The JBHE Foundation, Inc

Gordon Parks: A Man for All Seasons

Author(s): Milton Moskowitz
Source: The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, No. 40 (Summer, 2003), pp. 102-104
Published by: The JBHE Foundation, Inc
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3134060
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 Gordon Parks: A Man for All Seasons

"Make a man of yourself up there. Put something into it, and you'll get something out of it."

by Milton Moskowitz

HE QUOTE ABOVE was the advice Gordon Parks degree, he dedicated it to her "for pushing me to find her
received in 1927 from his mother when he was 15 wrong."
years old and living on the farm his father worked at Parks' apartment, overlooking the East River, is a veritable
Fort Scott in the Kansas prairie. Gordon was the youngest of cornucopia of certificates, plaques, medallions, paper-
her 15 children. She knew she was dying and had just weights, and what-have-you celebrating the accomplish-
arranged for Gordon to move to St. Paul, Minnesota, to live ments of a Renaissance man who was essentially self-taught.
with his older sister, Maggie Lee. And in many disciplines. He is no doubt best known for his
Gordon Parks, now 90 and living in a glass-sheathed sky- photography but he admits being a "restless soul," and so he
scraper near the United Nations in New York City, may have has tried his hand, successfully, at poetry, painting, films,
thought of that advice last May 17 when he traveled to journalism, fiction writing, and musical composition. He
Storrs, Connecticut, to accept a doctorate of fine arts from was driven by a catechism of his mother's: "If a white boy
the University of Connecticut. And it may have occurred to can do it, so can you. So don't ever give me color as a cause
him again a week later when he traveled to Amherst College for failing."
in western Massachusetts to accept another honorary degree. This ability to float from one field to another was honed
These days, when institutions of higher learning look during his late teenage years in the Twin Cities after he was
ahead to their spring commencements, they cast about to literally thrown out of his brother-in-law's home in St. Paul
find people of color to honor. It's akin to an act of atonement and left to fend for himself. He lived for two weeks on a trol-

for actions of previous years when applicants of color were ley car. At age seven he had begun to bang on the Kimball
routinely turned away. Recipients of these honorary degrees upright in his family's home, and he had learned to play by
have ranged from Mike Tyson to Toni Morrison. However, ear - and that skill enabled him to get a job playing piano
this quest for honorees has probably landed on Gordon in a Minneapolis brothel. During the late 1920s and into the
Parks' doorstep as often as at any other address in the United 1930s jobs did not so much come his way so much as he
States. The two degrees he received last May were the thir- sought them out himself. He washed dishes in a restaurant,
ty-ninth and fortieth he has collected. bused tables in a hotel, worked as a waiter in the fancy
It's a remarkable achievement considering the fact that Minneapolis Club, served in the Depression-born CCC
Gordon Parks never graduated from high school. That, too, (Civilian Conservation Corps) and played guard on the tour-
has been rectified - twice. In 1993, without having to take ing House of David basketball team. And then he took a
a test, he was awarded a high school degree by Lawrence series of jobs as a waiter on railroad dining cars. Riding the
High School in Lawrence, Kansas, home of the University Pullman cars gave him a chance to see other parts of the
of Kansas. Then, last July a delegation from his hometown, country, and for him these were learning experiences. As he
including a former mayor, made its way to Parks' apartment once put it, "The important thing is not so much what you
in New York to present him with a diploma from the Fort suffered - or didn't suffer - but how you put that learning
Scott high school. They may not have been aware that 77 to use."

years ago Miss McClintock, a white high school teacher in Putting that learning to use is the essential core of Gordon
Fort Scott, who served as an adviser to black students, had Parks' life.

told them: "Don't waste your parents' money on college. Reading magazines that had been discarded on the trains
You'll wind up as porters and maids." Gordon Parks remem- he worked, Parks came across photographs of migrant work-
bered this advice and when he received his thirtieth honorary ers shot by the remarkable group of photographers assem-
bled by the Farm Security Administration during the
Milton Moskowitz, a former columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, is the
coauthor of The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America. Depression: Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans,

102 SUMMER 2003

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 GORDON PARKS: A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS

Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, John Vachon, Jack Delano, Roy Stryker headed this photographic team, and he
Dorothea Lange. They made a powerful impression on him, came an important mentor of Parks, dispatching h
as did the paintings in the Art Institute, which he visited on shoot pictures depicting black life in the nation's capita
a stop in Chicago. which was then largely segregated. It was about this time
He began to read: John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, and that 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History
Margaret Bourke-White. He remembers going to a Chicago the United States was published. It f
movie theater in 1937 and seeing a newsreel showing Japan- selected by Edwin Rosskam and a searing
ese war planes bombing the U.S.S. Panay gunboat in the Wright, a self-taught writer whose n
Yangtze River in China. After the newsreel ended, a been published in 1940. This boo
voice on the theater intercom announced: "And bible, especially the passage:
here is Norman Alley, the photographer who _The seasons of the plantation no longer dictat
shot this remarkable film." Alley rose from the lives of many of us; hundreds of tho
sands of us are moving into the sphere of
the audience, took a bow and told about conscious history. We are with the new
his experience. "I was enthralled," Parks tide. We stand at the crossroads. We watch
wrote in
wrote inhis
his1965
1965 memoir,
memoir, A Choice
A Choice oft each new
of M procession. The hot wires c
urgent appeals. Print compels us. Voices
Weapons. "He had no way of knowing are speaking. Men are moving! And we
it, but he had just changed my life. I sat shall be with them.
through another show, and even before I A few years later Parks met Wright,
left the theater I had made up my mind I _ who gave him a copy of his
was going to become a photographer." inscribed: 'To one who moves with the
When the Northern Pacific train he was tide."
working on reached Seattle, he went to Abe Parks' career blossomed after World War
Cohen's pawnshop and for $12.50 bought a II. He moved to New York City to join a pho-
German camera, the Voigtlander Brilliant - and / tographic department that Stryker had formed at
he began taking pictures. He never stopped taking Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (now Exxon/
pictures after that. And he never stopped looking for Gordon Parks Mobil). He began shooting fashion pictures for Vogue.
new opportunities. Having studied copies of Vogue discard- And in 1949, two years after Jackie Robinson began to play
ed by train passengers, he fantasized about doing fashion for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Parks broke the color bar at Life
photography - and he went to every large department store magazine. He was hired there as a staff photographer and a
in the Twin Cities, offering his services. His diligence final- few years later he was posted to Life's Paris bureau. Parks
ly paid off when Frank Murphy's, a high-end boutique in St. completed more than 300 assignments for Life, and his work
Paul, gave him a chance to shoot pictures of models wearing is part of photographic history.
the store's clothes. Parks' photos were soon on display In 1997, when the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington,
throughout the store. One day Marva Louis, wife of heavy- D.C., mounted a Gordon Parks retrospective that traveled to
weight boxing champion Joe Louis, visited the store and, 30 cities, the exhibit included 277 of his photographs, and
impressed by the Parks' photos, told him: "I think you are certainly one of the amazing aspects of this show was the
wasting your time here. Why don't you come to work in diversity of subjects. They show that Gordon Parks was
Chicago? I could get you a lot of work there." comfortable pointing his camera at gang fights in Harlem,
He did, in 1940, working out of the Southside Art Center, chain gains in Alabama, Ingrid Bergman and Roberto
where he divided his time between taking pictures of life in Rossellini at Stromboli, the plains of his native Kansas, Paris
the black ghetto on the Southside of Chicago and portraits of fashion shows, Muhammad Ali, the favela in Rio de Janiero,
society matrons. His work in Chicago led to a Julius Duke Ellington, and black Muslim rallies in New York and
Rosenwald fellowship, and in 1942 he joined the fabled Chicago. This is very characteristic of Gordon Parks. He
Farm Security Agency's stable of photographers in Wash- enjoyed hanging out with Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver,
ington, D.C. but he is also an avid tennis player and an accomplished

