Fall 2022 - The Figure

The works shown here are among those featured in Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power,
on view October 16, 2022, through January 16, 2023, in the Millennium Gallery of the Audrey Jones Beck Building.
and fear. With no ready images of this foreign ideology, media
outlets quickly latched onto photos of Carmichael to represent
Black Power, casting him as a figure of racial violence and
distorting his character and SNCC’s message. Yet, looking
back on this period, Carmichael’s autobiography lists one
published work that was a fair and “sensitive portrait”—
the photographer Gordon Parks’s “Whip of Black Power,” a text
and photo-essay published in Life magazine on May 19, 1967.
Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was one of the 20th century’s
preeminent photographers. He created groundbreaking work
for the Farm Security Administration and magazines such as
Vogue and Life, where he was the first Black staff photographer.
Beyond his work in photography, Parks was a respected film
director, composer, memoirist, novelist, and poet who left
behind an exceptional body of work. In this photo-essay, Parks
details his firsthand experience traveling with Carmichael off
and on from fall 1966 to spring 1967, capturing the activist in
meetings, at lectures, and giving speeches, as well as at more
personal life events, such as his sister’s wedding. The artist’s
smart and eye-catching images relay his perspective by drawing
on visual tropes and harnessing connotation, presenting
Carmichael as a changeable and complex figure, his character
drawn as one of nuance and multidimensionality. Taken as a
whole, “Whip of Black Power” represents Parks’s visual translation
of Black Power and its root of self-love.
The tide of mass-media imagery was irrevocably turning
by the time Carmichael was elected chairman of the SNCC in
May 1966. Images of passive protests were replaced by Black
participants engaged in an active resistance against oppression.
This change shattered the familiar dynamic. “With the
change of lead visuals came a change of national sentiment.
And with the pronouncement of black power, general sympathy
gave way to a barrage of baffled questions belying white
fear,” author Leigh Raiford summarized. Indeed, the reports
and images that emerged following Carmichael’s speech at
the March Against Fear painted a distinctly ominous message.
In one such photo taken by Bob Fitch, Carmichael appears
as a haunting figure, unnaturally lit against the dark night and
gesturing aggressively at the crowd (see opposite page).
The image caption is equally telling, emphasizing anger and
danger: “At a night rally in Broad Street Park, a furious Stokely
Carmichael delivers his famous ‘Black Power’ speech.”
As a denigrated sign of Black radicalism, Carmichael’s
portrait became a one-dimensional, myopic symbol of racialized
fear. Parks’s writing and photographs, however, stand in
direct opposition to that prejudiced point of view. Drawing on
photographic compositions or broad visual motifs familiar
to Life’s readers, Parks forced a recognition of Carmichael’s
full humanity within the pages of the magazine. In doing so, he
created a new, positive image of Carmichael’s character and
Black Power.
Parks’s first image commands the page (see above). It
shows Carmichael speaking into a microphone, his right hand
slashing the air, his left curled into a fist. His conservative suit
is fitted, though he has loosened his tie and unbuttoned the
top button of his white dress shirt. He appears both serious
and charismatic, articulate and agile. The crowd Carmichael
addresses in Watts, California, is barely visible; instead, the
cropped image focuses the eye on this mesmerizing and
monumental man. Parks’s text emphasizes the energy of the
moment, describing the amped-up crowd, bodyguards, and
Carmichael, the magnetic force at the center of it all. “This
crowd was made for Stokely Carmichael,” Parks wrote. The
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