Parks, Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan

Impact on the world

Directed his own autobiographical novel 'The Learning Tree' in 1969, cited by the National Film Registry as the first feature film by a Black director ever financed by a major Hollywood studio, then directed 1971's 'Shaft,' which, alongside Melvin Van Peebles's 'Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song' released earlier the same year, co-created the Blaxploitation genre and introduced a confident, competent Black action hero to mainstream American cinema for the first time; the film's commercial success is widely credited with helping rescue financially struggling MGM Studios, and Parks deliberately changed the title character from a white detective in the source novel to a Black one, a decision that reshaped the project's entire cultural impact. Already an acclaimed photojournalist for Life magazine and the first Black staff photographer the magazine ever hired, Parks remains, by his own account and that of later filmmakers including Spike Lee, one of the most influential figures in the development of Black American cinema, having directed films under industry conditions that offered essentially no comparable opportunities to any other Black director of his era.

Life & background

Born in Fort Scott, Kansas in 1912, the youngest of fifteen children, Parks left home as a teenager after his mother's death and supported himself through a series of jobs including piano player in a brothel, railroad porter, and semi-professional basketball player before a chance encounter with documentary photography in a magazine inspired him to purchase his first camera; he taught himself the craft and quickly built a reputation in fashion and documentary photography in Chicago and Washington, D.C. He joined the Farm Security Administration's photography unit during the Roosevelt administration, capturing some of the era's most enduring images of poverty and racial inequality, including his iconic 1942 photograph 'American Gothic,' before becoming, in 1948, the first Black staff photographer ever hired at Life magazine, where he spent more than two decades producing photo essays on subjects ranging from urban poverty to the Civil Rights Movement to fashion and celebrity portraiture. Drawing on this visual sensibility, he turned to filmmaking in 1968 with 'The Learning Tree,' adapted from his own semi-autobiographical novel about growing up Black in Kansas, before 'Shaft' the following year made him one of the first Black directors working consistently within the Hollywood studio system; he went on to direct the sequel 'Shaft's Big Score,' 'The Super Cops,' and 1976's 'Leadbelly,' a biographical film about blues musician Huddie Ledbetter. Beyond film and photography, Parks composed classical music, including a piano concerto encouraged by conductor Dean Dixon and a symphony, wrote poetry and several books including his own multi-volume autobiography, and in 1989 composed and directed 'Martin,' a ballet dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King Jr.; he received the National Medal of Arts and more than 50 honorary degrees over his lifetime. He died in 2006 at 93, with both 'The Learning Tree' and 'Shaft' subsequently preserved in the National Film Registry, and the Sesame Street character Gordon was named in his honor.

Sources

1. Viddy Well (The History of Blaxploitation Cinema); Harvard Magazine (The Blaxploitation Era); Frame.io (6 African-American Filmmakers); HollywoodGlee