Gordon Parks: Born Black

"I came to each story with a strong sense of involvement, finding it difficult to screen out my own memories of a scarred past. But I tried for truth, the kind that comes through looking and listening, through the careful sifting of day-to-day emotions that white America whips up in black people. My own background has enabled me, I hope, to better share the experiences of some other black people. I do not presume to speak for them. I have just offered a glimpse, however fleeting, of their world through black eyes." - Gordon Parks, 1970

Originally published in 1971, Gordon Parks' Born Black was the first book to unite his writing and his photography. It also provided a focused survey of Parks' documentation of a crucial time for the civil rights and Black Power movements. This expanded edition of Born Black illuminates Parks' vision for the book and offers deeper insight into the series within it.

The original publication featured nine articles commissioned by Life magazine from 1963 to 1970, supplemented with later commentary by Parks and presented as his personal account of these historical moments. Born Black includes the original text and images, as well as additional photographs from each series, facsimiles from the 1971 book, manuscripts and correspondence, reproductions of related Life articles, and new scholarly essays.

The nine series selected by Parks for Born Black—a rare glimpse inside San Quentin State Prison; documentation of the Black Muslim movement and the Black Panthers; his commentaries on the deaths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.; intimate portrait studies of Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali, and Eldridge Cleaver; and a narrative of the daily life of the impoverished Fontenelle family in Harlem—have come to define his legendary career as a photographer and activist.

This reimagined, comprehensive edition of Born Black highlights the lasting legacy of these projects and their importance to our understanding of critical years in American history.