The Guardian: Why are poor Americans more patriotic than their wealthier counterparts?

If we define patriotism not only as an attachment to country but also as a belief in its greatness, if not superiority – the brand of patriotism expressed by America’s poor is extraordinary. Data analysis from the authoritative General Social Survey (run by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago) shows that over 90% of America’s poorest would rather be citizens of the United States than of any other nation. The figure is higher than that for working-class, middle-class and upper-class Americans. About 80% also believe that America is a “better” country than most other countries. [...]

First, America’s poor still see their country as the “last hope” for themselves specifically and for humanity more generally. Because of its foundational social contract, the country offers each citizen a sense of dignity. As Ray (all names have been disguised), an older African American man in Birmingham, Alabama, told me, only in America is everybody equal in principle to everyone else. [...]

Second, to many, America is seen as the land of “milk and honey”. It’s perceived as a rich and generous place, where those who work hard can achieve much. The people I spoke with took personal responsibility for the difficult trajectories they had experienced, even if in fact all odds were stacked against them. As Kysha, an African American woman in her 60s in a shelter in Birmingham, told me, “It’s on you … you got a chance like anyone else … everybody got a chance. Some people don’t wanna do right. You gotta realize that.” America, moreover, gives money to countries all over the world: it’s a place of abundance, that attracts people from all over the world. Under this reasoning, anyone who’s poor in America should be thankful to be here.

read the article

Today in Focus: Who is trying to ban abortion in the US?

Janet Porter believes life begins at conception and has spent the last 10 years lobbying on the fringes of the US abortion debate. Many on the left and right despise her, but in Donald Trump’s US, she has just had one of the biggest victories of her life. Porter successfully lobbied Ohio’s legislature to pass one of the strictest abortion bans in the world in April – the “heartbeat bill” would make the procedure illegal about six weeks into pregnancy. Alabama followed in May with an even more restrictive version, outlawing abortion at any stage of pregnancy, with no exceptions for those resulting from rape or incest. Six-week bans have been introduced in 15 states, although none are currently in effect.

Jessica Glenza, the Guardian’s US health reporter, tells Anushka Asthana about her meeting with Porter. With the recent appointment of two Trump-nominated supreme court justices and a growing number of anti-abortion federal judges, the ultimate aim of anti-abortion activists and lawmakers is to mount a challenge to Roe v Wade, the 1973 court decision that legalised abortion in the US.

And: Serena Daniari on why achieving a higher voice can be essential to embracing a female identity, and can provide a cloak of protection from bias and bigotry.

listen to the podcast

Los Angeles Times: States with the worst anti-abortion laws also have the worst infant mortality rates

States with the largest number of abortion restrictions such as mandatory waiting periods, counseling and ultrasounds; restrictions on insurance coverage for abortions in public or private health plans; and unnecessary standards on ambulatory abortion clinics tended to have the fewest number of supportive policies, the survey found. Those included Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act; family leave; sex- and HIV education programs; and good access to children’s health insurance programs. [...]

These statistics should give the lie to legislators’ arguments that their anti-abortion measures are somehow good for women’s health or aimed at protecting their rights. A 2017 study by the Center for Reproductive Rights and IBIS Reproductive Health, a healthcare think tank, found that hostility to reproductive rights tended to go hand-in-hand with a lack of state-level policies supporting women’s and infant health. [...]

Experts have connected the dots between abortion restrictions and maternal and infant health problems. Limits on access to legal abortions can prompt women to choose unsafe alternatives. Indeed, the reported rate of maternal deaths in Texas soared from 72 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2010 to 148 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2012, a trend that some experts attributed to the state’s closing of abortion clinics and cuts in funding for Planned Parenthood and other family planning services during the same period.

read the article

The Guardian view on abortion: protecting a human right

No law can end abortions, however severe its restrictions and however harsh its penalties. Each day almost 70,000 unsafe abortions are carried out around the world, and they are vastly more likely to happen in countries with strict laws. What such legislation does do is force some women to continue pregnancies against their wishes, while risking the lives and wellbeing of others. Women in the US have seen their ability to terminate pregnancies dismantled piece by piece. Now states are racing to outlaw or dramatically curb abortions with extreme and unconstitutional bills. The aim is to directly challenge Roe v Wade, the US supreme court ruling that established that abortion is legal before the foetus is viable outside the womb, at around 24 weeks. Last Tuesday, the governor of Georgia signed a bill essentially banning abortions after six weeks from 2020. Some described it as a sign that men who wish to control women’s bodies have no idea of how they actually work. More likely, those who pushed hardest for the change understand all too well that many women will not know they are pregnant until it is too late.

