March 10, 2006
Folks We Have Lost Posted by Audrey Peterson at 03:45 PM EST This Monday I was sitting at my computer, attempting to write an editor’s letter for American Legacy magazine. The theme was a goodbye to some of the notable African-Americans we have lost in 2005 and 2006. The list was discouragingly long, and seems to have started with the death of Shirley Chisholm on New Year’s Day of last year. It went on from there: Ossie Davis last February. Bobby Short and Johnnie Cochran (love him or hate him) in the spring. By the end of the summer we had lost Luther Vandross, August Wilson, and the founder and publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines, John H. Johnson. In the fall it was Judge Constance Baker Motley, the entertainers Shirley Horn and Nipsey Russell; and Rosa Parks, and Vivian Malone Jones, who in 1963 faced down Governor George Wallace when he refused to allow her to enter the University of Alabama to register. She became the first African-American to graduate from there. In November, the artist Ernest Crichlow died at 91. He lived in Brooklyn, just a few subway stops from our offices here on Fifth Avenue, but I found out too late that he had still been alive and missed the opportunity to talk to him about his long career and share it with our readers. December took Richard Pryor. Lou Rawls and Coretta Scott King passed on a few weeks into 2006. And at the end of February the 58-year-old science fiction writer Octavia Butler fell at her home in Seattle, hit her head, and died. As an African-American woman, she was alone in her genre when she published Kindred in 1979, a tale about a black woman who, in order to save her life, travels back to the antebellum South to save the life of a white slaveholder ancestor. Butler is the only science fiction writer to have received a MacArthur fellowship. Men and women like Ossie Davis, Judge Baker, Mrs. Parks, Mrs. King, and Vivian Jones were outright civil rights activists; artists and writers like Crichlow and Butler, on the other hand spoke to us about the social conditions of black people through their work. Public they were, but one has only to see Crichlow’s 1938 lithograph Lovers (part of a printmaking collection at the Library of Congress Web site) to understand the special kind of quiet courage it took to create as he did in those times. “I didn’t like seeing her go through back doors,” Ms. Butler once told Publishers Weekly. “If my mother hadn’t put up with all those humiliations, I wouldn’t have eaten very well or lived very comfortably. So I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.” The quote, which I clipped from her New York Times obituary, beautifully summed up her motivation. The great Gordon Parks, who died on Monday at the age of 93, possibly while I was churning out my long list of people who had gone before him,was another kind of social activist and artist. But right now I’ll set aside his films—The Learning Tree and Shaft—his poetry, musical compositions, and books (although his final autobiography A Hungry Heart: A Memoir by Atria books is a must-read if you’re interested in Parks), to focus on his photographs. Parks was a prolific recorder of history. But he was pragmatic enough to know, early on, that if he wanted to keep taking photos he’d have to earn a living at it—and so he got his first chance at learning to “shoot fashions,” as he was given to saying, by strolling into a white-owned Minneapolis dress shop in 1938 and asking the husband-and-wife owners, the Murphys, if he could have a job photographing the gowns there. Mr. Murphy gave him short shrift, but Mrs. Murphy gave him a job. That job eventually led him to the Farm Security Administration, where in 1942 he shot American Gothic, Washington, D.C., which he named after Grant Wood’s famous 1930 painting. You have probably seen it. A black cleaning woman stands with a broom in her right hand and a mop propped against the desk next to her. Behind her hangs the American flag. It’s not an homage to the plain-living American, as in Wood’s painting; it’s an indictment of segregation and racism in our capital city, something some of the white Southern members of the FSA, who didn’t want Parks there in the first place, would have used against him. “Stryker said you’ve got the right idea, but you’re going to get us all fired,” Mr. Parks told me in a telephone conversation last October. “He put it at the bottom of the pile, but he told me that I should stay with her. He said you had to write cold and hard about black life in America and not allow whites to address the words with the consolation of a few tears.” Parks took it to heart, but he wrote his words with images. He stuck with Ella Watson and took photos of her in her apartment with her family and attending church. She was a person beyond her ironic emblematic role of African-American as second-class citizen. And Roy Stryker’s words stuck with Parks. He continued throughout his life to capture his fellow blacks in all kinds of situations, from all walks of life. His work for Life magazine—a chronicle of poverty in Brazil, an exposé of gang violence in Harlem, a chronicle of racial segregation in the deep South, a photographic essay on Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam—are moving, stunning, brilliant, memorable, the expert work of a gifted man. But it is his earlier work, the FSA photos from the Library of Congress, that remains my favorite. Many of the images, including those of Ella Watson, are available to look at online. By visiting www.memory.loc.gov and typing “Gordon Parks” into the search box, you can see scores of his works, wonderful images that capture the soul of black America in the first half of the twentieth century.
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