Hip-Hop Studies Week @ Duke

Hip-Hop Studies Week @ Duke
November 7-9, 2006

“Teach the Bourgeois and Rock the Boulevard”:
Hip-Hop Studies and the Academy


Tuesday, November 7, 2006
White Lecture Hall, Room 107
7:00 PM
Screening: Beyond Beats and Rhymes: Masculinity and Hip-Hop
A film by Byron Hurt.
Discussion and Q&A with Filmmaker

Wednesday, November 8, 2006
John Hope Franklin Center, Room 240
12:00 noon
(Wednesday at the Center)
A Conversation with Joan Morgan, journalist and author of
When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost:
My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist (1999)

Wednesday, November 8, 2006
Giles Common Room (East Campus)
5:30 PM
Reception for Hip-Hop Studies Week @ Duke

Wednesday, November 8, 2006
White Lecture Hall, Room 107
7:00 PM
Panel Discussion

Drop It Like it's Hot: Sex, Race, Gender and Hip-Hop
Participants: Byron Hurt; Joan Morgan, Tim'm West (Duke '97), & Treva Lindsey

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The purpose of “Teach the Bourgeois and Rock the Boulevard”: Hip-Hop Studies and the Academy is to critically examine the emergence of Hip-Hop Studies as a legitimate field of study. There are more than 150 colleges and universities that currently offer courses with significant content related to hip-hop culture and with the creation of a Hip-Hop Archive, founded at Harvard by anthropologist Marcylina Morgan and currently residing at Stanford University, combined with the Smithsonian's recent announcement that it intends to mount an exhibit on Hip-Hop culture, this conference could not be better timed.

While the development of hip-hop as a musical genre and cultural phenomenon has been researched and written about extensively, our interest is in using “Teach the Bourgeois and Rock the Boulevard” to examine issues critical to everyday life in contemporary American society, with a particular focus on the intersections a sex, race, gender, class and sexual preference in contemporary popular culture

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Sponsors (as of 10/11/06):
John Hope Franklin Center, Institute for Critical US Studies, Franklin
Humanities Institute, Cultural Anthropology, Women's Studies at Duke,
Office of the Provost, Division of Student Affairs, English Department,
Duke University Center for International Studies, African and African
American Studies, Film/Video/Digital Program

"A Social Diasater" : Voices from Durham--Mark Anthony Neal

(White) Male Privilege, Black Respectability, and Black Women’s Bodies
by Mark Anthony Neal


“As a black female, you go to a party, you're expected to dance, you're expected to be sexually provocative. You [are expected to] want to be touched, to be grabbed, to be fondled…As if they're re-enacting a rap video or something. As if we're there to be their video ho, basically. We can't just be regular students here. We can't just go to a party and enjoy ourselves.”—Audrey Christopher and Danielle Terrazas Williams (The Independent Weekly, 3.29.06)

“Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.”
—Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”


When a young black women was allegedly raped, sodomized, robbed and beaten by members of the Duke University Lacrosse team of March 13th of this year, it was initially treated as little more than another case of “(privileged) boys gone wild”. As word began to spread about the specifics of the case, various communities mobilized to lay claim to its significance. These groups include Durham residents with long-standing grievances against the University, activists rightfully protesting yet another incident of alleged sexual violence related to a college campus, members of various black communities who wanted to highlight the racist implications of the alleged assault and of course those who felt that too many people were rushing to judgment about the alleged rapists, well before the true facts of the case were established. At the center of all of these claims and allegiances is the body of a young black woman, who in many ways has been continually assaulted, by the inability of the various narratives surrounding the case to take serious the realities of racialized sexual violence against women of color.

To date no charges have been filed in the so called “Duke lacrosse rape case”. The results of a DNA analysis taken after the alleged attack suggest that the members of the Duke lacrosse team were not involved in the attack, though the local district attorney will continue to pursue the case. As such I am less interested in trafficking through declarations of guilt and innocence in the case, but rather interested in illuminating the various perceptions that have been and will continue to be projected onto the body of the black woman who is the focal point of this case. As has been reported so far, the accuser is a full-time student at North Carolina Central University (NCCU) and a single mother of two. The young woman and a friend were purportedly hired to dance at a bachelor party at 610 N. Buchanan Blvd. in Durham—a residence shared by several of the lacrosse team players.

