[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 3]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 3109-3112]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




               COMMEMORATION OF THE LIFE OF GORDON PARKS

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, March 8, 2006

  Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to express my deep appreciation 
of the life and legacy of Gordon Parks. A gifted photographer and 
director, Parks, passed away Tuesday, March 7 at the age of 93. I would 
also like to enter into the Record numerous obituaries chronicling his 
life's achievements.
  Born in 1912, in Fort Scott, Kansas, he was the son of a dirt farmer 
and overcame tremendous obstacles to become a trailblazer--breaking 
down barriers posed to blacks throughout media and entertainment. The 
youngest of 15 children, Parks was orphaned at 16 when his mother died. 
After leaving high school before graduation, he found himself drawn to 
photography as a means of social documentary to advance those forgotten 
in the community. He referred to his photography as ``his weapon 
against poverty and racism,'' and used his skill to give a voice to the 
black experience. ``I never allowed the fact that I experienced bigotry 
and discrimination to step in the way of doing what I have to do,'' he 
once said. ``I don't understand how other people let that destroy 
them.''
  His first substantial work came when he began work in 1942 as a 
documentary photographer with the Farm Security Administration, an 
agency created to call attention to and produce a historical record of 
social and cultural conditions across the country. Six years later, 
Parks became the first black person to work at Life magazine where he 
covered poverty, segregation, crime and other issues through poignant 
photo essays. He was also the first black writer to join Vogue and the 
first to write, direct and score a Hollywood movie ``The Learning 
Tree'', based on a 1963 novel he wrote about his life as a farm boy. He 
later directed the 1971 film ``Shaft''.
  Parks was a passionate voice and a pioneer in the civil rights 
movement. While his mark was made documenting the human consequences of 
intolerance and crime through photojournalism, him empathy also shone 
through novels, poetry, autobiography, and nonfiction including 
photographic instructional manuals and filmmaking books. A self-taught 
pianist, Parks composed Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1953) and 
Tree Symphony (1967). In 1989, he composed and choreo-
graphed ``Martin,'' a ballet dedicated to civil rights leader Martin 
Luther King Jr. Parks also performed as a jazz pianist and as a 
campaigner for civil rights.
  Mr. Speaker, please join me in honoring the life of Gordon Parks, a 
man who not only changed the face of photography, but refused to ignore 
the most forgotten.

                     [From Reuters, March 7, 2006]

                      Filmmaker Gordon Parks Dies

                         (By Bob Tourtellotte)

       Los Angeles (Reuters).--Gordon Parks, the pioneering black 
     photographer and filmmaker who explored the African-American 
     experience in his work, including landmark movies ``The 
     Learning Tree'' and ``Shaft,'' died on Tuesday in New York, a 
     relative said.
       Parks, 93, had been in failing health, said the nephew, 
     Charles Parks, who lives in Lawrence, Kansas.
       Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks was orphaned by age 15 
     and grew up homeless. He worked a variety of menial jobs 
     before taking up photography in the late 1930s. He joined 
     ``Life'' magazine in the late 1940s and became its first 
     black staff photographer, remaining with the publication 
     until 1968.
       He worked at several government jobs as a photographer and 
     was a correspondent for the U.S. Office of War Information 
     during World War Two. After the war, he served for a stint as 
     a fashion photographer for Vogue magazine.
       But it was at ``Life'' where he made his mark documenting 
     the human consequences of intolerance and crime. He was 
     equally at ease with gangsters as with cops, and he won the 
     trust of the fiery Malcolm X, the militant Black Panthers and 
     ordinary black Americans who lived in big cities and small, 
     rural towns.
       His photo of a black cleaning lady, standing in front of a 
     huge American flag, mop in one hand, broom in the other and a 
     resigned look on her face, became one of his best known 
     shots.
       ``I suffered first as a child from discrimination, and 
     poverty to a certain extent, bigotry in my hometown in 
     Kansas,'' Parks told Reuters in a 2000 interview. ``So I 
     think it was a natural follow from that that I should use my 
     camera to speak for people who are unable to speak for 
     themselves.''


