Cora Taylor

Cora Lee Rucker Taylor was born in Vinegar Bend, Alabama, the eldest of six children. She was 18 years old when Gordon Parks photographed her in front of an ice cream parlor in nearby Prichard. As evidenced in that photograph, Cora loved fashion and always dressed the part.  

Taylor graduated from the Josephine Allen Institute in Mobile, Alabama at the age of 19. She married David Taylor, and together they had five children. After completing her education, she worked a series of mostly domestic jobs, although taking care of her family and ensuring a better life for them was of upmost importance. She worked extra jobs to make ends meet, and at age 29 she and her family left Mobile and relocated to Los Angeles, California to in search of better opportunities. 

After years working as a restaurant server and sales clerk, Taylor was eventually appointed a program clerk for the federal government, a position she held for 15 years until her retirement in 2006 due to a battle with cancer. She currently lives cancer-free in Los Angeles, California, and her family has expanded to include 10 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

 

Gordon Parks (1912-2006)
At Segregated Drinking Fountain, Mobile, Alabama, 1956

Created on assignment for Life magazine, the images belonging to the Segregation Story series remain among Parks’s most celebrated images. In the summer of 1956, the magazine sent Parks to Alabama to document the effects of Jim Crow laws on daily lives of Black Americans. With its vivid color pictures, the series offered a fresh perspective on a most controversial period in American history, which looms large in the collective memory almost exclusively through black-and-white imagery. Parks’s photographs, including this one, were published in the photo essay “The Restraints: Open and Hidden,” part four in a series on segregation, in the September 24, 1956, issue of Life magazine. Among the individuals captured in this iconic image, taken in Prichard, just outside Mobile, is Cora Taylor. Ms. Taylor, who is seen wearing sunglasses at right, and her friend were asked by Parks—back then he was simply “the man with a camera and a New York license plate”—to pose for the photograph. This image and others in the series, pursued at grave danger to the photographer himself, the project was an important chapter in Parks’s career-long endeavor to use the camera as a weapon for social change.