Five other states have signed similar bills; several more are considering them. (Others have introduced more incremental curbs.) The Alabama senate will this week consider a near-total ban on abortion – with prison sentences of up to 99 years for doctors – which Republicans initially tried to sneak through without even a vote. The state’s lieutenant governor said he believes Roe v Wade will be overturned thanks to Donald Trump’s appointment of conservative jurists. [...]

At this grim time there are signs of hope. New York state has sought to bolster abortion rights this year. Chile somewhat eased its ban in 2017. And last year’s landslide vote in favour of repealing Ireland’s near-total ban resonated worldwide. Yet women in Northern Ireland are no closer to enjoying the same rights as those elsewhere in the UK, even though the supreme court believes the ban there incompatible with human rights legislation. They can now access free abortion care in England, but too much confusion endures and women in abusive relationships, for example, may not be able to travel. Because this is a devolved issue, the right of women to control their own bodies is yet another casualty of the collapse of power-sharing. Northern Ireland’s politicians must find a way to work together again. When they do, overturning this cruel ban must be a priority.

read the article

CityLab: Alabama Can’t Make Birmingham Display Confederate Monument

Long before Donald Trump proclaimed that there were some “very fine people, on both sides” of the alt-racist eruption in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, Alabama Lieutenant Governor R.M. Cunningham gave similar equivocations at the 1905 dedication ceremony for the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument that was being installed in Birmingham’s Linn Park. Cunningham told the gathering that “the characterization of either side [of the Civil War] as rebels is false” because “both parties were loyalists and patriots.” The then-mayor of Birmingham Mel Drennen cosigned and said that his city’s new Confederate monument “memorialized … a cause that will ever remain fresh in the memories of our Southern people.” [...]

In 2017, Birmingham would join a wave of cities that decided Confederate monuments were no longer welcome, largely in response to the Charlottesville debacle. Birmingham’s solution was to wall off the monument with large planks of plywood, obscuring it from public view. However, also that year Alabama lawmakers passed the Alabama Heritage Preservation Act, which forbade Birmingham or any city in the state from removing or altering Confederate monuments that had stood for more than 40 years.[...]

Birmingham first began exploring taking down the monument in 2015, when then-Mayor William Bell asked the city’s attorneys and its parks and recreation board to investigate a legal path towards removal. It seemed like a safe time to do this given that Alabama’s then-Governor Robert Bentley had taken down Confederate flags from the state’s capitol grounds. However, the state legislature immediately began crafting legislation to ensure that other Confederate symbols would not meet the same fate. In May 2017, Bentley’s successor as governor, Kay Ivey, signed the Heritage Preservation Act into law. The act’s supporters intended it to obstruct Birmingham’s plans to obstruct the view of the Confederate monument in one of the city’s public parks. The city built the wall around it anyway, triggering the state’s lawsuit against the city. [...]

The judge affirmed Birmingham’s right to craft its own city narrative, something that has lately proved challenging for the “cradle of civil rights” that currently has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation. In 2016, when the city of Birmingham passed an ordinance to raise the minimum wage to $10.10, the Alabama legislature voted the following day to pre-empt and reverse the wage ordinance. (The city’s lawsuit against the state’s preemption is still pending). Meanwhile, Birmingham has been trying to futurize, or at least modernize its woeful public transit system in one of the few states that historically has not funded public transport. The state seems unwilling to allow the city to help its most oppressed residents, but a court has ruled that it must at least get out of the way of the city’s efforts to erase the symbols of that oppression.

read the article

Axios: Marijuana legalization, daylight savings and other notable measures passed in the midterm elections

Marijuana legalization: Michigan became the 10th state to legalize marijuana — including the District of Columbia — and first midwestern state to do so for recreational use. North Dakota rejected a similar measure, but voters in Missouri approved the legalization of medical marijuana.

Abortion: The matter was on the ballot in three states. In Oregon, voters defeated a measure that would have banned the use of public funds to pay for abortion coverage. Alabama and West Virginia approved sweeping anti-abortion language to the states’ constitution, proclaiming that women have no right to perform the procedure.[...]

