Gordon Parks on Being Born Black
Gordon Parks, born in Fort Scott, Kansas, on November 30, 1912, started his career in a town where racism was ubiquitous as he battled poverty and homelessness after the death of his mother. Despite his early start, his career transcended boundaries as he worked as a writer, composer, director, and photographer. Throughout his multifaceted career, one constant factor loomed significantly: his skin tone.
In the Gordon Parks Foundation republishing the book Born Black: A Personal Report on the Decade of Black Revolt 1960–1970, Parks’ essays and images delve deeper into the enduring consequences of being born Black at any time in America. In 1971, Parks argued that despite the passage of time, America remained entrenched in racism, failing to learn the lessons of the preceding decades. He writes in his postscript, “America is still a racist nation. It has not learned much from the turbulent decade just passed. We black people are still perplexed by the blood we must shed and the deaths we must die—as Americans.” Black Americans are undergoing the same threats and violence as they did in the 1960s. According to data collected by the United States Department of Justice in 2022, “anti-Black or African American incidents…were more than three times higher than the next highest racial or ethnic category.”
Parks notes if he “were to match each person [photographed] with his white counterpart—some leaders, several extremists, a celebrity, and a working man—surely the whites would not have suffered in such a uniform way. Look back and sift the carnage,” he writes. “Malcolm X is dead; Martin Luther King is dead; Stokely Carmichael’s great promise has been blighted; Muhammad Ali has been de- throned; Norman Fontenelle is dead; his son Kenneth is dead; Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers live under a constant threat of death.”
Parks’ motivation to thrive came from his need to survive the injustices Black men faced. “I didn’t finish high school. I was frightened to death of failure, and so it was not any genius to it; it’s just a matter of my being able to eat breakfast the next morning after my mother died,” he remembers in a 2000 interview with Charlie Rose. “I had to become a man, so it was a matter of survival rather than genius. I look back at today when people are talking about Renaissance men and so forth. I’ve said before I don’t even know how to spell renaissance.”
He began to pay his way at the age of 15 after the death of his mother. In 1937, while working as a waiter on the railway, Parks went to a theater in Chicago, and on the screen, a newsreel filmed by Norman Alley showed a Japanese plane attacking Panay in China. As the reel ended and the audience applauded, Parks knew he wanted a camera. He then purchased his first camera, a Voigtlander, for $7.50 from a pawn shop in Seattle, Washington. In the following years, Parks used his cameras to capture the lives of millions experiencing struggles similar to his own from the early 1940s to the 2000s. His extraordinary images earned him the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1942, leading him to work at the Farm Security Administration and, later, the Office of War Information. Afterward, upon moving to New York, his work was published in Vogue, Glamour, Ebony, and later Life magazine, where he served as a staff photographer.
Park’s images and text offer a glimpse into Black people’s daily difficulties when working toward a greater tomorrow. In the opening essay of Born Black, titled “Death at San Quentin,” Parks witnesses the brutality of the death penalty, a sentence given more frequently to African-Americans than any other race. Currently, 41% of the people on death row are African American, according to the Death Penalty Center. Since 1976, “more than 75% of death row defendants who have been executed were sentenced to death for killing white victims, even though in society as a whole about half of all homicide victims are African American.” Upon seeing the man walk to his execution, Parks felt his “strength ebb as if his legs were mine suffering the disordered weakness that claimed [him] long ago,” he writes. The gloomy dark purple and yellow undertones of his images suggest the feeling of doom that many Black people feel upon entering prison. Parks describes the dooming feeling of watching the man die. As the Bible falls from the executed lap, “his soul can’t be far away,” Parks writes. “Perhaps it hovers above, looking down upon the vacant body, indifferent to a God who would assign it to such anguish, damning the fallen Bible that holds the Commandment we have just violated.”
This somber feeling continues in Park’s images in his sixth essay, “The Fontenelle Family,” which offer an intimate look into the poverty that many Black people in Harlem were facing in 1968, as nearly two-thirds of the households had incomes below $10,000 a year while 21.8 percent of white people had an income of above 10,000 according to the 1968 census. When Parks first met Norman Fontenelle, the father had recently been laid off from his part-time job at the railway. When Parks asked about his job prospects, he responded, “What can I do? The Black man gets the walking papers first. And he’s the last to be called back.” As a result, the Fontenelle Family suffered in a small, one-bedroom, run-down apartment in Harlem where the heat was turned off in the winter, and dinner sometimes consisted of the four young children sharing an apple.
The wealth disparity faced by The Fontenelle Family is common among Black families today as “the median Black household in America has around $24,000 in savings, investments, home equity, and other elements of wealth,” according to RAND; meanwhile, the average white household holds around $189,000 in affluence. Ellen Fontenelle’s, Norman’s five-year-old son, tears in Park’s opening black and white photograph of their story echo the hardships many Black families face when trying to make ends meet while enduring an American economic system created to work against them. During the 2000 interview, Parks reflects on the struggles he watched Black people bear, saying, “pictures that I made that have become the most important picture are pictures that I wish I never had to take.”
The assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. serve as stark reminders of the dangers faced by those who dared to fight for equality and justice. “Malcolm’s years of ranting against the “white devils” helped create the climate of violence that finally killed him, but the private man was not a violent one. He was brilliant, ambitious, and honest,” Parks writes in his third essay, “The Death of Malcolm X”. Parks remembered him as a man who said things “most of us black folk were afraid to say publicly. When he told off “a head-whipping cop”—as he described him—his tongue was coupled with a million other black tongues. When he condemned the bosses of the “rat-infested ghetto,” a Harmful of fervid “Amens” could be heard ricocheting off the squalid tenements.” Like Malcolm X, a bullet killed King after he spent years using non-violence to fight for justice. “[King] spent the last dozen years of his life preaching love to men of all colors,” Parks remarks in his seventh essay titled, “The Death of Martin Luther King, Jr.”, King “led us into fire hoses, police dogs, and police clubs. His only armor was truth and love. Now that he lies dead from a lower law, we begin to wonder if love is enough. Racism still engulfs us.” As Parks reflects on the death of King, he offers words of wisdom that still ring true today, “If the death of this great man does not unite us, we are committing ourselves to suicide.”
Parks’ images of iconic Black civil rights leaders and his everyday photos of life in places like Alabama, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New York known all over the world as some of the most important images of the 20th century are on view in an upcoming exhibition titled Born Black, opening at Jack Shainman Gallery on March 5 until April 20. His images illuminate the past and present obstacles Black people endure to survive. As he writes, being born Black “control[s] our destiny above all others. From the evidence, our destiny is not a happy one, nor is it one that black people will, for long, accept.”
