Civil rights icons
Gordon Parks’ photos at MFAH show dignity of Stokely Carmichael and the Black Power movement
Gordon Parks quietly photographed Stokely Carmichael, leader of the grassroots Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in the 1960s.
Parks was unassuming but determined in his skill to capture on film the civil rights leader.
He navigated through Black communities with his camera as a way to humanize them. While the nation often depicted Black lives in turmoil and awash in violence, Parks looked at the world differently. He saw art and dignity in the struggle for civil rights, and his photographs captured that beautifully.
Parks spent four months covering Carmichael. Some 53 of his 700-plus photos of that time are featured in “Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power.” The exhibition, made possible by the Gordon Parks Foundation, runs Oct. 16-Jan. 16 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Parks shot the photos on assignment for Life magazine, which published five photos of 25-year-old Carmichael and Parks’ accompanying essay in May 1967. He was the first African American photographer hired by Life, working for the publication from 1948 to 1972.
With the exception of the five published images, the photographs in the exhibit have never been seen before.
Parks was 53 at the time of the assignment, and he had just completed a profile on Muhammad Ali. He also photographed fashion for Vogue and Ebony magazines.
The significance of this exhibit — and Parks’ work, for that matter — is evident in every image. He removed stereotypes to show the possibilities of the human spirit, even when it was brutalized.
“Learning about Black Power and reading the (Life magazine) essay and reading how Parks is able to articulate it for an audience made us realize that, while the vocabulary might have changed, the focus and intent and need has not,” said Lisa Volpe, MFAH curator of photography. “I tried to be a megaphone for Parks and also for the people who are in these photos.”
Volpe contacted many of the people in the Parks’ images who are still alive. Some recalled from their conversations with Carmichael that he had a love for children, music and laughter. But most didn’t even remember that Parks was there. He worked quietly.
Terry Cannon, now 82 and living in California, was a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was known as “Snick.” Cannon, one of a handful of white men and women who were part of the civil rights effort, has no recollection of meeting Parks.
“Maybe that was part of his way of working, by fading into the background,” he said.
“We were very young, but when you were 25, like Stokely, you were a hardened veteran. Everything we did was well thought out, not youthful folly. In the face of everything happening at the time, we matured rapidly.”
Cannon drove Carmichael to Selma and Birmingham while in Alabama and was his bodyguard when he traveled to San Francisco. On a back road in Alabama, Cannon said Carmichael told him to stop at a moonshine stand where they had “the best liquor” in his life.
“I was amazed at their spirit and courage. I was raised with a strong moral background in my family. I saw the brutal injustices and was drawn to doing something about it. I was just as scared as everyone else, but I had such admiration for Stokely and the others who worked with such bravery,” he said.
Parks’ photographs of Carmichael and the other young women and men who raised their voices to fight injustices are part of his incredible body of work.
He is considered one of the country’s most influential photographers, often called a Renaissance man — he was a photographer, filmmaker, writer and musician. But his upbringing, born into poverty in Fort Scott, Kan., in 1912, rooted him.
Parks wrote an autobiographical novel and then a film, “The Learning Tree,” about his upbringing in segregated Kansas. It was the first major studio film directed by an African American. In 1971, he wrote and directed “Shaft,” a box-office success that launched sequels and garnered an Oscar for
Isaac Hayes’ theme song.
One of his most well-known photographs is that of a Black woman who cleaned offices. He posed her with mop and broom in front of an American flag. The image is part of his “American Gothic” series.
Last year, HBO debuted the documentary “A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks,” which follows his career and features interviews with film director Ava DuVernay and basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, among others. In May, Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C., acquired 244 photographs representing Parks’ career over five decades. The collection includes his earliest photographs and covers the 1940s through the 1990s. Carmichael graduated from Howard University with honors in 1964.
I have my own Parks’ story. In the 1990s, he wrote the introduction to “Songs of My People,” a book of photographs of 50 prominent African American photographers. I met him during his appearance for the exhibit at Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. I had volunteered as a tour guide to share the stories of Black joy behind the photos with school children. I later moderated a panel discussion on Parks’ legacy for a Black History Month program at Macy’s Galleria.
The last time Parks and Carmichael were together was in April 1967 at the United Nations during the anti-Vietnam War movement. Carmichael spoke on a program with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and actor Harry Belafonte.
Carmichael, who was born in Trinidad and immigrated to New York with his family at age 11, died of prostate cancer at age 57 in Guinea in 1998. Parks died at age 93 in New York in 2006.
“Parks was generally trying to give him (Carmichael) dimension,” Volpe said. “He had been cast as this figure of racial violence in the press. Parks wanted to draw out all parts of his character, his humorous side and what a responsibility he was taking on at such a young age.”
Gordon Parks understood the power of images and how art could tell hard truths.