Though some have downplayed the significance of race in this case—violence against women is violence against women—the intersections and race and gender are palpable. As Greg Garber notes in his fine coverage of the case for ESPN.com, the default request for exotic dancers at mainstream escort agencies is often white women (preferably blonde and big-breasted). Thus in all likelihood, regardless of what happened inside of 610 N. Buchanan Blvd, the young men were hoping to consume something that they felt that a black woman uniquely possessed. If these young men did in fact rape, sodomize, rob, and beat this young women, it wasn’t simply because she was a women, but because she was a black woman.

UCLA and Columbia University Law professor and critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw explains the uniqueness of discrimination against black women in her seminal essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”. According to Crenshaw: “Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction , and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling in any number of directions, and sometimes, from all of them.” Using the traffic intersection as a metaphor, Crenshaw argues that black women often “experience double discrimination—the combined efforts of practices which discriminate on the basis of race and on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as black women—not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as black women.”

Of course there are historic discourses that have constructed black women as hypersexual insatiable, and exotic—such discourses have often been employed as the rationale for racialized sexual and rhetorical violence against black women. Contemporary examples of such discourses can be found in the flippant and hateful on-air comments by national radio personalities Rush Limbaugh and Neil Boortz, who described the alleged victim in the Duke lacrosse case and U.S. Representative Cynthia McKinney, respectively, as a “ho” and a “ghetto slut”. Though it is often the music videos of hip-hop artists that are targeted for the degradation of black women’s bodies, these videos—like the syndicated shows of Boortz and Limbaugh, television networks like BET and MTV, and recording labels—are simply the vehicles for the corporately controlled circulation of black women’s bodies as such . The message is clear: black women and their bodies have little value, little protection and are accessible to anyone who feels entitled to them. Thus it should not be surprising that a generation of young white men, for whom the consumption of hip-hop has been second nature, would find a black exotic dancer desirable or in the worse case scenario, sexually available to them, even if she resist their advances. But the Duke lacrosse rape case is not simply about centuries old dramas across the color line—It also about the tensions within black communities about which black bodies deserve protection and defense

As the “identity” of the young black woman in the case began to be constructed in the media, it was revealed that she was an “exotic dancer” and un-wed mother of two. These facts should be irrelevant in a sexual assault case, but as is well known, defense attorneys often seek to demonize rape victims—in the courts and in the media—so that the integrity of the victim is called into question. The goal is to have the public and juries to believe that rape victims bear the burden of responsibility in their assaults. As scholar Wahneema Lubiano recently opined, this is part of the tenuous status of being a women in American society; If you are not “at home” under the “supervision” of a father or a husband, it is open season on your body. Already there have been attempts to portray the young woman who was raped, sodomized, robbed and beaten as immoral on the basis that she was a “stripper” and an unfit mother, who left her two children home while she performed.

But such demonization takes on another dynamic within the world of “black respectability.” It was clear from the outset, that for some black communities in Durham, NC, the young women was not a “respectable” victim. The concept of “black respectability” can be traced back to the struggles of African-Americans in the early days following “emancipation”, where so many of the former enslaved sought to find common ground—a shared humanity—with the white citizenry. The strategy behind “black respectability”—exemplified in the late 19th and early 20th century by the Black Women’s Club Movement and the New Negro Movement and much later by the NAACP Image Awards—was to put the “best face” of the race forward. Accordingly, it also meant that less savory black bodies and antics had to be reduced to so-called “dirty laundry”—never to see the light of day. It was a logical strategy, given the pervasiveness of white supremacy in the century after emancipation and the desire of many black leaders to fight racism, disenfranchisement and racist violence on moral grounds. But it also created the context where those black bodies and practices that were not thought to be respectable enough were jettisoned to the margins of black life and culture.

