Growing up a bookish daydreamer in St. Louis, Missouri, I discovered Gordon Parks’s autobiography “A Choice of Weapons” during my sophomore year in high school. The narrative journey of his hardscrabble upbringing in neighboring Kansas to documenting fashion runways, favelas in Brazil, and the heroic everyday Americans driving the Civil Rights struggle captured my imagination. More than anything, the kaleidoscopic life he led was a living rejoinder to a contested literary line attributed to writer F. Scott Fitzgerald: “there are no second acts in American lives.” Gordon Parks lived multiple ones in his sprawling 93 years: photographer, memoirist, filmmaker, painter, and choreographer.
In comparatively minor ways, I sought to follow in the large footsteps he left for countless aspiring storytellers by leaving the Midwest at the soonest opportunity I could and moving to New York to become a journalist, eventually finding my way to LIFE magazine as he had, but becoming a staff reporter instead of a photographer.
A decade after first picking up “A Choice,” early in my four-year stint at LIFE magazine. I met Gordon at a holiday party. Star-struck but determined to speak with him, I went over to where he was standing amongst a group of older magazine alumni and awaited my turn to say “hello.” Our conversation that evening was extremely brief but sparked a relationship which lasted till his death. Irregularly, I would go to his apartment at the UN Plaza overlooking the East River to soak up any anecdotes, guidance, or feedback on ideas I could. Just a few years before his death at that point, he was the veritable “lion in winter” with a flowing white mane of hair, his signature mustache, and sparkling eyes. Sitting on a living room sofa or at the dining table, Gordon was gracious, patient, and still impassioned.
We actually ended up working together on a re-creation of the famous Art Kane photo “A Great Day in Harlem,” bringing together, in 1995, the dozen surviving jazz musicians from the 1958 original, ironically on the same day as the Million Man March — a conflict both he and I spoke about and deeply regretted.
For much of the mid- to late 20th century, LIFE magazine was the undisputed visual chronicler of the American dream, though an overwhelmingly white one. Between 1937 and 1972, less than three percent of LIFE’s coverage was devoted to everyday Black life, and for much of its initial publication run, Gordon Parks was the only Black photographer on staff, till John Shearer was hired in 1969. Mostly, Black Americans were flattened into tropes: sensationalized figures of crime, extraordinary sports stars, or distant victims in moments of acute crisis, except through the lens of Gordon Parks. When he joined the publication in 1948, he was the sole Black member of the full-time photographic staff and remained so till John Shearer, a mentee whose father was a friend, was hired in 1969. Gordon would go on to complete more than 300 assignments over his career at LIFE, tasked with forcing white mainstream readers to confront the complex, unflinching humanity of Black America.
Harlem became a frequent focus of his. For his breakout story, he shadowed 17-year-old Leonard “Red” Jackson. While LIFE’s white editors aggressively cropped and edited his work to lean into sensationalized fear, Gordon consistently strived to capture the tenderness and vulnerability of a young Black man molded by structural neglect, yearning to survive. In that same year, he teamed up with his close friend Ralph Ellison on the unpublished photo essay “Harlem Is Nowhere,” probing the psychological toll of urban segregation at Harlem’s Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic. Four years later, in 1952, Parks and Ellison collaborated again for LIFE, constructing haunting set pieces, such as a basement glowing with 1,369 lightbulbs.
Fifteen years later, as his ascendance in journalism and the arts had reached the status of lore, Gordon Parks went back to Harlem for what would become a defining work of humanistic, documentary excellence of Black life. To understand the weight of his seminal photo-essay on the Fontenelles, “A Harlem Family,” published in LIFE on March 8, 1968, one must understand the socio-political inferno in which it was born. Against the backdrop of firehoses, dogs, beaten protesters, burning churches, and lynchings in the South, cities in the North were veritable tinderboxes. In July 1964, the shooting of fifteen-year-old James Powell by an off-duty police officer sparked six nights of uprising in Harlem. By the “long, hot summer” of 1967, dozens of American cities were engulfed in civil disorder.
White Washington sought answers, but the dominant political narrative was shaped by then Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial 1965 report, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action. His framing pathologized urban Black life, blaming a “tangle of pathology” and broken family structures rather than centuries of institutional racism. White policymakers treated Moynihan as the definitive oracle on urban Black life, ignoring decades of rigorous scholarship from Black intellectuals like E. Franklin Frazier and Kenneth Bancroft Clark, among others.
When President Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission to investigate the 1967 riots, their landmark report — released on February 29, 1968, just one week before Parks’ Fontenelle story hit newsstands — offered a stark diagnosis: America was moving toward two societies, separate and unequal, driven by white racism, police misconduct, and economic abandonment.
To fully understand what Gordon Parks captured in the snow-bound Harlem of 1967, I urge readers of “Gordon Parks: Diary of a Harlem Family, 1967–68” to return to James Baldwin’s prophetic 1960 essay for Esquire, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown.”
Writing at the dawn of the decade, Baldwin observed a Harlem that was already being systematically walled off and neglected by a city that viewed its Black residents with indifference or fear. In “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” Baldwin warned that if America continued to ignore the desperate cries of Harlem, the bitterness festering in the northern ghettos would eventually boil over into an explosive, inescapable rage.
Standing in the Fontenelle home, seven years after Baldwin published that essay, Gordon Parks was looking directly at Baldwin’s prediction made flesh. He didn’t photograph the Fontenelles as sociological data or political fodder; rather, he embedded himself into their reality. Without judgment, he bore witness, fighting to change how everyday Black life was depicted.
Less than a month after the story’s publication, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis (Gordon would document his funeral for LIFE), and the country erupted once more. Parks would go on to photograph Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panthers, and Muhammad Ali, before expanding his oeuvre into Hollywood to direct “The Learning Tree” and “Shaft”, but the Fontenelle essay remained his most intimate statement on the power of documentary photography to demand empathy and expect humanity.
