Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power
A landmark reappraisal of Gordon Parks's 1967 Life magazine essay "Whip of Black Power," his nuanced profile of Stokely Carmichael at the moment the young SNCC chairman's call for Black Power made him the most controversial figure in the civil rights movement.
On contract with Life, Parks shadowed Carmichael from fall 1966 through spring 1967 as he gave speeches and built the movement, capturing his intelligence and humor in equal measure and revealing both the man behind the headlines and Parks's own sympathy for Black Power's message of self-determination. This clothbound volume gathers the essay and surrounding photographs with texts by curator Lisa Volpe and scholar Cedric Johnson, plus a full reprint of Carmichael's 1966 manifesto "What We Want." It accompanied the exhibition organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, with The Gordon Parks Foundation (October 2022–January 2023).
Parks (1912–2006), the first Black staff photographer at Life and later a novelist, composer, and director of Shaft, documented American life from segregation-era Alabama to Harlem's streets. The book continues the Steidl/Gordon Parks Foundation series devoted to his major bodies of work, alongside The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957, Segregation Story, and Muhammad Ali.
