Back to Fort Scott

Author: Photo courtesy and © The Gordon Parks Foundation, Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, BostonHusband and Wife, Sunday Morning, Detroit, Michigan.

Eloquent with both words and images, Gordon Parks often used his abundant and largely self-taught gifts as a photographer, writer and filmmaker to chronicle the African American experience during the 1920s through the ’60s, when segregation was entrenched in cities large and small throughout the nation.

Parks (1912-2006) was the first African American photographer to be hired full time by Life Magazine. For more than 20 years, from 1948 to 1972, his photo essays reached the magazine’s 20 million mainly white, middle class readers, countering their stereotypes by rendering the stories of black families and public figures with humanity and an eye for compelling, close-up detail.

In the spring of 1950, Life assigned Parks to do a story on segregated schools. He decided to turn to his own past. The youngest of 15 children, Parks grew up poor and black in the rural town of Fort Scott, Kansas, raised by a strong mother who died when he was a teenager.

In a photo essay he planned to call Back to Fort Scott, Parks would look up his 11 classmates who, as ninth graders, graduated with him in 1927 from the all-black Plaza School.

“My classmates from Plaza had drifted as if with the winds,” Parks writes in his notes on the trip. “I decided to chart their course and find where they had dropped anchor.”

During a road trip that started in Fort Scott and went on to five cities in the Midwest, Parks tracked down all but two of his classmates. He followed a route that many African Americans took during the Great Migration, as they left small towns to find better lives in larger cities. Starting in Fort Scott, Parks then stops in nearby Kansas City and St. Louis, and then moves on to Detroit, Columbus and Chicago, which drew the largest population of African Americans in the country.

Parks visited and photographed his friends in their parlors and porches. Subtly underscoring their ties to family and home, he often adopted the motif of Midwestern painter Grant Wood’s iconic 1930 painting, American Gothic, in which couples stand side by side, gazing at the viewer.

Yet the photo essay was never published, passed over twice by breaking news: first, the start of the Korean War; and then in the following year, President Truman’s dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur.

Making this masterpiece visible for the first time, Karen Haas, Lane Curator of Photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has collaborated with the Gordon Parks Foundation to create an exhibition and catalog that juxtaposes the photographs Parks took during his trip with excerpts from the 1927 Plaza School Yearbook and passages from the seven pages of typed notes that Parks compiled during his road trip.

Haas is author of the catalog, which includes an introduction by Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.

Borrowing the title Parks planned for his chronicle, Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott is on view through September 13 at the MFA. The exhibition’s 42 photographs, all but one black-and-white, include loans from the Foundation as well as five images from the MFA’s own collection.

With extraordinary pictorial beauty and power, Parks bears witness to the political, social and human toll of segregation, as well as the strength and humanity of his subjects. The photographs and texts span 23 years, from pictures and captions in a 1927 yearbook portraying ninth graders to the words and images with which Parks documents his encounters with childhood friends as adults.

Near a yearbook photo of the 12 graduates is an excerpt from the notes Parks kept that draws a poignant contrast between the ninth graders’ exuberance and the distortion of their segregated schooling. Parks writes, “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.”

Starting his journey in Fort Scott, Parks finds the one classmate who has remained in their home town, Luella Lee. Parks notes that her teenaged daughter Shirley Jean Hill is prepared for “better things, college…a career,” but he photographs the girl with her boyfriend outside the movie theater, where blacks must sit in a high balcony known as the “buzzard’s roost.”

Visiting his family, Parks photographs his Uncle James, a blind peddler of handmade brooms whom he describes as “my real mentor.” At his sister’s home, writes Parks, “I melted into a welcome that only home can give,” dining on “hot buttered homemade rolls, baked beans, sweet-meated chicken and butter-soaked corn on the cob.”

Parks photographs Paralee Rivers, who had cared for his ailing mother, on her deathbed. He writes, “She had been at the edge of the river several times before but this time she would have to swim it.”

Also on display are photographs of white neighbors, including Lyle Myrick. As teenagers, he and Parks became close friends after an evenly matched fistfight.

In St. Louis, Parks photographs Earl Collins on his porch with his young daughter, Doris Jean. A World War II veteran, Earl has a good job at Union Electric, earning $1.2 an hour. The yearbook describes him as “big and strong and an athlete too. Handiest man when there’s something to do.”

In Detroit, Parks finds that Pauline Terry, whose yearbook motto is “Conquer or die,” remains a figure of strength, a matriarch with four sons at home and a married daughter nearby. Parks photographs Pauline and her husband en route to Sunday services. “We stay pretty close to church and God,” she tells Parks, and feeds him a meal of roasted hams and chicken.

Three classmates in Chicago demonstrate a spectrum of experiences. Parks shows Margaret Augusta Tyson in her warm, well-appointed apartment. While her young daughter plays the upright piano, Margaret does needlepoint. In his portrait of Fred Wells and his wife Mary, Parks conveys the couple’s dignity as they say grace at the table in their small kitchenette apartment.

Parks finds Mazel Morgan, whom the yearbook describes as “full of fun,” in a transient hotel. He shows her as a desolate figure, staring out the window next to her husband Willie, who is sprawled on a bed. As Parks was leaving, Willie pulled a loaded .45-caliber handgun on him and took all his money. Parks enlisted Margaret Tyson to help Mazel get back to Fort Scott.

This unpublished chronicle seems to have been a turning point for Parks, who began mining his own experience in books and films. Drawing on his early years, he wrote a best-selling novel, The Learning Tree, and in 1969 turned it into a movie — the first Hollywood feature directed by black man. Three years later, detouring from fact to fantasy, he directed his blockbuster crime thriller, Shaft, but then returned to memoirs.

In a late poem, he writes of Fort Scott, “This small town into which I was born, / has, for me, grown into the largest, / and most important city in the universe.”

The exhibition includes one color image: an idyllic close-up Park took in 1968 of a boy gazing at the sky from the grass, entitled Boy with a June Bug, Fort Scott, KS.