THE SEGREGATION STORY

In September 1956, Life magazine published a photo-essay by Gordon Parks entitled The Restraints: Open and Hidden, which documented the everyday activities and rituals of one extended African American family living in the rural South under Jim Crow segregation. On e of the most powerful photographs depicts Joanne Thornton Wilson and her niece, Shirley Anne Kirksey, standing in front of a theate r in Mobile, Alabama, an image which became a forceful weapon of choice, as Parks would say, in the struggle against racism and segr egation. ...[Read more]