PARKS, Gordon, Sr.

(b. 30 November 1912 in Fort Scott, Kansas), prominent photographer who became an autobiographer, novelist, musician and composer, essayist, and an award-winning photojournalist and film director.

Parks was born Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks, the son of Andrew Jackson, a Kansas dirt farmer, and Sarah (Ross) Parks, a homemaker and mother of fifteen children, Parks being the youngest. At age sixteen Parks's life changed drastically with the death of his mother and the illness of his ailing father. Parks moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, to live with his older sister and her husband. An argument between him and his sister's husband caused him to be thrown out of the house and forced to live on his own. He dropped out of high school and struggled to support himself with a variety of odd jobs, including mopping floors in a slum hotel, playing piano in a brothel, working as a busboy in a Saint Paul hotel, and playing semiprofessional basketball. He eventually secured a position with the Northern Pacific Railroad. While working and traveling he read voraciously, wrote music, and developed an eye for photography after purchasing his first camera in a pawnshop.

Lacking technique and training but gifted with an eye for composition, Parks's big break came when he convinced a women's clothing store owner in Saint Paul to let him try fashion photography. His work eventually came to the attention of Marva Louis, wife of heavyweight boxer Joe Louis. She encouraged him to come to Chicago, where he would have greater exposure to the fashion world. Fashion photography enabled him to earn enough money to support his family as well as have the freedom to explore documentary photographic techniques in the slums of Chicago. Parks had married Sally Alvis in 1933; the couple had three children, one of whom, before dying young in a 1979 plane crash, worked as a film director.

Many of Parks's milestone achievements took place prior to the 1960s. Winning the Julius Rosenwald Foundation fellowship in 1941 for documentary photographs marked the beginning of his professional career. He broke racial barriers in a profession typically not open to African Americans. It is said that his creative output from 1944 to 1978 was more than extraordinary. Parks's photography in the United States dealt with many substantive issues, from politics and entertainment to the lives of ordinary men and women in their struggles to survive. This intertwining of real life and photography became a distinctive characteristic of Parks's work throughout his career.

In 1944 Parks applied for a position with Harper's Bazaar, published by Hearst Publishing, a company that refused to hire him because of his race. However, the famed photographer Edward Steichen understood the quality of Parks's work and sent him to Alexander Lieberman, director of Vogue magazine. Lieberman contacted the senior editor of Glamour magazine, and from that point on Parks's work appeared in both publications.

In 1942 Parks began working for Life magazine as a photojournalist and essayist. He served as a European correspondent in France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Parks stayed with Life until 1972, covering more than three hundred assignments ranging from high fashion layouts to crime, gangs, the civil rights movement, and black activist organizations. Parks's photo-essay on Harlem gang leader Red Jackson of the Midtowners revealed a perceptive and extraordinary understanding of the culture of gang life. Parks had a way of getting his subjects to talk about their lives.

By the 1960s Parks was enjoying his status as one of the country's most influential photojournalists. In 1961 he was assigned to create a documentary on poverty in Brazil, contrasting it with the cosmopolitan life in Rio de Janeiro. As with his essays about Harlem gangs and segregation, he centered his piece around one individual. Parks met a young asthmatic boy named Flavio Da Silva, who became his primary subject. Parks photographed Flavio's parents, brothers, and sisters, all of whom lived together in a one-room shack. He wrote how the entire family depended on Flavio in spite of his deteriorating health. The story became a classic example of photojournalism and is still used widely to illustrate the concept.

Parks's work on the Flavio story stirred the hearts of people around the world, and thousands of dollars poured into Life, money that was to be used to bring Flavio to the United States for medical treatment, which was successful. In 1964 Parks produced a short documentary, Flavio. Flavio remained in touch with Parks at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

In 1961 Parks divorced his first wife and married Elizabeth Campbell in 1962. The couple had one child, but they were divorced in 1973. Parks married editor Genevieve Young in 1973, but this union, too, ended in divorce in August 1979.

In 1963 Parks published his first novel, The Learning Tree. It is a saga of a black family living on a farm in Kansas during the 1920s. It is Parks's own story based on recollections of his early years growing up, covering his life from the time of his mother's death to 1944. The Learning Tree is a significant piece of literature in that it contributes to a positive image of black Americans.