                             photos to film

       He turned to filmmaking in the late 1960s, and in 1971 
     directed the hit movie ``Shaft,'' one of the first of a wave 
     of ``blaxploitation'' films that directly targeted a black 
     American audiences and typically featured exaggerated 
     sexuality, violence and funk or soul music.
       ``Shaft'' starred Richard Roundtree as a police detective 
     who was as street tough as he was sexy with the ladies. It 
     spawned a hit song, ``Theme from `Shaft''' by Isaac Hayes, 
     and in 2000 was remade by director John Singleton with Samuel 
     L. Jackson in the lead role.
       In 2000, when HBO aired a documentary on the photographer 
     and moviemaker, called ``Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works 
     of Gordon Parks,'' he said the two films were hard to 
     compare.
       ``There was a lot of humanity in the first one that was 
     lacking in the second one,'' he said. ``People probably want 
     more violence now and so on.''
       Parks' first movie, 1969's ``The Learning Tree,'' was 
     adapted from a novel he wrote about growing up poor and black 
     in 1920s Kansas. He became the first black to write and 
     direct a major studio production when Warner Bros. 
     commissioned him to adapt his book to the big screen.
       In 1989, the film was among the first 25 to be deemed 
     culturally and historically significant and was preserved in 
     the U.S. National Film Registry for future generations.
       Over the years, he wrote volumes of poetry and fiction, 
     grew into an accomplished pianist and wrote a ballet about 
     the life of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, 
     Jr., titled ``Martin,'' which aired on the PBS network in the 
     United States.
                                  ____


                [From the New York Times, Mar. 8, 2006]

            Gordon Parks, a Master of the Camera, Dies at 93

                          (By Andy Grundberg)

       Gordon Parks, the photographer, filmmaker, writer and 
     composer who used his

[[Page 3110]]

