Just outside Pittsburgh is the tiny borough of Braddock, Pa., best known as the birthplace of Andrew Carnegie's first steel mill. Today, it's something of a poster child for rust belt revitalization, a place where artists can buy property for pennies and even construct outdoor pizza ovens using the bricks from abandoned or demolished buildings.
LaToya Ruby Fazier grew up in Braddock. She's a photographer who's been taking pictures of her hometown for two decades, and she says that neither of those narratives represent the Braddock she knows. Her Braddock is primarily black, primarily female and primarily poor.
"Another way to understand it is to see my grandmother as Braddock's prosperous days, my mother as the signification of white flight and segregation, and me as the 1980s and '90s during the war on drugs and the dismantling of the surrounding steel plants," says Frazier.
[For more of this story, written by Shereen Marisol Meraji, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/codes...e-women-who-lived-it]
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