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Doy Gorton
A farmer in his blacksmith shack, Lake Village, Arkansas. By 1969, there were very few small farmers left in the Arkansas-Mississippi Delta, most having fled increasing poverty. The ones who remained did all the work on their small plots themselves, from plowing to harvesting, as well as repairing equipment. Gorton stresses how he sees in his photos a side of the White South often left out of narratives about its past, and with parallels to racial and economic tensions across America today.
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Doy Gorton
An auctioneer urges bids on equipment from a failed farm near Starkville, Mississippi. Gorton credits American photojournalist Walker Evans, best known for documenting the human impacts of the Great Depression, for inspiring him to present people “in a way that was respectful, very thoughtful and very straightforward.”
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Doy Gorton
It was a common sight in the 1960s rural South to see young men with signal flags at the edges of fields, guiding crop dusters. The flag men helped the pilots line up their runs over the fields and ensure that they laid down a uniform coat of chemical herbicides or insecticides. “It was considered a good job at the time, as working class kids sought work,” Gorton says.
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Doy Gorton
New labor-saving equipment, cotton gin, Glen Allen, Mississippi. “Gorton’s images [reveal] the tensions and anxieties of southerners of all stripes who found themselves in a society being shaken to its knees by cultural, political, and economic revolution,” says Ben Wright at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.
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Doy Gorton
A family attends a rally for George Wallace in Boaz, Alabama, in the spring of 1970. At his 1963 gubernatorial inaugural address, Wallace infamously declared: “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Wallace, adept at feeding and tapping racial fears and economic concerns, was elected governor for four terms.
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Doy Gorton
Bikers and Ku Klux Klan members sport Iron Crosses and swastikas in Mississippi. “I was an insider who had stepped outside,” Gorton says. “I wasn’t concerned with the collapse of white supremacy because I felt I knew where the world was going and that I’d have a place in it. They didn’t. They were being left behind. White supremacy was a crutch, a distraction.”
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Doy Gorton
Sharecroppers and farm workers gather at a roadhouse honkytonk near Wayside, Mississippi. “I was also interested in caste and class—class is just as powerful as race in shaping society,” Gorton says.
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Doy Gorton
A once-bustling railroad hotel near Chattanooga, Tennessee, converted into a swap shop for retired men circa 1970. “The images have a mythic quality to them; they communicate a sense of what things felt like, not just what happened,” says Ben Wright at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. “They document hope, irony, beauty, and humor in addition to injustice, hatred, tumult, and protest.”
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Doy Gorton
A newly integrated bus station, Memphis, Tennessee, Christmas 1969. Gorton recalls that the white woman was traveling to see grandchildren after shopping in the city. “Everything was changing,” remembers the photographer.
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Doy Gorton
“Youth Jubilee” in Edwards, Mississippi. “You could literally look between two groups and see how one group was looking ahead in the direction the world was going, and the other had no idea,” he says.
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Doy Gorton
A hoe gang at the Parchman Prison Farm in Mississippi. Two bosses, unarmed other than with their canes, are backed up by “trustees,” armed prisoners typically in for life and entrusted with watching over other prisoners. Under state law, the prison was obliged to pay for itself through farmland operations, and to enforce order through a system that sourced discipline from within the incarcerated.
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Doy Gorton
A Vietnam War widow, 1970, Chatham, Mississippi. “Much of what was believed in back then and fought for remains unresolved,” Gorton says. “That is why these pictures still resonate today."
Born in deeply segregated Mississippi in the 1940s, photographer Doy Gorton grew up surrounded by what he describes as “legalized white supremacy.” While he came to abhor that system—submerging himself in the civil rights movement, even getting kicked out of college for his efforts—he sympathized with the South’s blue-collar white workers. Even as they upheld white supremacy, Gorton saw them struggling, left behind by economic, social, and political changes of the 1960s.
Inspired to better understand the people he grew up around, Gorton spent eighteen months in 1968 and 1969 driving across the Mississippi Delta documenting what he describes as “the most Southern place on Earth.” The resulting photos reveal a pointed but sympathetic gaze, rare in narratives about the white South.
“These were good pictures, I was on a hot streak,” Gorton says about this work. The negatives and prints from his trip, along with cassette tape interviews and other materials, were packed away in trunks and attics for nearly fifty years until he retired to southern Illinois and had an opportunity to revisit the images. In 2018, the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History in Austin, Texas, acquired his “White South” collection, which has since gained widespread attention.