     prodigious, largely self-taught talents to chronicle the 
     African-American experience and to retell his own personal 
     history, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 93.
       His death was announced by Genevieve Young, his former wife 
     and executor. Gordon Parks was the first African-American to 
     work as a staff photographer for Life magazine and the first 
     black artist to produce and direct a major Hollywood film, 
     ``The Learning Tree,'' in 1969.
       He developed a large following as a photographer for Life 
     for more than 20 years, and by the time he was 50 he ranked 
     among the most influential image makers of the postwar years. 
     In the 1960's he began to write memoirs, novels, poems and 
     screenplays, which led him to directing films. In addition to 
     ``The Learning Tree,'' he directed the popular action films 
     ``Shaft'' and ``Shaft's Big Score!'' In 1970 he helped found 
     Essence magazine and was its editorial director from 1970 to 
     1973.
       An iconoclast, Mr. Parks fashioned a career that resisted 
     categorization. No matter what medium he chose for his self-
     expression, he sought to challenge stereotypes while still 
     communicating to a large audience. In finding early acclaim 
     as a photographer despite a lack of professional training, he 
     became convinced that he could accomplish whatever he set his 
     mind to. To an astonishing extent, he proved himself right.
       Gordon Parks developed his ability to overcome barriers in 
     childhood, facing poverty, prejudice and the death of his 
     mother when he was a teen-ager. Living by his wits during 
     what would have been his high-school years, he came close to 
     being claimed by urban poverty and crime. But his nascent 
     talent, both musical and visual, was his exit visa.
       His success as a photographer was largely due to his 
     persistence and persuasiveness in pursuing his subjects, 
     whether they were film stars and socialites or an 
     impoverished slum child in Brazil.
       Mr. Parks's years as a contributor to Life, the largest-
     circulation picture magazine of its day, lasted from 1948 to 
     1972, and it cemented his reputation as a humanitarian 
     photojournalist and as an artist with an eye for elegance. He 
     specialized in subjects relating to racism, poverty and black 
     urban life, but he also took exemplary pictures of Paris 
     fashions, celebrities and politicians.
       ``I still don't know exactly who I am,'' Mr. Parks wrote in 
     his 1979 memoir, ``To Smile in Autumn.'' He added, ``I've 
     disappeared into myself so many different ways that I don't 
     know who `me' is.''
       Much of his literary energy was channeled into memoirs, in 
     which he mined incidents from his adolescence and early 
     career in an effort to find deeper meaning in them. His 
     talent for telling vivid stories was used to good effect in 
     ``The Learning Tree,'' which he wrote first as a novel and 
     later converted into a screenplay. This was a coming-of-age 
     story about a young black man whose childhood plainly 
     resembled the author's. It was well received when it was 
     published in 1963 and again in 1969, when Warner Brothers 
     released the film version. Mr. Parks wrote, produced and 
     directed the film and wrote the music for its soundtrack. He 
     was also the cinematographer.
       ``Gordon Parks was like the Jackie Robinson of film,'' 
     Donald Faulkner, the director of the New York State Writers 
     Institute, once said. ``He broke ground for a lot of people--
     Spike Lee, John Singleton.''
       Mr. Parks's subsequent films, ``Shaft'' (1971) and 
     ``Shaft's Big Score!'' (1972), were prototypes for what 
     became known as blaxploitation films. Among Mr. Park's other 
     accomplishments were a second novel, four books of memoirs, 
     four volumes of poetry, a ballet and several orchestral 
     scores. As a photographer Mr. Parks combined a devotion to 
     documentary realism with a knack for making his own feelings 
     self-evident. The style he favored was derived from the 
     Depression-era photography project of the Farm Security 
     Administration, which he joined in 1942 at the age of 30.
       Perhaps his best-known photograph, which he titled 
     ``American Gothic,'' was taken during his brief time with the 
     agency; it shows a black cleaning woman named Ella Watson 
     standing stiffly in front of an American flag, a mop in one 
     hand and a broom in the other. Mr. Parks wanted the picture 
     to speak to the existence of racial bigotry and inequality in 
     the nation's capital. He was in an angry mood when he asked 
     the woman to pose, having earlier been refused service at a 
     clothing store, a movie theater and a restaurant.
       Anger at social inequity was at the root of many of Mr. 
     Parks's best photographic stories, including his most famous 
     Life article, which focused on a desperately sick boy living 
     in a miserable Rio de Janeiro slum. Mr. Parks described the 
     plight of the boy, Flavio da Silva, in realistic detail. In 
     one photograph Flavio lies in bed, looking close to death. In 
     another he sits behind his baby brother, stuffing food into 
     the baby's mouth while the baby reaches his wet, dirty hands 
     into the dish for more food.
       Mr. Parks's pictures of Flavio's life created a groundswell 
     of public response when they were published in 1961. Life's 
     readers sent some $30,000 in contributions, and the magazine 
     arranged to have the boy flown to Denver for medical 
