Fall 2022 - The Figure

S E R I E S
While Parks coded Carmichael’s character through visual
tropes, his first draft of text for the profile also utilized written
analogy. He began:
Stokely Carmichael stood at center stage. Beneath
an angry sky, with the majestic United Nations building
towering behind him; with hundreds of thousands of
peace marchers standing ankle-to-ankle in the wide
plaza cheering him on, he decided to go for broke.
“Vietnam: Hell no! We won’t go!” . . . Then a more familiar
cry, hostile, unrelenting and razor-sharp, knifed through
the chant. “Black Power! Black Power! We want Black
Power!” A master stroke. He had two of his slogans
going at once. He was on fire, spitting his heat into
the crowd.
Parks would consistently refer to Carmichael utilizing various
fiery metaphors in his later texts, recalling him “breathing
fire” in his speeches, as part of a generation of “fiery young
insurgents,” and, despite his later resignation as SNCC’s chairman,
as a catalyst for change, predicting, “across the nation
the fires would burn on.”
Gordon Parks understood that visibility mattered. For “Whip
of Black Power,” Parks depicts Carmichael in a holistic and
humanizing manner. A fiery, passionate, and dutiful figure filled
with love for his community, Carmichael is the picture of new
Black leadership and a corpus for Black reflection. The creation
of these images of fellowship and self-determination—Parks’s
weapons waged in the battle against erasure and caricature—
was the embodiment of Black Power and an act of fiery love.
This text has been excerpted and adapted from the exhibition
catalogue Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black
Power, published by Steidl in association with the Gordon Parks
Foundation and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
41
20 × 24”