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PHOTOGRAPH BY DANIELLE VILLASANA
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Seeking asylum: LGBTQ+ migrants make the arduous journey to the United States, seeking refugee from hate, slurs, harassment at work, and random beatings. They imagine the U.S. as a peaceful place, free from discrimination, where they can find a home and a job. Often, they find some of the same challenges when they arrive. Aurora Almendra and photographer Danielle Villasana, a Nat Geo Explorer, report on some of their journeys. (Pictured above, Alexa Smith Rios makes a phone call outside the home in Memphis, where she lives with her boyfriend, Norlan Alexander Gonzalez Cruz, and other Central America migrants. Alexa spends most of her days inside— without a car, it's difficult to move around the city.)
Justice deferred: In 1892, shoemaker Homer Plessy bought a first-class train ticket in New Orleans. He was kicked off and arrested for being Black. The Supreme Court ruled against him in 1896, codifying second-class – called separate but equal -- treatment for Blacks until the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision. On Friday, Louisiana’s Board of Pardons recommended that Plessy, who died in 1925 with the conviction on his record, be pardoned, the Washington Post reports.
Dealing with the past and present: German Historical Museum in Berlin has acquired 15,000 objects tracing the history of antisemitism, both to preserve them and prevent them from being traded on the open market. Wolfgang Haney, the previous collector who died in 2017 at 93, spent three decades and more than 1 million euro (about $1.15 million) amassing knickknacks, coins, photographs, and artifacts, Artnet News reports.
Photographing the animals: In real life, Nat Geo Explorer Joel Sartore is known for photographing nearly 12,000 of the world’s vulnerable species. Tomorrow, Sartore makes a cameo on the venerable ABC soap General Hospital, playing himself at an exhibition of his Photo Ark of animals in fictional Port Arthur, New York. (The soap’s executive producer is a Photo Ark fan.) We hear that Sartore makes it out just fine, but (spoiler alert!) looks like someone is going to need medical attention.
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