In 1956, photographer Gordon Parks was hired by Life Magazine to follow and document the everyday life of a southern Black family. Twenty of these photos were published in Life’s September issue that year with an article titled “The Restraints: Open and Hidden.”
Of course, Parks snapped many more photos than actually made it to print, but these were thought to be lost. However, in early 2012 the Gordon Parks Foundation was going through several storage boxes and came upon a taped-up paper package labeled, “Segregation Series.” In it they found 70 more color photographs from Parks’ 1956 work.
Here are just a few of the pics, both the published and the rediscovered…
The book in question was Sherman Alexie’s young adult novel “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.” Published in 2007, it won the National Book Award and has become popular with young teens, supposedly for its universal themes of fitting in, making sense of race, and sexual discovery. Parents in Idaho called the cops last week on junior-high student Brady Kissel when she had the nerve to help distribute a book they’d succeeded in banning from the school curriculum.
The sex part (and let’s face it—probably the race part) led parents to lobby Junior Mountain High School to remove it from the syllabus, citing its sexual content (it discusses masturbation) and supposedly anti-Christian content.
For the rest of the story:
Nelson Mandela, the civil rights leader who rose from a small village in rural, apartheid-era South Africa to become the country's first black President, died on Thursday at age 95. Mandela's election in 1994 ended three centuries of European domination of indigenous African people of the region.
Can we talk about the idea of “pandering” in Superhero comics? I’ve see the world tossed around a lot in the free wheeling world of internet commenting and I gotta say if I see it one more time, I’m going to punch as wall.
Marvel creates a set of comics with female leads? PANDERING!
Green Lantern and Batwoman are gay? PANDERING!
Characters of color getting their own comics? PANDERING!
Transgender characters in Demon Knights or Batgirl? Pandering!
It seems that anytime anything but a straight white male character is introduced there’s a certain part of the internet that balls up their little hands and screams “PANDERING!”
Because you know, why would comics reflect anything but the little bubble that surrounds their little world.
Lately I’ve seen the term pandering turned towards the comics community on Tumblr. Bleeding, channing and cbr’ing and stamping their feet that some comic creators and publishers are choosing to pay attention to NOT THEM!
Vincent Jacobs, now 80, battled racism as a rodeo rider in the 1950s
