Segregation Story: Expanded Edition
The expanded edition of Gordon Parks’ Segregation Story, the definitive presentation of his 1956 color photographs of an African American family living under Jim Crow segregation in Alabama, images that became, in Parks’ words, a “weapon of choice” against racism.
On assignment for Life, Parks spent weeks with the extended Thornton family near Mobile and Shady Grove, Alabama, photographing daily life (churchgoing, farm work, shopping beneath “White Only” signs) in saturated color. Twenty-six images ran in the September 24, 1956 issue as “The Restraints: Open and Hidden” the bulk of the assignment was thought lost until The Gordon Parks Foundation recovered more than 70 transparencies in 2011. Revising Steidl’s 2014 edition, this 2022 volume adds some 30 previously unpublished photographs and enhanced reproductions from the original transparencies, with a new essay by Dawoud Bey joining first-edition texts by Maurice Berger and Charlayne Hunter-Gault.
Parks (1912–2006), the first African American staff photographer at Life and later the director of The Learning Tree and Shaft, documented American life from the 1940s into the 2000s Steidl and the Foundation continue to publish his archive, including Invisible Man with Ralph Ellison.
