GORDON PARKS, OR HOW ONE THING SOMETIMES LEADS TO ANOTHER

Saturday morning started out like most mornings:  I read my email.  Among the messages was one from my husband, who every Friday forwards the Guardian Art Weekly.  It always includes an Image of the Week, and this week’s image is a photograph (above) by Gordon Parks entitled, At Segregation Drinking Fountain, Mobile, Alabama, 1956. 

I am a big fan of Parks’ photography.  In fact, my Facebook profile picture, last seen before I deleted my Facebook account last week, is a Parks photo-poem entitled, I Am You, below.  But, apart from Parks’ work behind his camera lens, I knew little about him.  That changed yesterday.   

Accompanying the image At Segregation Drinking Fountain, was a review of Gordon Parks: Part One, an exhibition of the photojournalist’s work from 1956 to 1963, which opened at the Alison Jacques Gallery in London on July 1 and runs until August 1.  Given that the pandemic is raging in the UK, I’m not likely to see it, which is a pity, because Part One focuses on segregation in the South and Black Muslims, two series that appeared in Life magazine and which have a heightened currency today.  Part Two will open on September 1 and showcase Muhammad Ali (below with Parks to the right).  

As the gallery’s Press Release notes, the photographs in the current Part One exhibition were taken during the burgeoning civil rights movement:  

The visionary images that constitute both these series offered visibility to often marginalised, anonymous families and misrepresented figures in American society at large. Parks’ interest in taking photographs stemmed from a desire to create meaningful change. As he commented, “I saw that the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, against all sorts of social wrongs”.

Standing apart from the civil rights photography of this period, which often focused on violence and brutality, Parks chose to illustrate this bleak time [1950s Alabama] through affirmative images of community life. ... Focusing on mundane activities, and serene in tone, the artist wanted his work to inspire empathy. As he reflected, “I felt it is the heart, not the eye, that should determine the content of the photograph”.

 

 

 

And it is impossible for anyone with a beating heart to look at these photographs and not feel intense sorrow and shame.  I wanted to see more from this series done for Life entitled Segregation in the South, 1956, beyond those featured at the London gallery, so I googled Parks, and found More Segregation Photos 1956 at the Gordon Parks Foundation website.  Above are a few I found especially poignant.

Parks (pictured in the self-portrait above at age 41) is a silent but eloquent and truthful witness.  He gives us unmistakable visual signs, sometimes literally, of the unseen violence of segregation in these serene images of quotidian black life.  This persistence of dignity in the face of indignity is something I have been thinking a lot about since the George Floyd protests.  Where does this dogged equanimity come from?  Fear?  Faith?  Superhuman survival instincts?   And where does Parks' perspective come from?  We know from his own words that Parks was more than a chronicler; he was also a protagonist.  What were his personal experiences as a black man and how did they inform his creative work?  I wanted to know more about the artist.

My interest piqued, I read the Artist's Biography prepared by the gallery.  Wanting to know more, I turned to Parks’ Wiki Bio and that’s where it hit me.  I’ve been reading about the American history we didn’t learn in school and am currently immersed in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.  Although this is a work of fiction and takes liberties with certain historical facts and timelines, it is not a false narrative and its depiction of slavery and its aftermath will curl your toes and make you cry.  So will what happened to Parks as a young boy.  Per Wiki:

Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, the son of Andrew Jackson Parks and Sarah Ross, on November 30, 1912. He was the youngest of fifteen children. His father was a farmer….

He attended a segregated elementary school. The town was too small to afford a separate high school that would facilitate segregation of the secondary school, but black people were not allowed to play sports or attend school social activities, and they were discouraged from developing any aspirations for higher education. Parks related in a documentary on his life that his teacher told him that his desire to go to college would be a waste of money.

When Parks was eleven years old, three white boys threw him into the Marmaton River (above), knowing he couldn’t swim. He had the presence of mind to duck underwater so they wouldn't see him make it to land. His mother died when he was fourteen. He spent his last night at the family home sleeping beside his mother's coffin, seeking not only solace, but a way to face his own fear of death.

