float like a butterfly, sting like a bee

I grew up an hour away from Muhammad Ali's hometown. He was one of my heroes. Back then, as a kid, I knew him as Cassius Clay, and I watched every one of his fights on TV. I was ten years old when he beat Sonny Liston. I remember the buzz and excitement of that night. I loved Ali's fierceness and strength, but I also loved his sense of humor, his poetry and his gracefulness. I had never seen anyone so full of himself, but in such a lovable way. Of course, later, I admired his political and religious convictions. And even later,  I was deeply moved by the dignity with which he navigated the assault of Parkinson's.

My favorite photographs of Ali were made by Gordon Parks. These were featured in two articles Parks did for Life Magazine in 1966 and 1970. The article was in the Huff Post last year.

On September 9, 1966, Life magazine featured a story on Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., the rising boxing star who’d recently changed his name to a moniker more familiar to sports devotees — Muhammad Ali.

At this point, Ali had already won the gold medal at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome and snatched the heavyweight title from Sonny Liston in 1964. He’d also become a point of controversy for fans following the champion. Questioned about his connection to Black Muslim leaders like Malcom X, and his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War, Ali was fighting battles in and out of the ring.

The Life photo shoot of ‘66 introduced Ali to Gordon Parks, a Kansas-born photographer who, with no formal training, made his way from photojournalist with the Farm Security Administration to the first African American staff photographer at Life magazine. Parks had previously turned his lens onto migrant workers and sixties activists. Now he was photographing “The Greatest.”

Over several months, Parks and Ali forged a bond that no doubt affected the shots included in the magazine. Over time, Parks had found a way to reconcile the differences between himself and the boxer, and appreciate Ali’s place in the cultural pantheon. “At last, he seemed fully aware of the kind of behavior that brings respect,” Parks wrote at the end of his Life essay accompanying the photos. “Already a brilliant fighter, there was hope now that he might become a champion everyone could look up to.”

The article was called “The Redemption of the Champion.”

Parks’ work was instrumental in bringing the man of butterflies and bees back into the public’s lap, particularly the close-up photo of a sweat-soaked Ali staring wistfully beyond the camera after a training session. Four years after their initial meeting, the photographer returned to Ali’s side, profiling him once again as he prepared to fight Joe Frazier in 1970. Ali was still controversial and Parks was still sympathetic to the human behind the hero. The epigraph for that essay read: “Dripping with controversy, Muhammad Ali comes back.”

- Katherine Brooks

some gordon parks beauties from the 1950's - never seen before until very recently

“Gordon Parks was only a teenager when he left his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas. The youngest of 15, Parks chose to make a living for himself after his mother passed away, and wound up becoming the first African American photographer for Life Magazine.

Only two years after his first Life assignment, Parks returned home for a photo essay on segregated education. Journeying to Fort Scott and other Midwestern cities nearby, Parks photographed his childhood classmates, capturing their faces, families and homes while recording details about their occupations and incomes. The photo essay, for reasons that remain unknown, was never published, and most of the images went unseen.

And then Karen Haas, curator at MFA Boston, stumbled upon an image of Parks' that changed everything.

From this original image, an exhibition was born. Haas mimicked Parks' journey to revisit his old classmates from an all-black elementary school, visiting Kansas City, Saint Louis, Detroit and Chicago -- everywhere except Columbus, Ohio, to see what remained of the spaces Parks immortalized. ‘For Parks, it became this trip back into his past to present this national issue to the mostly white readership of Life Magazine through the lens of his own life.’

The poignant images depict everyday life for African Americans in the 1950s -- playing pool, reading a book, watching a baseball game -- all under the regulations of segregation. Along with the images, Parks recorded details about his former classmates' current lives, for example, that Norman Earl Collins was doing quite well, making $1.22 an hour at Union Electric of Missouri. 

’What I love about the pictures is the way I feel as though when I look at the expressions on their faces I can see the pride each of these families felt standing in front of their houses,’ explained Haas. ‘Parks made an effort to pose his subjects in front of their houses with these strong nuclear families -- the way so many families in Life Magazine are posed to begin with. That white middle class family pose. To pose African American families in front of their homes, I think, would have been quite startling to the readership. I'm fascinated by the gaze. Each of them trusting their friend, not only this fellow African American, but someone who'd grown up in Kansas with them. What they'd experienced together, the poverty, the childhood struggles. And now he's the famous New York photojournalist, he's a success story. And each of them is trusting him, telling him their stories.’

Not surprisingly, from the moment the 42 photographs were installed on gallery walls, the reaction from museum employees and visitors was overwhelming. ‘It's been really wonderful talking to people around the galleries and hearing their reactions. We've been struck by how contemporary it feels, how timely these issues are, obviously, even today. Here was a photographer, he'd only just begun at Life Magazine less than two years earlier. They assigned him this story on segregated education and he's already given the relative free reign to focus the story around his own childhood. It doesn't look dated to me. It feels like there is a lot we can talk about.’