Ultimately the desire was to find the most “respectable” victims to help animate black communities to struggle against racism, segregationist practices and disenfranchisement. The late Rosa Parks embodied such a “victim”. As noted scholar Aldon Morris notes in his book The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, Parks galvanized blacks in Montgomery, AL and nationally, in part, because she was a “quiet, dignified woman of high morals”. (52) The same could not be said for fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin, who more than 8 months _before_ Rosa Parks’s historic act, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. Unlike Ms. Parks, Ms. Colvin loudly protested the request that she move from her seat and was eventually charged with assault and battery on the bus driver who made the request and the police officers who were called in to intervene. When it was eventually revealed that Ms. Colvin was an un-wed, pregnant teen, black activists in Montgomery backed off of her case, waiting for a more respectable candidate—Ms. Parks—to emerge. Though the Duke Lacrosse case occurs in a different historical context than the Montgomery bus boycott, the silence and ambiguity emitting from some in black communities in Durham and elsewhere resembles the efforts of Montgomery’s black leaders to distance themselves from Colvin.

Even more profound are those who would distance themselves from the alleged victim in the Duke lacrosse case, because she was involved in “immoral” behavior. Such a point was made by Herald-Sun columnist John McCann—in many ways the “voice” of Black Durham—who suggested that the case was about the “consequences of violating moral laws.” (3.29.06) He later added in a subsequent column that the young woman was at 512 Buchanan Blvd. to “arouse and titillate young men who allegedly stumbled the same way she did—inappropriately using the body and mind.” (4.04.06) In McCann’s world a “thin line separates the criminal”—rape—and the “immoral”—exotic dancing. McCann’s comments are reflective of a deep social conservatism that offers little protection those who are thought to be immoral. Thus had the alleged victim in this case had been a gay black man or a black lesbian—such as the late Sakia Gunn (and far too many like her)—who was randomly assaulted, their assaults would likely be met with the same level of silence and moral scrutiny (as compared to your run-of-the-mill gang-banger, who gets shot by a law enforcement officer).

The real immorality here is the way that “silence” makes so many black folk complicit in sexual attacks against black women and girls. For every media spectacle, which highlights sexual violence across the color line, there are numerous black women who are assaulted in their own communities and even homes by black men. This is the point that Aishah Shahidah Simmons’s poignant documentary NO! makes throughout. Black male sexual violence against black women and girls is more often than not, met with blatant silence and denial or in the case of black celebrities, what University of Florida law professor Katheryn Russell-Brown calls “black protectionism”. In her book Protecting Our Own: Race, Crime, and African-Americans (Rowman & Littlefield) defines black protectionism as “what happens when the African-American community rallies around its fallen heroes—those prominent blacks who have been accused of wrongdoing.” Black protectionism figures prominently in issues of rape and sexual abuse in the black community given the number of highly visible black men, to name a few, who have been accused (Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas), convicted (heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson and former congressman Mel Reynolds) and recorded (R. Kelly) of/in acts of sexual abuse and harassment against black women and girls. In each case, to varying degrees, these men benefited from black protectionism. As Russell-Brown notes, “black protectionism splits the Black community by gender. It treats prominent black men as a unique class.”

The Duke lacrosse rape case has generated so much attention and media coverage because it traffics in the time tested spectacles of race relations and white privilege gone awry. Regardless of whether or not anyone is indicted and convicted in the case, the reality is that women will continue to be raped and those sexual assaults will continue to be met with silence and a degree of dismissiveness that holds the victims accountable for attacks on their bodies. If anything should come of the human tragedy that is unfolding in Durham, NC, it should be to challenge us as a nation to take very seriously the incidences of sexual assault—in all of its forms—and to construct responses to those crimes that are reflective of a society concerned with all assaults on our humanity.

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Mark Anthony Neal is Associate Professor of African-American Studies at Duke University and the author of four books, including the recent New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity.

"A Social Diasater" : Voices from Durham--Wahneema Lubiano

Perfect Offenders, Perfect Victim:
The Limitations of Spectacularity in the Aftermath of the Lacrosse Team Incident
by Wahneema Lubiano

Legal scholar and critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw has asserted that the default doctrine of colorblindness in law forces black Americans “to articulate themselves as perfect victims as against a perfect discriminator” [citation: The House That Race Built, (ed.) W. Lubiano]. Crenshaw’s language about the working of the law helps me think about some things that I’m hearing in this moment. Throughout various discussions of the criminal and social issues of this incident, I hear desire on the part of various constituencies for the comfort either of being able to construct a perfect offender and a perfect victim, and, therefore, some kind of resolution, or the converse position–the comfort of saying that the impossibility of constructing a perfect offender and a perfect victim means that nothing happened and that nothing needs to be resolved.