Daylight saving: Californians decided they no longer want to reset clocks twice a year. A measure they approved would implement a permanent year-round daylight saving time. But, it requires a two-thirds vote from the state legislature and a change in federal law to go into effect.

read the article

The Huffington Post: Trump Is Wreaking Havoc On Republican Governor Primaries

Trump hasn’t meddled in GOP Senate primaries, avoiding endorsements of controversial candidates and largely following McConnell’s lead. But it turns out Republicans were just worried about the wrong type of statewide race.

In recent weeks, Trump has turned GOP gubernatorial races into his own personal playground, endangering eight years of Republican dominance over the nation’s governor’s mansions. It culminated Tuesday night when Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer conceded to Trump-endorsed Secretary of State Kris Kobach and businessman Jeff Johnson defeated former Gov. Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota’s primary after hammering him over his criticisms of Trump in 2016.

Republicans control 33 of the nation’s governorships, a record. And the Republican Governors Association is a political heavyweight, regularly outraising its Democratic counterpart by a two-to-one margin. With Trump’s approval ratings in the low 40s and a high-energy Democratic base, Republicans were already expected to lose governorships in the fall, especially in blue-tinted states like Maine and New Mexico. Trump’s meddling in GOP primaries, along with Republican voters’ desire for candidates who ape Trump’s style, could expand those losses to swing states ― Florida and Minnesota ― and even into the red territory of Georgia and Kansas. [...]

It’s also possible Trump’s endorsement didn’t turn the tide in these contests. Most of the defeated candidates are the type of establishment politicians Republican voters have been tossing aside since the tea party movement began in 2010. In the secretly audiotaped words of Cagle, the Georgia primary came down to “who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck and who could be the craziest.”

read the article

FiveThirtyEight: Support For Same-Sex Marriage Isn’t Unanimous

A majority of conservative Republicans (58 percent), Republicans overall (51 percent), Mormons (53 percent), white evangelical Protestants (58 percent) and adults in Alabama (51 percent) oppose same-sex marriage, according to a survey released this week by the Public Religion Research Institute. [...]

A majority of black people (52 percent), Hispanics (61 percent) and white people (63 percent) back same-sex marriage. The majority of people in all but six states support it. And even in those six states — Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia — only in Alabama are opponents an outright majority.  [...]

But I think it’s worth looking closely at the 39 percent of Americans who don’t support same-sex marriage, including the 30 percent who outright oppose it. That group really matters because it includes a majority bloc in the Republican Party, which dominates U.S. politics nationally and in many states. They haven’t exactly given up on this issue — the question of same-sex marriage itself has become less of a political football, but LGBT rights more generally may be taking its place.  [...]

PRRI also asked Americans whether they support small businesses being able to deny services to gay or lesbian people if doing so would conflict with the business owner’s religious beliefs. Overall, 33 percent of Americans support that idea, while 60 percent oppose it. The majority of conservative Republicans (59 percent), Republicans overall (52 percent), Mormons (53 percent) and white evangelical Protestants (53 percent) support such religious-based denials of services.

read the article

The New Yorker: The Trump Era After Bannon

This week, Steve Bannon was ousted from his position as the executive chairman of Breitbart News, the self-described “platform for the alt-right.” Andrew Marantz joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the rise of the alt-right movement, and what Bannon’s downfall means for Trump and nationalist economic populism.

listen to the podcast

Politico: Republicans warn Trump of 2018 bloodbath

The backstage talks provide a window into how those closest to Trump are bracing for a possible bloodbath in the 2018 midterms, which could obliterate the Republican congressional majorities and paralyze the president’s legislative agenda. The potential for a Democratic wave has grown after Republican losses this fall in Virginia, New Jersey and Alabama, and as the president’s approval ratings have plummeted to the 30s.  [...]

Among GOP leaders, however, there is widespread concern heading into 2018. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said privately that both chambers could be lost in November. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has told donors that he fears a wave of swing district Republican lawmakers could retire rather than seek reelection. [...]

Trump is well aware of the dangers his party faces in 2018, those who’ve discussed it with him say. During political briefing sessions, top aides highlight positive developments — but also more concerning ones, such as his declining numbers among well-educated voters and higher earners. He has peppered advisers with questions about his approval ratings, and about whether he is getting enough credit for his accomplishments. [...]

