On this 3rd day of American Black History 2025 with Dr. Brice “Doc” Miller, Gordon Roger Parks, urban photographer. Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks (b) November 30, 1912, (d) March 7, 2006, was an Black American photographer, composer, author, poet, and filmmaker, who became prominent in U.S. documentary photojournalism in the 1940s through 1970s.

His lens focused particularly on issues of civil rights, poverty and Black Americans, using his photogenic glamour photography style. He is best remembered for his iconic photos of poor Americans during the 1940s (taken for a federal government project), for his photographic essays for Life magazine, and as the director of the films Shaft, Shaft’s Big Score and the semiautobiographical The Learning Tree.

Parks had moved his family to Washington, D.C., in 1942 after joining the Farm Security Administration, and was stung by the racial schism that beset the agency and the nation’s capital in general. Ella Watson was a janitor there. After a long day riddled with bigotry, Parks began talking to her. “She told me about how her father had been lynched. How her daughter died at childbirth. How she was bringing up two kids on a salary fit for half a person.” Suddenly realizing how his camera could be a real weapon against injustice, he produced “my first professional photograph,” and his signature image.

Photographing the Deep South. In the wake of the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Life asked Parks to go to Alabama and document the racial tensions entrenched there. He would compare his findings with his own troubled childhood in Fort Scott, Kansas, and with the relatively progressive and integrated life he had enjoyed in Europe.

Arriving in Mobile in the summer of 1956, Parks was met by two men: Sam Yette, a young Black reporter who had grown up there and was now attending a northern college, and the white chief of one of Life’s southern bureaus. In his memoirs and interviews, Parks magnanimously refers to this man simply as “Freddie,” in order to conceal his real identity. Revealing it, Parks feared, might have resulted in violence against both Freddie and his family. However, the assignment encountered challenges from the outset.

As the project was drawing to a close, the New York Life office contacted Parks to ask for documentation of “separate but equal” facilities, the most visually divisive result of the Jim Crow laws. Parks captured this brand of discrimination through the eyes of the oldest Thornton son, E.J., a professor at Fisk University, as he and his family stood in the colored waiting room of a bus terminal in Nashville. (Parks experienced such segregation himself in more treacherous circumstances, however, when he and Yette took the train from Birmingham to Nashville. With the threat of tarring and feathering, even lynching, in the air, Yette drank from a whites-only water fountain in the Birmingham station, a provocation that later resulted in a physical assault on the train, from which the two men narrowly escaped.)

Shaft! Among his many accomplishments, Gordon Parks had a groundbreaking career in film—as director, screenwriter, producer, and composer. In 1969, encouraged by acclaimed film director and friend John Cassavettes, Parks became the first African American to write and direct a major Hollywood studio feature film, The Learning Tree, based on his bestselling semiautobiographical novel. His next directorial endeavor, Shaft (1971) helped define a genre then referred to as blaxploitation films. Over 25 years, Parks’s career in film encompassed documentaries, blockbuster Hollywood films, and bio-pics such as Leadbelly and Solomon Northup’s Odyssey depicting the lives of significant Black Americans.

Parks died of cancer on March 7, 2006, in New York City. He is buried in his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas. Today, Parks is remembered for his pioneering work in the field of photography, which has been an inspiration to many, including my 19 year old son BAM @bamcapture who is a young, but accomplished photographer and videographer studying Mass Communications and Digital Journalism @tougaloocollege📸