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Gordon Parks
- University of Illinois Press
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gordon Parks (november 30, 1912–March 7, 2006) elizabeth schultz In 1999, Gordon Parks received his fifty-sixth honorary doctorate degree. In accepting this award from Princeton University, the nonagenarian Parks expressed his wish that the white high-school English teacher in Kansas who had told him and his black classmates that their families should not waste their money on sending them to college might have been present for this occasion. Although he did not go on to finish high school, Parks, who died in New York in March, 2006, during his lifetime received accolades, honors, and distinctions from a wide range of national organizations, including the National Medal of Art, presented by President Ronald Reagan in 1988, for his achievements during a long, creative, and socially conscious life. His work as a photojournalist, fashion photographer , art photographer, novelist, poet, memoirist, scriptwriter, filmmaker, and music composer, in which he combined a commitment to social justice with an aesthetic for beauty and tragedy, took him far beyond his Kansas origins and the erroneous and potentially damaging judgment of his high school English teacher. In the course of his long life, during which he moved from Kansas to Minnesota, Chicago, Washington, and New York, to Paris, Barcelona, and Rio, to Africa and Asia, he learned from his own experiences, from his associations with ordinary and extraordinary individuals, and from his continuous desire to create and to experiment with diverse genres and diverse media. While his work was significantly influenced by the social and cultural circumstances wherever he lived, the time he spent in Chicago, where he became familiar with the work of Black Chicago Renaissance writer Richard Wright and his colleagues, provided a formative dimension to his vision as it played out in the variety of genres in which he worked during his long life. Just as Frederick Douglass rewrote the narrative of his years in slavery and of his escape to freedom in each of his three autobiographies, Parks relives his Kansas experiences in each of his six autobiographical works as well as in numerous interviews. His autobiographies invariably begin with tribute to his parents—Andrew Jackson and Sarah. Born on November 30, 1912, the last of gordon Parks • 275 fifteen children, he was raised on the family’s farm outside of Fort Scott. He credits his parents’ lessons in perseverance and dignity and love to his survival in a racist society and to his decision to choose art—words and pictures, the pen and the camera—as his “weapons” rather than violence and hatred.1 His experiences with racism, both individual and institutional, began as a boy in Kansas where he was subjected to segregated schools and witnessed the persecution of black acquaintances. Although he attained worldwide renown and respect, Parks never forgot that his beloved parents as well as other members of his family lay in a segregated cemetery in Fort Scott, a fact he recalled frequently in his interviews and autobiographies. Parks’s boyhood was characterized not only by the intimacy and support of his family, but also by his appreciation for the beauty of the Kansas landscape. In 2004, on the occasion of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius’s declaring June 12 to be “Gordon Parks Day,” Parks commented that “Kansas was [a] marvelous place for me and a terrible place.”2 His poem, “Kansas Land,” which appears in several of his books, enumerates the delight he took in the state’s natural beauty: “Cloud tufts billowing across the round blue sky. / Butterflies to chase through grass high as the chin. / Junebugs, swallowtails, red robin and bobolink, / Nights filled of soft laughter, fireflies and restless stars.” The poem’s conclusion, however, indicates that these pleasures were tempered by “the fear, hatred and violence / We blacks had suffered upon this beautiful land.”3 This bifurcated vision—of perceiving tragedy simultaneously with beauty—which he first felt during his Kansas boyhood becomes a primary attribute of his aesthetic. Immediately following his mother’s death, Gordon, at age fifteen, was sent to St. Paul, Minnesota, to live with a sister—a traumatic event that quickly introduced him into a changing and complex urban society, first in St. Paul and then in Chicago. After an altercation with his brother-in-law, he found himself on the street, penniless and homeless, in a frigid climate. “It was,” he explains in Half Past Autumn, “a frightening leap to a big metropolis that would wash over me like a cold sea.”4 From 1927 to...