parks

15Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

Journalism, SOCIAL JUSTICE

An Intimate Glimpse Into Segregation-Era Life For African Americans – The Gordon Parks Exhibit

In the spring of 1950, Gordon Parks, the first African-American photographer for Life Magazine, returned to his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas. On assignment for the magazine, Parks photographed his middle school classmates, who were dispersed among Fort Scott and other Midwestern cities and towns. The resulting images – while quite personal to Parks – offer a glimpse into a community and a set of experiences shared by many African Americans of his generation. Depicting the realities of discrimination without the veil of nostalgia, it’s a body of work that captures the resiliency of a community at a significant point in American history – just prior to the Civil Rights Movement. But for reasons unknown, Life never published the series. Now, the powerful exhibit of over 40 segregation-er...

Twitter posts show that people are profoundly sad – and are visiting parks to cheer up

The COVID-19 pandemic in the United States is the deepest and longest period of malaise in a dozen years. Our colleagues at the University of Vermont have concluded this by analyzing posts on Twitter. The Vermont Complex Systems Center studies 50 million tweets a day, scoring the “happiness” of people’s words to monitor the national mood. That mood today is at its lowest point since 2008 when they started this project. They call the tweet analysis the Hedonometer. It relies on surveys of thousands of people who rate words indicating happiness. “Laughter” gets an 8.50 while “jail” gets a 1.76. They use these scores to measure the mood of Twitter traffic. The Hedonometer measures happiness through analysis of key words on Twitter, which is now used by one in five Americans. This chart cover...

US civil rights icon Rosa Parks’ home is up for auction

Other rare historic African-American artefacts up for auction include Jackson 5's original recording contract, and several chapters of original typed manuscript for Malcolm X's biography. Guernsey's in New York is auctioning off "African American Historic & Cultural Treasures", and included in the auction will be civil rights activist Rosa Parks' Detroit home, along with dozens of other African American rarities. by Gabriel Elizondo Al Jazeera's Gabriel Elizondo reports from New York.