     treatment for asthma and paid for a new home in Rio for his 
     family.
       Mr. Parks credited his first awareness of the power of the 
     photographic image to the pictures taken by his predecessors 
     at the Farm Security Administration, including Jack Delano, 
     Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein and Ben Shahn. He first saw 
     their photographs of migrant workers in a magazine he picked 
     up while working as a waiter in a railroad car. ``I saw that 
     the camera could be a weapon against poverty, against racism, 
     against all sorts of social wrongs,'' he told an interviewer 
     in 1999. ``I knew at that point I had to have a camera.''
       Many of Mr. Parks's early photo essays for Life, like his 
     1948 story of a Harlem youth gang called the Midtowners, were 
     a revelation for many of the magazine's predominantly white 
     readers and a confirmation for Mr. Parks of the camera's 
     power to shape public discussion.
       But Mr. Parks made his mark mainly with memorable single 
     images within his essays, like ``American Gothic,'' which 
     were iconic in the manner of posters. His portraits of 
     Ma1colm X (1963), Muhammad Ali (1970) and the exiled Eldridge 
     and Kathleen Cleaver (1970) evoked the styles and strengths 
     of black leadership in the turbulent transition from civil 
     rights to black militancy.
       But at Life Mr. Parks also used his camera for less 
     politicized, more conventional ends, photographing the 
     socialite Gloria Vanderbilt, who became his friend; a 
     fashionable Parisian in a veiled hat puffing hard on her 
     cigarette, and Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini at the 
     beginning of their notorious love affair.
       On his own time he photographed female nudes in a style 
     akin to that of Baroque painting, experimented with double-
     exposing color film and recorded pastoral scenes that evoke 
     the pictorial style of early-20-century art photography.
       Much as his best pictures aspired to be metaphors, Mr. 
     Parks shaped his own life story as a cautionary tale about 
     overcoming racism, poverty and a lack of formal education. It 
     was a project he pursued in his memoirs and in his novel; all 
     freely mix documentary realism with a fictional sensibility.
       The first version of his autobiography was ``A Choice of 
     Weapons'' (1966), which was followed by ``To Smile in 
     Autumn'' (1979) and ``Voices in the Mirror: An 
     Autobiography'' (1990). The most recent account of his life 
     appeared in 1997 in ``Half Past Autumn'' (Little, Brown), a 
     companion to a traveling exhibition of his photographs.
       Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was born on Nov. 30, 
     1912, in Fort Scott, Kan. He was the youngest of 15 children 
     born to a tenant farmer, Andrew Jackson Parks, and the former 
     Sarah Ross. Although mired in poverty and threatened by 
     segregation and the violence it engendered, the family was 
     bound by Sarah Parks's strong conviction that dignity and 
     hard work could overcome bigotry.
       Young Gordon's security ended when his mother died. He was 
     sent to St. Paul, Minn., to live with the family of an older 
     sister. But the arrangement lasted only a few weeks; during a 
     quarrel, Mr. Parks's brother-in-law threw him out of the 
     house. Mr. Parks learned to survive on the streets, using his 
     untutored musical gifts to find work as a piano player in a 
     brothel and later as the singer for a big band. He attended 
     high school in St. Paul but never graduated.
       In 1933 he married a longtime sweetheart, Sally Alvis, and 
     they soon had a child, Gordon Jr. While his family stayed 
     near his wife's relatives in Minneapolis, Mr. Parks traveled 
     widely to find work during the Depression. He joined the 
     Civilian Conservation Corps, toured as a semi-pro basketball 
     player and worked as a busboy and waiter. It was while he was 
     a waiter on the North Coast Limited, a train that ran between 
     Chicago and Seattle, that he picked up a magazine discarded 
     by a passenger and saw for the first time the documentary 
     pictures of Lange, Rothstein and the other photographers of 
     the Farm Security Administration.
       In 1938 Mr. Parks purchased his first camera at a Seattle 
     pawn shop. Within months he had his pictures exhibited in the 
     store windows of the Eastman Kodak store in Minneapolis, and 
     he began to specialize in portraits of African-American 
     women.
       He also talked his way into making fashion photographs for 
     an exclusive St. Paul clothing store. Marva Louis, the 
     elegant wife of the heavyweight champion Joe Louis, chanced 
     to see his photographs and was so impressed that she 
     suggested that he move to Chicago for better opportunities to 
     do more of them.
       In Chicago Mr. Parks continued to produce society portraits 
     and fashion images, but he also turned to documenting the 
     slums of the South Side. His efforts gained him a Julius 
     Rosenwald Fellowship, which he spent as an apprentice with 
     the Farm Security Administration's photography project in 
     Washington under its director, Roy Stryker.
       In 1943, with World War II under way, the farm agency was 
     disbanded and Stryker's project was transferred to the Office 
     of War Information (O.W.I.). Mr. Parks became a correspondent 
     for the O.W.I. photographing the 332d Fighter Group, an all-
     black unit based near Detroit. Unable to accompany the