This isn't the first time a Gordon Parks exhibition has hit close to home. His ‘Segregation Story,’ on view at the High Museum in Atlanta, depicts an Alabama family living under Jim Crow segregation in the same decade. Parks' images, despite capturing an altogether different time, still speak to a nation where issues of racism are pronounced, whether looking at police killings or the Oscar race.

One of Haas' main hopes for the exhibition was connecting to the children of Parks' subjects -- the subjects, as well as Parks, are all deceased. ‘The children were my hope,’ she said. ‘I spent a lot of time doing genealogical research. I tried to find a number of the children and had no luck, until the other day, the phone rang. It was this little girl from one of the pictures, who is now in her late sixties. She's retired and lives in Arizona and we just had the most amazing conversation about her mother and her mother's friendship with Gordon Parks and how she was able to do many of the things her mother wasn't able to do in life. Her daughter has gone on to get a teaching degree, a doctorate, she's travelled the world. It was incredibly emotional.’

‘To think, I can email her the pictures and I can read her her mother's yearbook quote and I can look at the picture of her playing the piano and what that meant. I can look at what an image of an African American girl sitting at a piano on the South Side of Chicago would have meant to Life readers back in 1950. That was a real sign of people's commitment. They were investing in an expensive musical instrument for their child, in aspirations for their future.’

The exhibition, full of beauty, suffering, pride and injustice, is both powerful and heartbreaking. Gazing upon the images, we're struck by a combination of amazement and horror, at the strength these subjects possessed and the struggles they endured. The bittersweet imprint is reminiscent of Parks' own feelings upon his graduation:

‘Twenty-four years before I had walked proudly to the center of the stage and received a diploma. There were twelve of us (six girls and six boys) that night. Our emotions were intermingled with sadness and gaiety. None of us understood why the first years of our education were separated from those of the whites, nor did we bother to ask. The situation existed when we were born. We waded in normal at the tender age of six and swam out maladjusted… nine years later.’”

- by Priscilla Frank, The Huffington Post

gordon parks

“Going to church. Playing around the house. Window shopping. These are the types of everyday, seemingly innocuous activities that wound up before the lens of iconic civil rights photographer Gordon Parks. Parks, a self-taught artist, believed in the photographic medium as a weapon of change, capable of awakening people's hearts and undoing prejudice.

An exhibition of Parks' rare color photographs, entitled ‘Gordon Parks: Segregation Story,’ will go on view this fall at The High Museum of Art in Atlanta. The photos capture a particularly disturbing moment in American history, captured via the lives of an African American family, the Thorntons, living under Jim Crow segregation in 1950s Alabama.

The images, originally titled ‘The Restraints: Open and Hidden,’ were first taken for a photo essay for Life Magazine in 1956. The essay chronicles the lesser-seen daily effects of racial discrimination, revealing how prejudice pervades even the most banal and personal of daily occurrences. Parks doesn't photograph protests, rallies, acts of violence or momentous milestones in civil rights history. No, he prefers the quieter moments in and around the home.

Some photos focus on inequality -- a ‘colored’ line at an ice cream stand or black children window shopping amongst all white mannequins. Others hint ominously at violence, as one child plays with a gun and another examines it solemnly. Such images are especially haunting in retrospect, considering the recent death toll of American black men in this country, over half a century after these photographs were taken.

Yet the majority of Parks' photos focus on the positive over the negative, showing a different breed of civil rights documentation. Instead of highlighting discrimination here, Parks emphasizes the similarities that bind all Americans: spending time in the home, being with family, exploring nature. Parks' images revealed what so many Americans struggled to understand: the human link that connects us all.

‘More than anything, the Segregation Series challenged the abiding myth of racism: that the races are innately unequal, a delusion that allows one group to declare its superiority over another by capriciously ascribing to it negative traits, abnormalities or pathologies,’ Maurice Berger wrote in The New York Times. ‘It is the very fullness, even ordinariness, of the lives of the Thornton family that most effectively contests these notions of difference, which had flourished in a popular culture that offered no more than an incomplete or distorted view of African-American life.’

Parks' photographs pick away at a dark moment in history in bright colors, spreading knowledge and hope simultaneously with the click of a camera. Although we wish these photographs depicted a world entirely different than the one we live in today, recent events show differently. The deaths of unarmed black men all over America reveal we may need Parks' visual essay more today than we would have expected, or hoped.

Now is as good a time as ever to remind each other that every human life matters.

‘I've been asked if I think there will ever come a time when all people come together,’ Parks once said. ‘I would like to think there will. All we can do is hope and dream and work toward that end. And that's what I've tried to do all my life.’

‘Gordon Parks: Segregation Story’ will be on view from November 15, 2014 until June 7, 2015 at The High Museum in Atlanta.

- article by Priscilla Frank for the Huffington Post