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In 1956, Life magazine sent Gordon Parks, its first African-American staff photographer, down to the deep South to document how things had or had not changed. Parks photographed four generations of the Thornton family in and around Mobile, Alabama, and Nashville, Tennessee, and found that their lives remained separate and very much unequal. Although Albert Thornton, the family’s 82-year-old patriarch, himself the son of a slave, had managed to send four of his nine children to college, their fortunes remained constrained by systemic injustice. Family members who lived near Mobile had access only to squalid housing in segregated neighborhoods where the roads remained unpaved. One daughter, a teacher, could land a position only in a school that lacked basic necessities like indoor plumbing. Their children played in separate, lesser playgrounds and drank from different water fountains than white children. And no matter where they lived, their professional opportunities were limited.

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Twenty-six of Parks’s images appeared alongside an accompanying article in a late September 1956 issue of Life, called A Segregation Story. 

This is an assemblage, a sculpture made from found objects. This piece commemorates the Freedom Rides, when young people rode buses down South to help people register to vote.  Many of these people were attacked, some killed. Hence, you have the tire tracks on them.

It’s important that they are baby dolls because most of these people were young when they were standing up for the Civil Rights Movement.  Think Ruby Bridges who was just 6 years old and the importance of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committe. 

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Kienholz was a white artist well known for his political work– not always about race or civil rights, but he did some significant pieces about this issue throughout the years.

Vincent Smith’s etching Mississippi Incident depicts a nightmarish scene: a monstrous Klansman and an armed sheriff standing large and powerful behind a fence in the foreground, while two figures stroll unaware in the background, giving the work an overwhelming sense of danger and anticipation. Smith’s prints were created during the height of the civil rights movement, when demonstrations and racially motivated violence were commonplace and instilled widespread fear throughout the South.  

Vincent Decosta Smith was born in 1929 in New York and grew up in Brooklyn.  He preferred drawing to studying and dropped out of high school to try life as a hobo traveling on the railroad from place to place.  He rediscovered art when he went to a Cezanne retrospective at the MoMA.  

In 1999 the Met bought three of his paintings.  Smith said this made him realize how sucessful he had become since as a child he had gone to the Met and felt that the paintings there did not represent his life or who he was.   

David Hammons’ piece The Door (Admissions Office) references the struggles associated with desegregating schools.  In this work, a wooden door is labeled “Admissions Office” on its acrylic, transparent center—and a black ink print of two hands, a face, and a body pressed forcibly against it imply the body of an excluded African American student. The effort to desegregate schools across the U.S. was perhaps the most drastic and far-reaching aspect of the Civil Rights Movement, and received some of the most vicious push back. Throughout the desegregation process, the opposition would physically stand in the way, preventing students of color from entering. The physicality of the dispute is palpable in this work, allowing viewers to empathize with the struggle many African Americans children felt during the desegregation era.  Hammons used a real door and painted his own body to make the impression on the acrylic panel.

David Hammons was born in 1943.  His art emphasizes racial injustice.   

Night Journey belongs to Bowling's Map series, a group of abstracts that rely on his pouring and staining with diluted acrylic paint on canvas.  Here we can make out the shape of South America in red, while North America is blurred out.  Africa is covered with purple.  Most striking is the yellow covers the Atlantic Ocean, representing the Middle Passage of the slave trade.   

Betye Saar is best known for her assemblage pieces that recycle found objects, often by combining African symbols with racist imagery from pop culture. The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, repurposes the black “mammy” figure, as the doll holds a small rifle instead of the pencil and notepad the figurine originally held when Saar found it. Possessing guns instead of pencils liberates the character, as she’s now threatening and tough instead of subservient. She is further empowered by the symbolic black power fist placed in the center of the work.

This was Saar's first political protest piece. She told The New York Times, “I was really motivated by the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. Before that I hadn’t felt any pressure to make political art…The images on television were pretty brutal. You saw the police at war with protesters who just wanted to eat where they wanted or sit on a bus where they wanted. I was a mom with three kids at home; I couldn’t go on marches, but I used my art to release emotional feelings of anger and resentment.”