“There are 10 months to improve the fundamentals here, and the Senate map is, on paper, good. But maps don’t make majorities and I think there’s a realization that there’s at least a 50 percent chance one or both chambers could fall,” Jennings said. “In less than one year, this first term could be, for all intents and purposes, over if the Democrats take control of either chamber.”

read the article or listen to the podcast

The Atlantic: Memphis's Novel Strategy for Tearing Down Confederate Statues

In a surprise move Wednesday evening, Memphis’s city council voted to sell the two parks to a new private nonprofit corporation that will run them, on condition that they keep the parks public. Mayor Jim Strickland signed a contract with the nonprofit, Memphis Greenspace, on Friday, and the council ratified it. Soon afterward, Greenspace, which was incorporated in October, began removing the statues, with celebratory crowds gathering to watch, singing, “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye.” The statues have been removed to a place nobody can find, according to the city’s chief legal officer. [...]

Leaders in Memphis have long wanted to get rid of the statues. Tennessee seceded during the Civil War, though it was a hotbed of loyalism and sent more soldiers to fight for the Union than any other Confederate state. But while the Volunteer State is conservative at the state level, Memphis is not. The city is nearly two-thirds African American, and the presence of monuments to Davis, who led a traitorous revolt from the United States dedicated to maintaining black slavery, and Forrest, a Confederate general infamous for slaughtering surrendering black soldiers and for later co-founding the Ku Klux Klan, was offensive and nonsensical. [...]

Over the last few months, local officials in some jurisdictions have simply acted to remove monuments. In Birmingham, Alabama, another majority-black city saddled with a Confederate monument the local government detested, the city council and mayor decided in August to simply cover up a monument, drawing a lawsuit from the state government and more than $3 million in fines to date. In Durham, North Carolina, where state law prevents removal of monuments, a crowd of protesters gathered and tore down a statue commemorating Confederate soldiers that sat on the lawn of the former county courthouse.  

read the article

Salon: Black voters won Alabama for the Dems. Here’s what they need in return

According to exit polls, 30 percent of the over 1 million people who participated in this election were black, and 96 percent of black voters supported Jones. In short, in an election where Jones’ margin of victory was less than 2 percent, Alabama’s near-unanimous black voters were the deciding factor. [...]

Poverty is probably top on that list of concerns. Alabama is the sixth poorest state in the nation, with a poverty rate of 18.5 percent. In some counties more than 40 percent of people live in poverty. Alabama’s rural areas have been said to show “the worst poverty in the developed world.”

Most of those areas are in the state’s so-called “Black Belt.” In Wilcox County, for example, the white poverty rate is 8.8 percent, but the black poverty rate is 50.2 percent. Nearby Lowndes County has the lowest white poverty rate in the state — 4.1 percent — but almost 35 percent of black people there live in poverty. [...]

Entrenched poverty means that health care access for black Alabamians is also dismal. The Black Belt region has fewer primary care physicians, dentists, mental health providers, and hospitals than other parts of the state. It has a much higher rate of uninsured people than other regions. In most of its counties, more than 25 percent of residents lack access to health care — and that’s with the Affordable Care Act in place. [...]

Finally, black Alabama voters have expressed concern about crime and punishment in the state. Just 26 percent of Alabama’s population is black, yet more than half its prison population is, according to the Sentencing Project.

At the same time, in 2016, Alabama also had the third-highest homicide rate in the U.S., after Louisiana and Missouri, data from the Death Penalty Information Center shows. More than 71 percent of homicide victims were African-American.

read the article

Vox: Trumpism never existed. It was always just Trump.

Trumpism was made out of whole cloth, by his supporters and by his detractors, cobbled together from an amalgamation of The Art of the Deal and divinations of Trump’s innermost thoughts based on his staffing decisions and tweets. Trumpism was less an interpretation of another language than a wholly invented phrasebook for a language that was never real in the first place. Trump’s genius was in letting millions of people largely believe what they wanted to believe about his policies and preferences and refusing to get in the way. [...]

This is the reason why so many GOP members of Congress have voted with Trump in 2017: Not because they are supporting a Trumpian agenda, but because Trump has largely governed as a pretty standard conservative Republican. While conservative priorities — like deregulation and nominating conservative judges — have been more or less successfully brought to fruition, the last remaining fragment of “Trumpism” appears to be Donald Trump’s exceedingly pugnacious Twitter feed. [...]