SUMMER 2003 103

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 THEJOURNAL OF BLACKS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

skier. There is very little in the world that does not interestAnd today, as he approaches his ninety-first birthday this
Gordon Parks. November, Gordon Parks is still at work. Last year he pub-
lished a new book, The Sun Stalkers, a novel based on the
Parks once explained: "When the doors of promise open,
the trick is to quickly walk through them." He himself has
life of the English landscape painter, Joseph M.W. Turner. It
walked through many doors. In the early 1960s, a colleague
was his eighteenth book. Life magazine still calls upon him
at Life, Carl Mydans, a famous photographer in his ownto write essays. He did so after the September 11 attacks on
right, read something Parks had written about a storm he
the World Trade Center, and he recently completed a com-
once witnessed in Kansas and he suggested that they have
mentary for a special Life issue on "Pictures That Changed
lunch with Evan Thomas, a Harper & Row executive. As
the World." And yes, he has completed some 500 pages of
Parks relates the story, Thomas - surprise - another memoir.
opened the conversation by Parks has already made it
"Gordon Parks has rec 'ei ved 40 honorary degrees.
saying: "Look, I want your ved 4 honorary degree. clear, in his memoirs, that he
It's a remarkable achie vet ment considering the fact
novel. It's your first novel and ig h considered his parents "my just
that he never gradutat ed from high school. "
we can only offer you $5,000." heroes." He has cited their

Parks started to respond, "But "compassion and generosity" as

Mr. Thomas, I ...", which prompted Thomas to add: they raised a large family in a two-bedroom house. "Not
"Perhaps we can go to ten, but no more." Parks' answer: once, during those years, did I hear my mother or father rais
"What I was trying to say, Mr. Thomas, was that I probably a voice against one another, nor, for that matter, against their
can't write a novel, but since you offered me all this money, children." Racism was rampant in Kansas during Parks
I'm damn sure going to try." childhood, and he once wrote that he considered himself
His "damn trying" led 18 months later to The Learning "lucky to be alive especially when I remember that four of
Tree, a novel published in 1963 to wide acclaim and to great my close friends died of senseless brutality before they were
commercial success: it was a bestseller. Set in the Kansas twenty-one."
locale where he grew up, the town is called Cherokee Flats But Parks has never become bitter about the racism he
(Parks' mother was part Cherokee). The novel's openingencountered - and he credits his mother, Sarah Parks, for
page has a father saying: "Son, the only thing worse than imbuing in him a spirit that enabled him to succeed against
lazy Negroes is lazy white trash 'cause they're born white, all odds. In his last memoir, Voices in the Mirror, he depicts
with a God-given chance from the start." his mother as someone "who would have defied God him-

The success of The Learning Tree opened another door forself if what he willed her to do would harm another human
Parks. It became a motion picture that Parks produced and being. Without considering the consequences, she once took
directed, returning to Fort Scott to film it. It moved into the-a homeless white child into our house to feed and clothe
aters in 1969, the first Hollywood movie directed by an until a distant relative came to his rescue. When a judge sen-
African American. Parks also wrote the screenplay and the tenced three older black boys to three months' imprisonment
musical score. In the 1970s Parks directed the two Shaft for roughing me up and and throwing me off a truck, she
movies starring Richard Rountree - Shaft and Shaft's Big asked the court to rescind its decision and allow her to mete
Score - plus The Super Cops and Leadbelly. out the punishment. The judge bowed to her wishes and the
One reason we know so much about Gordon Parks is that three were sentenced to three months' worth of Wednesday
he has written endlessly about himself. He has written three night prayer meetings."
full-length memoirs: A Choice of Weapons (1965), To Smile Parks himself has great compassion, and you can see that
in Autumn (1979), and Voices in the Mirror (1990). The in his photographs. Philip Brookman, curator of photogra-
Learning Tree, while fictional, deals with the Kansas town phy and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery, concluded that
where he grew up. And Half Past Autumn, the book pub- Parks' "greatest achievement remains that, while still young,
lished by Little, Brown in 1997 in conjunction with the he overcame both personal and social adversity to fulfill his
Corcoran retrospective contains a long autobiographical potential to dream, to express the lessons of his early life,
essay by Parks, along with comments on his work. and to impart them to future generations. [JBHE I

104 SUMMER 2003

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