THE GORDON PARKS FOUNDATION

The Foundation permanently preserves the work of Gordon Parks; makes it available to the public through exhibitions, books, and digital media; and supports artistic and educational activities that advance what Parks described as “the common search for a better life and a better world.”

The Man Beyond the Media Bias

As chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Carmichael was the figure most identified with the call for Black Power, and was routinely depicted as a representative of anger and separatism. But Parks’ text and photo essay for Life Magazine, “Whip of Black Power,” conveyed the nuanced range of Carmichael as a person—not only his anger at America’s deeply rooted racism, but his self-effacing humor, his private moments with family and his own feelings of dismay that the justice he and the movement sought would not be attained in his lifetime – all part of a “truth,” as Parks described, “the kind that comes through looking and listening.”

Third Ward, Texas

Just days after Gordon Parks’ photo-essay “Whip of Black Power” was printed in Life magazine, Stokely Carmichael visited Houston. He delivered speeches at the University of Houston and at Texas Southern University (TSU). “We will define ourselves as we see fit. We will use the term that will gather momentum for our movement,” Carmichael said, addressing public critiques of Black Power. The speeches were part of a SNCC nationwide campus tour. Yet, Carmichael’s appearance in Houston was auspiciously timed. Spring 1967 was a time of heightened social unrest in the city, and local universities were hubs of civil rights activism.

A Deeper Dive

The accompanying catalogue, Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power, is the latest installment in a series that highlights Parks’ body of work throughout his career, published by the Gordon Parks Foundation and Steidl. Essays by Lisa Volpe, MFAH associate curator of photography, and Cedric Johnson, professor of African American studies and political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, shed critical new light on the subject. Carmichael’s September 1966 essay in The New York Review of Books, “What We Want,” is reproduced in the book.

Gordon Parks, Untitled, Bronx, New York, 1967, gelatin silver print, courtesy of and © The Gordon Parks Foundation. Mary Charles Carmichael serving her children Lynette and Stokely at Lynette’s wedding dinner in the Bronx, 1966.

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