“Trumpism” wasn’t an ideology. It was a means to an end, the promises one makes when trying to win an election, not change the face of politics. And only Trump could use it. Only Trump could tell Americans that America wasn’t great and be greeted with rapturous applause by those most in touch with their patriotism, though Roy Moore tried. Only Trump could make promises so grandiose that they exceeded the very boundaries of fact-checking.

read the article

The Atlantic: The Growing Partisan Divide Over Feminism

At my request, researchers from the Schar School broke down the answers by party and gender. The results: Party mattered far more. Republican women in Alabama were only four points more likely than Republican men to believe Moore’s accusers. In fact, Republican women were 40 points less likely to believe Moore’s accusers than were Democratic men. All of which points to a truth insufficiently appreciated in this moment of sexual and political upheaval: It’s not gender that increasingly divides the two parties. It is feminism. [...]

In other words, Clinton, along with Donald Trump, has done for gender what Barack Obama did for race. Obama’s election, UCLA political scientist Michael Tesler has argued, pushed whites who exhibited more racial resentment into the Republican Party and whites who exhibited less into the Democratic Party. Something similar is now happening around gender. But what’s driving the polarization is less gender identity—do you identify as a man or a woman—than gender attitudes: Do you believe that women and men should be more equal. Democrats aren’t becoming the party of women. They’re becoming the party of feminists. [...]

But when it comes to the political reaction to sexual harassment, gender identity matters less and gender attitudes matter more. “A sizable minority of American women,” note Huddy and Willmann, “do not believe in the existence of gender discrimination, think that women who charge men with gender discrimination are trouble makers, and are inclined to side with a man accused of discriminatory behavior.” And Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy seems to have made these women more staunchly Republican. [...]

Feminist theorists have long sought to explain this. In a recent essay, Marcie Bianco of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University cited Simone de Beauvoir’s argument that women are more likely than other oppressed groups to defend the hierarchies that subjugate them. Women, de Beauvoir wrote, have “no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat. … They live dispersed among the males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men—fathers or husbands—more firmly than they are to other women.” In her 1983 book, Right-Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin argued that female anti-feminism was an understandable, if tragic, strategy of self-protection. “A woman,” she wrote, “acquiesces to male authority in order to gain some protection from male violence. She conforms in order to be as safe as she can be.”

read the article

The Guardian: Alabama election: Democrats defeat Roy Moore, dealing huge blow to Donald Trump

Alabama has long faced a profound racial divide, which was reflected in the results. According to an exit poll, Jones won 95% of the African-American vote but only 27% of the white vote in the Yellowhammer State. However, widespread African-American turnout on Jones’s behalf overcame Moore’s margins in rural, predominantly white parts of Alabama. 

Jones also made significant inroads among college-educated whites. He won well-educated Madison county by a margin of 57-40. A center of the aerospace industry, the county voted for Trump by a margin of 55-38 in 2016.  [...]

The Democratic victory will reduce the Republican majority in the Senate to 51-49 once Jones takes his seat on Capitol Hill. This significantly reduces the margin for error as Republicans attempt to push through a major corporate tax cut. [...]

Moore’s defeat also marks a major personal blow to Trump, who endorsed the Alabama Republican and held a rally on his behalf just over the state line in Pensacola, Florida. Although most national Republicans rushed to distance themselves from Moore in the aftermath of the allegations, Trump reaffirmed his support through tweets and public statements. [...]

Bannon and his allies are planning a series of primary challenges against establishment Republicans in 2018. Moore’s defeat significantly reduces their leverage as the joint efforts of Bannon and his rightwing news website, Breitbart, could not elect their preferred candidate in a state that Trump won in a landslide in 2016.

read the article

FiveThirtyEight: The Values That ‘Values Voters’ Care About Most Are Policies, Not Character Traits

“Values voters” — a label that emerged to describe conservative Christians during the 2004 election — are sometimes held up as prioritizing candidate character, meaning whether a candidate personally embodies Christian values such as kindness, honesty and forgiveness. But although personal character is important, evangelicals’ first priority is to elect politicians who will fight for them and advance their agenda on the issues they care about. [...]

