African Americans during the integration effort. Counts went on to work for the Associated Press. He developed some of the most renowned photojournalism departments in the United States and, in 1996, he was inducted in the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame.

Personal life Counts and his wife, Vivian, lived in Bloomington. They had four children.

Publications Will Counts, A Photographic Legacy, Ira Will Counts Jr., 1979 Will Counts, The Magnificent 92: Indiana's Courthouses, Quarry Books (1991) Will Counts, Monroe County in Focus (1993) Will Counts, A Life is More than a Moment, Will Campbell, Ernest Dumas, Robert S. McCord, Indiana University Press (1996) Will Counts, Bloomington: Past and Present, Indiana University Press (2002) Will Counts and Jon Dilts. The Magnificent 92: Indiana Courthouses