DAVID BIANCULLI

Founder / Editor

ERIC GOULD

Associate Editor

LINDA DONOVAN

Assistant Editor

Contributors

ALEX STRACHAN

MIKE HUGHES

KIM AKASS

MONIQUE NAZARETH

ROGER CATLIN

GARY EDGERTON

TOM BRINKMOELLER

GERALD JORDAN

NOEL HOLSTON

 
 
 
 
 
SOUTHERN RITES
May 18, 2015  | By David Bianculli

HBO, 9:00 p.m. ET

 

In 2009, photojournalist Gillian Laub took pictures in Georgia of an event that sounds more common to an era more than 50 years earlier: segregated high-school proms. Her photographs prompted an end to that shockingly existent policy in Montgomery County – but when she returned the following year to document the area’s first integrated prom, she encountered angry and physical resistance from local police. She also stumbled upon an even bigger story in a nearby Georgia county: a shooting of a young black man by an older white man, and the racial tensions that erupted afterward. Justin Patterson was 22 when he was shot and killed by Norman Neesmith. But the story’s complicated, and the older white man’s motives may have little, or nothing, to do with race…

 
 
 
 
 
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