According to a 2015 survey conducted by the Barna Group, a research organization that focuses on Christian trends, 58 percent of evangelicals said that candidates’ stances on the issues were a key factor for their presidential vote, while less than half said the same of a candidate’s character (46 percent) or religious faith (45 percent). Robert Jeffress, a prominent Christian conservative supporter of Donald Trump, told The Washington Post that for evangelicals, character matters, but “leadership, experience, morality and faith are all important, and the rank of those changes according to circumstances.” [...]

The policy goals that fall under the umbrella of “family values” or “moral values” are largely social and cultural, and they remain high political priorities for evangelicals. When asked in the same Barna survey which issues will have “a lot” of impact on candidate selection, evangelicals were about as likely to cite abortion (64 percent) and religious liberty (67 percent) as the economy (69 percent). [...]

On the campaign trail, Moore has denied the existence of evolution (57 percent of evangelicals do as well). He has said that Ronald Reagan’s famous statement about the Soviet Union being “the focus of evil in the modern world” could apply to the U.S. — when asked for an example, he pointed to the legalization of same-sex marriage. Moore has suggested that the 9/11 attacks may have been a punishment from God because abortion and sodomy are legal. He called the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage “even worse” than the 1857 decision in the Dred Scott case, which found that African-Americans were property and not citizens. The idea of electing a senator who does not oppose abortion appears to be particularly troubling for some Alabama evangelicals. “I don’t want to vote for a creep, but I also don’t vote for Democrats,” Charlene Buttram, who is married to a pastor in a town southeast of Birmingham, told the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t believe in abortion.”

read the article

FiveThirtyEight: Trump Voters In Alabama May Be About To Teach Trump A Lesson

Endorsements, if they work at all (and often they don’t), work best when they give an ideological cue to a voter that they wouldn’t have otherwise had. That’s why endorsements rarely matter in general elections: Most voters already fit into one of the partisan camps and are going to cast a ballot based solely off party label. In a primary, on the other hand, the candidates are more ideologically similar, and so an endorsement can help voters make a choice.

In 2010, for example, Sarah Palin endorsed fellow tea partyer Christine O’Donnell over the more moderate and well-known Mike Castle in the Delaware Republican Senate primary. Palin’s endorsement of O’Donnell specifically highlighted O’Donnell’s conservative positions, and though it may not have won O’Donnell the primary, according to polling data, it certainly helped her along. [...]

The lesson of these different endorsements should be fairly clear: Trump voters aren’t mindless drones. They’ll take cues from the president when he’s selling them on something it makes sense for them to back.2 Indeed, much of the reason Trump won in 2016 was because he defended positions that were already popular among the base, even if they weren’t popular among the party elite. On one of the biggest issues of the 2016 primary, illegal immigration, Trump staked out a hardline position that was already highly correlated with vote choice in previous primaries. (More anti-immigration Republicans did better, on average, in GOP primaries.) He took that position when one of the so-called frontrunners for the GOP nomination, Jeb Bush, was known for being soft on illegal immigration. Trump found a lot less success when he was pushing a health care bill this past spring and summer that went against his promises to Republican voters in the primary.

read the article

Slate: What Segregation Looked Like in 1950s Alabama

Parks’ philosophy is eloquently expressed in his photo essay, “The Restraints: Open and Hidden,” which ran in Life magazine, where he was the first black photographer on staff, in 1956. In Mobile, Alabama, and beyond, he documented the everyday lives of Albert Thornton and his wife as well as their nine children and 19 grandchildren, who comprised the Causey and Tanner families. At the time, most of the media coverage of the civil rights era centered on political demonstrations and violence. Parks, however, highlighted the injustices of the Jim Crow era—just as, in 1950, he demonstrated the consequences of school segregation in work that we featured earlier this year on Behold—not with spectacle but with the everyday.

“He didn’t want to go to the South and take images of people protesting or people being angry or people looking really poor and destitute. He wanted to generate a feeling of empathy in the readers of the North, so they’d see the images in the story and relate to the daily activities of the people that they saw in the magazine,” said Fabienne Stephan, director and curator of New York’s Salon 94 Freemans, which is showing Parks’ photos in an exhibition, “Segregation Story,” through Dec. 20. [...]

Parks’ essay wasn’t just about denouncing segregation. It was, in a way, also about imagining the possibilities of a world in which blacks were treated equally. Causey, like her father, hoped for the end of segregation, and she personally believed it was “on the way out.” Once the laws changed, she told the magazine, life was sure to improve.

read the article and see the photos