[[Page 3111]]

     pilots overseas, he relocated to Harlem to search for 
     freelance assignments.
       In 1944 Alexander Liberman, then art director of Vogue, 
     asked him to photograph women's fashions, and Mr. Parks's 
     pictures appeared regularly in the magazine for 5 years. Mr. 
     Parks's simultaneous pursuit of the worlds of beauty and of 
     tough urban textures made him a natural for Life magazine. 
     After talking himself into an audience with Wilson Hicks, 
     Life's fabled photo editor, he emerged with two plum 
     assignments: one to create a photo essay on gang wars in 
     Harlem, the other to photograph the latest Paris collections.
       Life often assigned Mr. Parks to subjects that would have 
     been difficult or impossible for a white photojournalist to 
     carry out, such as the Black Muslim movement and the Black 
     Panther Party. But Mr. Parks also enjoyed making definitive 
     portraits of Barbra Streisand, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, 
     Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Calder. From 1949 to 1951 he 
     was assigned to the magazine's bureau in Paris, where he 
     photographed everything from Marshal Petain's funeral to 
     scenes of everyday life. While in Paris he socialized with 
     the expatriate author Richard Wright and wrote his first 
     piano concerto, using a musical notation system of his own 
     devising.
       As the sole black photographer on Life's masthead in the 
     1960's, Mr. Parks was frequently characterized by black 
     militants as a man willing to work for the oppressor. In the 
     mid-1960's he declined to endorse a protest against the 
     magazine by a number of black photographers, including Roy 
     DeCarava, who said they felt that the editorial assignment 
     staff discriminated against them. Mr. DeCarava never forgave 
     him.
       At the same time, according to Mr. Parks's memoirs, Life's 
     editors came to question his ability to be objective. ``I was 
     black,'' he noted in ``Half Past Autumn,'' ``and my 
     sentiments lay in the heart of black fury sweeping the 
     country.''
       In 1962, at the suggestion of Carl Mydans, a fellow Life 
     photographer, Mr. Parks began to write a story based on his 
     memories of his childhood in Kansas. The story became the 
     novel ``The Learning Tree,'' and its success opened new 
     horizons, leading him to write his first memoir, ``A Choice 
     of Weapons''; to combine his photographs and poems in a book 
     called ``A Poet and His Camera'' (1968) and, most 
     significantly, to become a film director, with the movie 
     version of ``The Learning Tree'' in 1969.
       Mr. Parks's second film, ``Shaft,'' released in 1971, was a 
     hit of a different order. Ushering in an onslaught of genre 
     movies in which black protagonists played leading roles in 
     violent, urban crime dramas, ``Shaft'' was both a commercial 
     blockbuster and a racial breakthrough. Its hero, John Shaft, 
     played by Richard Roundtree, was a wily private eye whose 
     success came from operating in the interstices of organized 
     crime and the law. Isaac Hayes won an Oscar for the theme 
     music, and the title song became a pop hit.
       After the successful ``Shaft'' sequel in 1972 and a comedy 
     called ``The Super Cops'' (1974), Mr. Parks's Hollywood 
     career sputtered to a halt with the film ``Leadbelly'' 
     (1976). Intended as an homage to the folk singer Huddie 
     Ledbetter, who died in 1949, the movie was both a critical 
     and a box-office failure. Afterward Mr. Parks made films only 
     for television.
       After departing Life in 1972, the year the magazine shut 
     down as a weekly, Mr. Parks continued to write and compose. 
     His second novel, ``Shannon'' (1981), about Irish immigrants 
     at the beginning of the century, is the least 
     autobiographical of his writing. He wrote the music and the 
     libretto for the 1989 ballet ``Martin,'' a tribute to the 
     Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., choreographed by Rael Lamb.
       He also continued to photograph. But much of Mr. Parks's 
     artistic energy in the 1980's and 1990's was spent summing up 
     his productive years with the camera. In 1987, the first 
     major retrospective exhibition of his photographs was 
     organized by the New York Public Library and the Ulrich 
     Museum of Art at Wichita State University.
       The more recent retrospective, ``Half Past Autumn: The Art 
     of Gordon Parks,'' was organized in 1997 by the Corcoran 
     Museum of Art in Washington. It later traveled to New York 
     and to other cities. Many honors came Mr. Parks's way, 
     including a National Medal of Arts award from President 
     Ronald Reagan in 1988. The man who never finished high school 
     was a recipient of 40 honorary doctorates from colleges and 
     universities in the United States and England.
       His marriages to Sally Alvis, Elizabeth Campbell and 
     Genevieve Young ended in divorce. A son from his first 
     marriage, Gordon Parks Jr., died in 1979 in a plane crash 
     while making a movie in Kenya. He is survived by his daughter 
     Toni Parks Parson and his son David, also from his first 
     marriage, and a daughter, Leslie Parks Harding, from his 
     second marriage; five grandchildren; and five great 
     grandchildren.
       ``I'm in a sense sort of a rare bird,'' Mr. Parks said in 
     an interview in The New York Times in 1997. ``I suppose a lot 
     of it depended on my determination not to let discrimination 
     stop me.'' He never forgot that one of his teachers told her 
     students not to waste their parents' money on college because 
     they would end up as porters or maids anyway. He dedicated 
     one honorary degree to her because he had been so eager to 
     prove her wrong.
       ``I had a great sense of curiosity and a great sense of 
     just wanting to achieve,'' he said. ``I just forgot I was 
     black and walked in and asked for a job and tried to be 
     prepared for what I was asking for.''
                                  ____


