CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/15/2024

In 'Gordon Parks: Born Black,' a personal report on a decade of Black revolt

Featured spreads are from Gordon Parks: Born Black, the new, expanded edition of Parks’ 1971 book of photographs and writings from the forefront of the civil rights and Black Power movements. “In the last ten years black Americans have turned four hundred years of despair and oppression into an era of rebellion and hope,” Parks wrote in the 1970 Foreword. “It was a turbulent decade filled with demonstrations, riots, bombings and violent death; a period in which we black people combined to mutiny against a common fate. The white symbols and images that for so long disfigured our minds and blackness are being jettisoned by that very blackness. And it was clearly revolt that had to be employed to alter this country’s conduct toward us. Now we are beginning to know who we are, what we mean to America—and what America means to us.”