‘The camera is my weapon of choice’: Gordon Parks’ era-defining shots of segregation – and those who defied it

The visionary photographer captured the ugliness of racism in America, as well as the strength and dignity of those who opposed it – from cleaners in the corridors of power to Martin Luther King Jr proclaiming his dream In the summer of 1956, the American news magazine Life dispatched its first Black staff photographer, Gordon Parks, to Alabama, with a brief to document racial segregation in the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott. The trip was a perilous one, but Parks, then in his early 40s,...

By Oliver Laughland