18
As the 15th child of black Kansas sharecroppers, Gordon
Parks knew poverty. But he didn’t experience virulent rac-
ism until he arrived in Washington in 1942 for a fellowship
at the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Parks, who
would go on to become the first African-American photog-
rapher at life, was stunned. “White restaurants made me
enter through the back door. White theaters wouldn’t even
let me in the door,” he recalled. Refusing to be cowed,
Parks searched out older African Americans to document
how they dealt with such daily indignities and came across
Ella Watson, who worked in the FSA’s building. She told
him of her life of struggle, of a father murdered by a lynch
mob, of a husband shot to death. He photographed Wat-
son as she went about her day, culminating in his Ameri-
can Gothic, a clear parody of Grant Wood’s iconic 1930 oil
painting. It served as an indictment of the treatment of
African Americans by accentuating the inequality in “the
land of the free” and came to symbolize life in pre-civil-
rights America. “What the camera had to do was expose
the evils of racism,” Parks later observed, “by showing the
people who suffered most under it.”AMERICAN GOTHIC Gordon Parks, 1942