Though, it would be fair to say that, despite all of this, he is relatively unknown outside of certain circles. His name doesn\u2019t loom large over history, despite his influence and the things he showed us about a divided America looming heavily on our current world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Parks was born in rural Kansas in a town that straddles the Missouri border called Fort Scott. The youngest of 15 children, his father, Andrew Jackson Parks, was a farmer. He attended a segregated elementary school, and though his high school was segregated, Black students weren\u2019t allowed to play sports or attend extracurricular activities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When he was 11 years old, three white boys threw him into the Marmaton River, believing he couldn\u2019t swim. He had the presence of mind to duck his head underwater so that the boys wouldn\u2019t see him swim to the shore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At 14, his mother, Sarah Ross, died and he spent the last night in his childhood home next to his mother\u2019s coffin. Shortly afterward, he went to live with his sister and her husband in St. Paul, Minnesota, but he fought with his brother-in-law and was turned out. He worked odd jobs for some time until finally, on a trip to Seattle, with 12 dollars in his pocket, he bought a camera, a Voigtl\u00e4nder Brilliant for $7.50.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually, Parks landed a job with the Town and Country Department Store in St. Paul, Minnesota, and worked there for years as an official photographer. He worked for local newspapers and documented life on the south side of Chicago. For this, he won a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1941, eventually being hired by the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a government organization formed by the New Deal that was created to document poor, rural workers living in America in order to bolster support for government aid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was in the FSA that Parks took perhaps his most famous photo. A black and white photo with subject Ella Watson, an African American mother and worker. A broom in one hand, a mop in the other, and behind her just above her right shoulder hung an American flag. In the photo, her face looks off to her right just slightly, forlorn, tired and perhaps with a bit of confusion as to what\u2019s happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After viewing the photo, the head of the FSA Roy Stryker said that it would get them all fired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe said, well, you\u2019re getting the idea but you\u2019re gonna get us all fired,\u201d said Parks about Stryker\u2019s response. \u201cThis is a government agency and that picture is an indictment against America.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The photo, \u201cAmerican Gothic, Washington, D.C.\u201d takes its name from the Grant Wood painting of a farm couple with a pitchfork. Parks\u2019 rendition expressed, for many, the lie inherent in the \u201cAmerican Dream\u201d for the poor and destitute working class of America, especially for African Americans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI felt the need for me, somehow or another, to use humanity to get people to become aware of how people suffered,\u201d said Parks of his time working for the FSA. \u201cThat was what drove me into it, to expose to the public something that I thought was being hidden.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Parks\u2019 autobiography, he would claim that the photo was \u201cunsubtle.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/old-3819383_1920-1024x1024.jpg\")