This new edition of Gordon Parks' Segregation Story includes several never-before-published
photographs as well as enhanced reproductions created from Parks' original transparencies. A
selection of 26 images from Segregation Story first appeared in the September 24 1956 issue of
Life magazine as part of the photo essay "The Restraints: Open and Hidden." Although some of
these were exhibited during his lifetime the bulk of Parks' assignment was thought lost. In
2011 five years after Parks' death The Gordon Parks Foundation discovered more than 70 color
transparencies from the series. Revising the original book published by Steidl in 2014 this
expanded edition is the most comprehensive publication of this pivotal body of work to date. In
the summer following the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery Life magazine sent Parks to Alabama to
document the daily realities of African Americans living under Jim Crow laws that enforced
racial segregation. Over the course of several weeks in summer 1956 he photographed an
extended Black family the Causeys at home and work in the rural South. The resulting images
are among Parks' most powerful and groundbreaking and have since become iconic representations
of the conditions that led to the civil rights movement. Among them is one of Joanne Thornton
Wilson and her niece Shirley Anne Kirksey standing in front of a theater in Mobile Alabama-a
celebrated photograph that became in Parks' words a forceful "weapon of choice" in the
struggle against racism and segregation. In addition to unseen images from the series the
expanded Segregation Story includes a new essay by artist Dawoud Bey alongside texts from the
first edition by the late art historian Maurice Berger and the esteemed journalist and civil
rights activist Charlayne Hunter-Gault. Co-published with The Gordon Parks Foundation