Soon after, he was sent to … live with a sister and her husband. He and his brother-in-law argued frequently and Parks was finally turned out onto the street to fend for himself at 15. Struggling to survive, he worked in brothels, and as a singer, piano player, bus boy, traveling waiter, and semi-pro basketball player.

This is one enterprising, indomitable man, a survivor.  At age 25 he bought his first camera, taught himself how to take a decent photograph, and despite having no professional experience, talked his way into a job at the Farm Security Administration, documenting the nation’s social conditions during the Depression.  One of his most famous photographs, American Gothic, Washington, D.C., (below) was taken during his time at the FSA.  When the FSA dissolved, Parks went on to become a free-lance fashion photographer for Vogue.  From 1948 to 1972, he was a staff writer and photographer for Life and in 1950 was assigned to Paris for two years.  

In the 1950s Parks consulted on various Hollywood productions and in 1969, wrote the screenplay (adapted from his semi-autobiographical novel) and the score for The Learning Tree.   In 1971, he directed Shaft, the first Blaxploitation film (below), and its sequel Shaft’s Big Score.   

He also wrote books on photography, as well as fiction and poetry, and he composed a ballet dedicated to Martin Luther King.  He was an autodidactic Renaissance man:  a photographer and a painter, a jazz pianist and a classical composer, a writer and a poet, the co-founder of one of the first black magazines, Essence, and a screen writer.  He was a civil rights activist and godfather to Malcolm X’s daughter.  He was married and divorced three times and was romantically involved with Gloria Vanderbilt.  Over the course of his lifetime, he received over 20 honorary doctorates.  “College”was hardly a waste of money on him.  Quite the reverse:  he didn’t even have to pay for his degrees!

But out of all the biographical details of his life, it was Parks’ Fort Scott, Kansas roots that intrigued.  One Google search led to another, which brought me to the Exodusters and full circle back to The Underground Railroad and the northward migration of freed slaves:

Thousands of African-Americans made their way to Kansas and other Western states after Reconstruction [1865-1877]. The Homestead Act [1862] and other liberal land laws offered blacks (in theory) the opportunity to escape the racism and oppression of the post-war South and become owners of their own tracts of private farmland. For people who had spent their lives working the lands of white masters with no freedom or pay, the opportunities offered by these land laws must have seemed the answer to prayer. Many individuals and families were indeed willing to leave the only place they had known to move to a place few of them had ever seen. The large-scale black migration from the South to Kansas came to be known as the "Great Exodus," and those participating in it were called "exodusters."

The exodus began to subside by the early summer of 1879. Though some African-Americans did continue to head for Kansas, the massive movement known as the exodus basically ended with the decade of the 1870s. That ten-year period had witnessed great changes for blacks both in the South and in Kansas. In 1870, Kansas had hosted a black population of approximately 16,250. Ten years later, in 1880, some 43,110 African-Americans called Kansas home. Between the earlier gradual migrations and the 1879 exodus, Kansas had gained nearly 27,000 black residents in ten years. Though a far greater number of blacks remained in the South, this number still represents 27,000 individual dreams of a better life and 27,000 people that acted on their desires and their rights to enjoy the freedoms to which they supposedly had been entitled since the Emancipation Proclamation. Though few found Kansas to be the Promised Land for which they hoped, they did find it a place that enabled them to live freely and with much less racial interference than in the South.

 

The Great Exodus ended around 1879, and Parks was born in 1912.  Could Parks’ grandfather or father have been an exoduster?  That seems very likely to me, and even if not the case, Parks would certainly have heard about the migration from the stories told by blacks then living in Fort Scott.  Perhaps it was these tales of privation and promise that focused his sympathetic eye on the everyday lives of black Americans chasing the American dream from one end of the country to the other.  Sometimes, like a Google search on a Saturday morning, one thing just leads to another, as it did for Gordon Parks. 

Keep it real!  Wear your mask!

Marilyn