UNITED NATIONS - / www.MaximsNews.com/ 23 March 2006 - America has lost another civil rights and cultural icon.

Gordon Parks, the groundbreaking and award winning photographer, filmmaker, writer, painter, musician and symphonic composer died at the age of 93. 

He leaves behind an unparalleled body of work that exposed poverty, challenged racial stereotypes and changed the images of Black America.     

Born Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks in 1912 to Sarah Ross Parks and Andrew Jackson Parks, he was the youngest of fifteen children in a very poor family. 

Parks would later describe his birthplace of Fort Scott, Kansas, as “a town electrified with racial tension." At age fifteen, upon the death of his mother, he moved to St. Paul Minnesota to live with his sister. He left high school and worked as a busboy and piano player in a brothel. 

By 1934, he was married with three children and part of the Civilian Conservation Corps.  While working on the railroads in the northwest, Parks bought his first camera at a pawn shop for $12.50. 

Parks would later write that the lens would become his lifelong “choice weapon against poverty and racism.”             

In 1941, Parks became the first photographer to receive a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation through his revealing, poetic, yet realistic photography; he captured Chicago’s South side and World War II.  

He broke new racial barriers three years later as the first African-American photographer for Vogue magazine.

From 1948 to 1969, he served as the first African-American staff photographer for Life magazine, producing powerful photo essays of African-American life that had never been seen before. 

Stirring pictures of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, gang life in the streets of Harlem, the Black Panthers, and the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were among the favored and trusted images of the civil rights movement.  

Malcolm X wrote of Parks in his autobiography, “Success among whites never made Parks lose touch with black reality.”            

His creative genius expanded to literature, film and music, as he became the first black director for a major Hollywood studio.  He co-produced, directed, wrote the screenplay, and composed the musical score for the film based on his 1963 novel, The Learning Tree.  

His commercial success was cemented as the director of Shaft (1971), Shaft's Big Score (1972), The Super Cops (1974) and Leadbelly (1978).  Parks’ films began to redefine the image of African Americans by creating uncompromising superheroes and true depictions of urban life. 

In Blacks in American Films and Television, Donald Bogle wrote "Almost all his films reveal his determination to deal with assertive, sexual black heroes, who struggle to maintain their manhood amid mounting social/political tensions.” 

Despite his successes, Parks was constantly frustrated with Hollywood’s attempts to market his work as exclusively “blaxplotation” films. Subsequently, he produced several documentaries for television and PBS including Solomon’s Northrup’s Odyssey, The World of Prit Thomas, Diary of a Harlem Family and Mean Streets.  

By 1989, he completed the musical score and libretto for Martin, a ballet about Martin Luther King, Jr. and began filming it for PBS, where it was shown on King's birthday in 1990.

Parks was a prolific writer and his creative drive continued well into his 90’s. He published Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective (1997), A Star for Noon (a homage to women in images and poetry, 2000). In 2005, he wrote A Hungary Heart: A Memoir and With Winged Thoughts (portrait images).   

Throughout his lifetime, Parks received countless awards and acknowledgements which reaffirmed his creative contributions as a renaissance man of the 20^th century.   

He received the Emmy Award for the documentary, Diary of a Harlem Family, 1968; NAACP Spingarn Award, 1972; National Medal of the Arts, 1988; the U.S. Library of Congress included The Learning Tree among the first twenty five to be preserved in the National Film Registry, 1989.  

He is the recipient of over twenty honorary doctorates among numerous other honors. In 2002, at the age of 90, he received the Jackie Robinson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award and was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum.

When asked why he undertook so many professions, Parks told Black Enterprise:

"At first I wasn't sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it. I suffered evils, but without allowing them to rob me of the freedom to expand."

Gordon Parks’ "freedom to expand” gave us our freedom. His work reflected our lives, our civil rights movement and evolution of Black culture with an assertive dignity and clarity unseen before him. 

He was one of a kind. An artist, originator and thinker… the likes of which, we may never see again.  

        MarcMorial@MaximsNews.com