               [From the Associated Press, Mar. 8, 2006]

                   Filmmaker Gordon Parks Dies at 93

                          (By Polly Anderson)

       New York.--Gordon Parks, who captured the struggles and 
     triumphs of black America as a photographer for Life magazine 
     and then became Hollywood's first major black director with 
     ``The Learning Tree'' and the hit ``Shaft,'' died Tuesday, 
     his family said. He was 93.
       Parks, who also wrote fiction and was an accomplished 
     composer, died at his home in New York, according to a former 
     wife, Genevieve Young, and nephew Charles Parks.
       ``Nothing came easy,'' Parks wrote in his autobiography. 
     ``I was just born with a need to explore every tool shop of 
     my mind, and with long searching and hard work. I became 
     devoted to my restlessness.''
       He covered everything from fashion to politics to sports 
     during his 20 years at Life, from 1948 to 1968.
       But as a photographer, he was perhaps best known for his 
     gritty photo essays on the grinding effects of poverty in the 
     United States and abroad and on the spirit of the civil 
     rights movement.
       ``Those special problems spawned by poverty and crime 
     touched me more, and I dug into them with more enthusiasm,'' 
     he said. ``Working at them again revealed the superiority of 
     the camera to explore the dilemmas they posed.''
       In 1961, his photographs in Life of a poor, ailing 
     Brazilian boy named Flavio da Silva brought donations that 
     saved the boy and purchased a new home for him and his 
     family.
       ``The Learning Tree'' was Parks' first film, in 1969. It 
     was based on his 1963 autobiographical novel of the same 
     name, in which the young hero grapples with fear and racism 
     as well as first love and schoolboy triumphs. Parks wrote the 
     score as well as directed.
       In 1989, ``The Learning Tree'' was among the first 25 
     American movies to be placed on the National Film Registry of 
     the Library of Congress. The registry is intended to 
     highlight films of particular cultural, historical or 
     aesthetic importance.
       The detective drama ``Shaft,'' which came out in 1971 and 
     starred Richard Roundtree, was a major hit and spawned a 
     series of black-oriented films. Parks himself directed a 
     sequel, ``Shaft's Big Score,'' in 1972, and that same year 
     his son Gordon Jr. directed ``Superfly.'' The younger Parks 
     was killed in a plane crash in 1979.
       Roundtree said he had a ``sneaking suspicion'' that the 
     Shaft character was based on Parks.
       ``Gordon was the ultimate cool,'' he said by telephone. 
     ``There's no one cooler than Gordon Parks.''
       Parks also published books of poetry and wrote musical 
     compositions including ``Martin,'' a ballet about the Rev. 
     Martin Luther King Jr.
       Parks was born Nov. 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kan., the 
     youngest of 15 children. In his 1990 autobiography, ``Voices 
     in the Mirror,'' he remembered it as a world of racism and 
     poverty, but also a world where his parents gave their 
     children love, discipline and religious faith.
       He went through a series of jobs as a teen and young man, 
     including piano player and railroad dining car waiter. The 
     breakthrough came when he was about 25, when he bought a used 
     camera in a pawn shop for $7.50. He became a freelance 
     fashion photographer, went on to Vogue magazine and then to 
     Life in 1948.
       ``Reflecting now, I realize that, even within the limits of 
     my childhood vision, I was on a search for pride, meanwhile 
     taking measurable glimpses of how certain blacks, who were 
     fed up with racism, rebelled against it,'' he wrote.
       When he accepted an award from Wichita State University in 
     May 1991, he said it was ``another step forward in my making 
     peace with Kansas and Kansas making peace with me.''
       ``I dream terrible dreams, terribly violent dreams,'' he 
     said. ``The doctors say it's because I suppressed so much 
     anger and hatred from my youth. I bottled it up and used it 
     constructively.''
       In his autobiography, he recalled that being Life's only 
     black photographer put him in a peculiar position when he set 
     out to cover the civil rights movement.
       ``Life magazine was eager to penetrate their ranks for 
     stories, but the black movement thought of Life as just 
     another white establishment out of tune with their cause,'' 
     he wrote. He said his aim was to become ``an objective 
     reporter, but one with a subjective heart.''
       The story of young Flavio prompted Life readers to send in 
     $30,000, enabling his family to build a home, and Flavio 
     received treatment for his asthma in an American clinic.