Parks's coverage of the civil rights movement for Life lasted from the early 1950s through the late 1960s. He profiled Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Stokely Carmichael, the Black Panthers, and others. One of his most controversial pieces of journalism concerned Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam. His coverage included their activities in Chicago, Illinois, New York City, and Los Angeles, California, and detailed the development of education and self-reliance among members of the Nation of Islam. In To Smile in Autumn, Parks describes Malcolm X as having charm and the remarkable ability to captivate an audience. He stated that Malcolm X was brilliant, ambitious, honest, and fearless and that he had the temerity to say publicly what every other African American wanted to say.

As the study of Malcolm X began, Parks recognized a visible change in Malcolm X's attitude when discussing the "brotherhood of mankind." He also observed the agonizing break between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad. Also, Parks had been with Malcolm X two days prior to his assassination. Information Malcolm X shared with him caused his own life to be threatened; the destruction of the Time-Life building in New York City was feared as well. Parks and his family were placed under the protection of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for two months until Parks decided to meet with one of the black Muslim leaders to end the standoff. An assistant managing editor of Life, Dee Dee Moore, stated that it was Malcolm X's trust of Parks that made it possible for the one-time documentary to be developed.

In the summer of 1966 Parks began his study of Muhammad Ali. This was a difficult time in Ali's career because of his stand on the Vietnam War and because of his heavyweight title being revoked. Ali revealed to Parks his concerns about growing up poor in Kentucky and not being able to fulfill his dream of getting a good education. In 1967 Parks began his coverage of several black nationalists and the culture of the Black Panthers. Covering Stokely Carmichael, Parks found himself in harm's way once again, this time in the Watts area of Los Angeles.

In the mid-1960s Parks ventured into Hollywood as the first black director for a major studio. He produced, directed, and composed the musical score for the feature film adaptation of The Learning Tree (1968). The Library of Congress placed the film on the National Film Register. A Choice of Weapons, published in 1966, details Parks's life as fictionalized in the The Learning Tree film. For Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) he directed Shaft (1971), Shaft's Big Score (1972), and The Super Cops (1974). Shaft is viewed as the forerunner of the blaxploitation genre.

The second volume of Parks's memoirs, To Smile in Autumn (1979), begins in 1944, with his fashion photographs appearing in Vogue and Glamour, and ends in 1978, when he had accomplished almost everything he had identified as a goal. Voices in the Mirror: An Autobiography, the third memoir, was published in 1990 and shows Parks's strength and vitality in his later years. His autobiographical film Moments Without Proper Names aired on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in 1988.

In 1988 Parks added to his repertoire a ballet titled Martin. He completed the musical score and libretto, and PBS began filming in 1989. It was shown in January 1990 in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Critics view Parks's films as a revealing statement about the portrayal of black characters. Parks created assertive, sexual black heroes instead of "foot shuffling servants." Although Shaft brought MGM back from dire financial straights, it did not secure him a position in Hollywood as a director.

Parks's multifaceted career opened doors for other African-American artists who followed him in the 1960s and beyond. In Visions he wrote, "I've known both misery and happiness, lived in so many different skins it is impossible for one skin to claim me."

Autobiographical sources on Parks include A Choice of Weapons (1966), To Smile in Autumn: A Memoir (1979), and Voices in the Mirror: An Autobiography (1990). Other selected biographical sources include Donald Bogle, Blacks in American Films and Television: An Encyclopedia (1988); Contemporary Authors (1989), vol. 26; Contemporary Black Biography (1993), vol. 1; and Black Literature Criticism (1994), vol. 1. Parks's literary contributions include Flash Photography (1947); Camera Portraits: The Techniques and Principles of Documentary Portraiture (1948); A Poet and His Camera (1968); Gordon Parks: Whispers of Intimate Things (poetry and photographs, 1971); Born Black (essays and photographs, 1971); In Love (poetry and photography, 1971); Moments Without Proper Names (1975); Flavio (1978); and Shannon (1981).

Johnnieque B. (Johnnie) Love