Over the course of several weeks, Parks and Yette photographed the family at home and at work; at night, the two men slept on the Causeys’ front porch. They also visited Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton, Allie Causey’s parents, and Parks was able to assemble 18 members of the family, representing four generations, for a photograph in front of their homestead.
As the project was drawing to a close, the New York Life office contacted Parks to ask for documentation of “separate but equal” facilities, the most visually divisive result of the Jim Crow laws. Parks captured this brand of discrimination through the eyes of the oldest Thornton son, E.J., a professor at Fisk University, as he and his family stood in the colored waiting room of a bus terminal in Nashville. (Parks experienced such segregation himself in more treacherous circumstances, however, when he and Yette took the train from Birmingham to Nashville. With the threat of tarring and feathering, even lynching, in the air, Yette drank from a whites-only water fountain in the Birmingham station, a provocation that later resulted in a physical assault on the train, from which the two men narrowly escaped.)
After the story on the Causeys appeared in the September 24, 1956 issue of Life, the family suffered cruel treatment. They were stripped of their possessions and chased out of their home. Parks made sure that the magazine provided them with the support they needed to get back on their feet (support that Freddie had promised and then neglected to provide).
In his memoirs, Parks looked back with a dispassionate scorn on Freddie; the man, Parks said, represented people who “appear harmless, and in brotherly manner . . . walk beside me—hiding a dagger in their hand” (Voices in the Mirror, 1990).
