Willie Causey Jr. with Gun During Racial Violence in Alabama, Shady Grove, Alabama
1956, printed later
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
silver dye bleach print
Dimensions
image: 40 × 39.4 cm (15 3/4 × 15 1/2 in.) sheet: 41.3 × 40.6 cm (16 1/4 × 16 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Corcoran Collection (The Gordon Parks Collection)
Accession Number
2016.117.202
Art Historical Context
In 1956, amid the intensifying civil rights struggles in the American South—including the nearby Montgomery Bus Boycott—renowned photographer Gordon Parks captured striking image of Willie Causey Jr. armed with a gun in Shady Grove,. Part of Parks' seminal *Life* magazine series "The Restraints: Open and Hidden," the photograph documents the raw tensions of racial violence, portraying Causey standing resolute, defending his home and family against Ku Klux Klan threats. Parks, a trailblazing African American artist and photojournalist, used his lens to humanize Black Southerners, exposing segre...
About the Artist
Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks (1912–2006), born the youngest of fifteen children to a Kansas tenant farmer and his wife in segregated Fort Scott, overcame a childhood marked by poverty, racism, and tragedy—including his mother's death at age fourteen—to become one of America's most influential chroniclers of Black life. Entirely self-taught after purchasing his first camera in 1937, inspired by Farm Security Admin...