In 1970, Gordon Parks, from New York City, wrote the introduction to the original publication of his book Born Black. “In the last ten years black Americans have turned four hundred years of despair and oppression into an era of rebellion and hope. It was a turbulent decade filled with demonstrations, riots, bombings and violent death; a period in which we black people combined to mutiny against a common fate. The white symbols and images that for so long disfigured our minds and blackness are being jettisoned by that very blackness. And it was clearly revolt that had to be employed to alter this country’s conduct toward us. Now we are beginning to know who we are, what we mean to America—and what America means to us.”
Co-published by Steidl and The Gordon Parks Foundation, Born Black has now been re-printed in an expanded edition. The book contains 9 of Parks’ photo essays that were produced between 1963 and 1970. The stories, selected by Parks, include his look inside San Quentin State Prison; documentation of the Black Muslim movement and the Black Panthers; commentaries on the deaths of civil rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.; intimate studies of Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali, and Eldridge Cleaver; and his work documenting the daily life of the impoverished Fontenelle family in Harlem. All of them had been articles commissioned by LIFE magazine.
The original book also featured commentary by Parks himself, along with his personal accounts of the stories. This new and expanded edition includes all of the original text and photographs, but also contains additional photographs, spreads from the 1971 publication, correspondence, reproductions of the LIFE articles, and new essays that seek to further explore Parks’ work, life, and add context of the original publication.
The book’s history began in 1967, when Parks received a letter from his literary editor, Genevieve Young, who offered him some advice about writing the text that would accompany his story in LIFE on the Fontenelle family.
“The camera can show, with unparalleled vividness, the facts, the present, the tangible. But only words can convey the web of thought and emotion, the influence of the past and the fears and hopes for the future, all the things that go into the way an individual faces his world” Young wrote as Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr. and Michal Raz-Russo recount in their introduction. His job, Young said, was “to show, not tell; to dramatize, not lecture.”
Before Born Black, Gordon Parks had already written two books: The Learning Tree and A Choice of Weapons. So he was very familiar with the power of the written word.
But Born Black is not autobiographical like those other books. Rather, it gave Parks the opportunity to not just look back on the work he had done for LIFE magazine over the previous decade of great social changes, but also the chance to write about his experiences producing the work, examine what the stories meant, and allow him to reflect in his own words on the stories.
As Nicole R. Fleetwood reflects in her essay, “Born Black grants an intimate view into Parks’s thinking as he steers among his role as a documentarian of Black experience for a white, mainstream audience through Life, his ambivalence toward Black radical activism, and his concerns about the future of Black Americans. It reveals both his hope for that Black futurity and his apprehension about the endurance of anti-Black discrimination and violence.”
Parks’ complex view of the decade covered in the book is not surprising. It was a period of equally complex social and political changes, as his work showed through the aspects of African American life and culture that he covered. And as the 1970s began, the names of dead leaders had grown, the Black Power movement was being attacked from many sides, and icons were facing jail. African Americans had suffered greatly.
As Gordon Parks writes himself in his postscript “Look back and sift the carnage: Malcolm X is dead; Martin Luther King is dead; Stokely Carmichael’s great promise has been blighted; Muhammad Ali has been dethroned; Norman Fontenelle is dead; his son Kenneth is dead; Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers live under a constant threat of death.”
One can say that the current decade we are ending has been equally as traumatic. 10 years ago this summer Eric Garner and Michael Brown were killed by white police officers. The Black Lives Matter Movement grew and spread across America in the wake of their deaths, and those of many others. The nation’s first Black President was replaced by a man who is the anthesis of everything that Obama’s presidency had hoped to accomplish. The global pandemic changed the nation in countless ways, as community leaders, family members and friends passed away. Politics has in many ways devolved as norms have been washed away. And as we get closer to this year’s presidential election, much is at stake.
As Fleetwood says at the end of her essay, this is an important moment to look back at Gordon Parks’ work, and how it holds up a mirror that can both show us what has changed, and what we as a nation still face. “Through the precision and attunement of his camera and his pen, Parks leaves a moving and moody historical document of his take on Black freedom struggles. The reissue of Born Black in this historic moment is as important now as its initial publication was in 1971, because Gordon Parks remains one of the nation’s most treasured witnesses and chroniclers of where this nation has been and how far it still must go.”
Born Black: A Personal Report on the Decade of Black Revolt 1960-1970 is Co-published by Steidl and The Gordon Parks Foundation, and can be purchased through their website here.
An exhibition of photographs from Born Black is on exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City through April 20th.
An exhibition of “American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson” is on display through June 23rd at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
On May 21st, The Gordon Parks Foundation be hosting its annual gala. The gala, which brings together changemakers across film, music, the visual arts, business and philanthropy, will honor athlete and activist Colin Kaepernick, acclaimed mixed-media artist Mickalene Thomas and civil rights activist and former Chairman of the NAACP Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Sixteen-time GRAMMY® Award-winning singer, songwriter, musician, producer, and actress Alicia Keys and GRAMMY® Award-winning producer, rapper, and songwriter Kasseem Dean (aka Swizz Beatz) will be recognized as Patrons of the Arts.