[[Page 3112]]

     By the 1970s, he had a family and a job as a security guard, 
     but more recently the home built in 1961 has become 
     overcrowded and run-down.
       Still, Flavio stayed in touch with Parks off and on, and in 
     1997 Parks said, ``If I saw him tomorrow in the same 
     conditions, I would do the whole thing over again.''
       Life's managing editor, Bill Shapiro, said in a statement 
     Tuesday that it had ``lost one of its dearest members. ``
       ``Gordon was one of the magazine's most accomplished 
     shooters and one of the very greatest American photographers 
     of the 20th century,'' the statement said. ``He moved as 
     easily among the glamorous figures of Hollywood and Paris as 
     he did among the poor in Brazil and the powerful in 
     Washington.''
       In addition to novels, poetry and his autobiographical 
     writings, Parks' writing credits included nonfiction such as 
     ``Camera Portraits: Techniques and Principles of Documentary 
     Portraiture,'' 1948, and a 1971 book of essays called ``Born 
     Black.''
       His other film credits included ``The Super Cops,'' 1974; 
     ``Leadbelly,'' 1976; and ``Solomon Northup's Odyssey,'' a TV 
     film from 1984.
       Recalling the making of ``The Learning Tree,'' he wrote: 
     ``A lot of people of all colors were anxious about the 
     breakthrough, and I was anxious to make the most of it. The 
     wait had been far too long. Just remembering that no black 
     had been given a chance to direct a motion picture in 
     Hollywood since it was established kept me going.''
       Last month, health concerns had kept Parks from accepting 
     the William Allen White Foundation National Citation in 
     Kansas, but he said in a taped presentation that he still 
     considered the State his home and wanted to be buried in Fort 
     Scott.
       Two years ago, Fort Scott Community College established the 
     Gordon Parks Center for Culture and Diversity.
       Jill Warford, its executive director, said Tuesday that 
     Parks ``had a very rough start in life and he overcame so 
     much, but was such a good person and kind person that he 
     never let the bad things that happened to him make him 
     bitter.''
       Parks is survived by a son and two daughters, Young said. 
     Funeral arrangements were pending, she said.

                          ____________________