There is a spectacularity to what has been discussed and represented, and that spectacularity, I think, is driven in no small part by some desire for our understanding to be complete, coherent, and visible. This moment’s intensity is driven equally by the relative privateness of our encounters. We’re part of a university and a city, but absent the space that was opened up by the protests, vigils, and scattered limited fora such as this one, we don’t have a public sphere where discussion easily flows. And in the midst of the difficulty of bridging the distances between us and the structures of power wherein decisions are made, we have to yell in order to be heard.

At the same time we read and watch the media through which positions are articulated, and we consume again and again the spectacle that is news and the news as spectacle. Whatever our desires and fears are in this moment, depending upon our ability to be heard, the threads of our fears and desires are woven through the positions we articulate. And the positions that are articulated are filtered and modified by hierarchies of power and influence and by conventional wisdom which is itself influenced by powerful actors. The heat, then, is necessarily turned up.

In other words, I’m suggesting that some of the discussion, the rhetoric, being circulated in the aftermath of the incident and coming either from those defending the alleged offenders or those defending the alleged victim, is rhetoric driven, haunted, by a fight over whether or not we have offenders who can be seen as “perfect” in their villainy and a victim whose victimage can be seen as necessarily complete and thus “perfect.”

Within the terms of the responses to the incident, I understand the impulse of those outraged and who see the alleged offenders as the exemplars of the upper end of the class hierarchy, the politically dominant race and ethnicity, the dominant gender, the dominant sexuality, and the dominant social group on campus. Further, this group has been responsible for extended social violence against the neighborhood in which they reside. In short, by a combination of their behaviors and what they represent in terms of social facts, and by virtue of their relation to the alleged victim, for those who are defenders of the victim, the members of the team are almost perfect offenders in the sense that Crenshaw writes about. As more information circulates and the stakes are raised by virtue of considerations of Duke’s and the nation’s long-standing class, race, and gender disparities, they are increasingly “perfected” as offenders. As part of this dynamic, the young woman, black and non-wealthy, made even more vulnerable by virtue of being employed by the perfect offenders and outnumbered, approaches the state of perfect victim. However, even within the media circulation of narratives, neither the offenders’ nor the victim’s “perfection” is absolutely complete; our own imaginations and our own language has to complete it.

For those who are critical of the victim, her specific vulnerabilities as someone who works at a job socially disapproved of by much of the public, whose presence in the house constitutes for them a mitigation of her victimage–even a rationale for what might have happened to her, and whose complexities as parent and student are marginalized in discussions that support the offenders, her victimage is far from perfect. Being a woman already means that her behavior is subject to heightened social scrutiny and disciplining and makes her a target both of free-floating sexism that regulates the social behavior of women and of Puritanism about the body and its display. For those critical of the alleged victim, her “perfectness” as victim is severely decreased by her position as an outlier in terms of norms of acceptable female gender behavior. Against this assault by her critics, her race, her gender, her class standing, her status as a mother, and her position as a student have to be rhetorically heightened by her defenders in order for them to secure a tenuous hold on her perfectness as victim.

Within the specifics of this moment, for those who are critical of the team, in order for their “perfectness” as offenders to intensify, any ethnic differences among the offenders have to disappear into a general “whiteness”; any differences among the familial wealth has to disappear into a general understanding of their privilege; and any differences among the behaviors of individual players has to disappear into a general understanding of their record of bad behavior. Within the specifics of this moment, any complexity of the victim has to disappear into a general understanding of what she represents historically–a category of those socially, economically, and politically disadvantaged who are subject to the domination of the offender category. The perfectness of the offenders has to be solidified so that a critique of their social and institutional production can be underscored. Against this solidification of their perfectness as offenders, their defenders have to reinforce and heighten the circulation of rhetoric around a narrative, among other things, of their wonderful athletic ability, understandings of them as fine, upstanding young men or boys who are good students, the products of good homes, and the possessors of good characters attested to by their grades, their performances, and the fine characters and records of those who support them. Their perfectness as offenders has to be lessened, mitigated, or disrupted to the point that any bad behavior is forgiveable by virtue of the mitigations – mitigations such as “they aren’t any different from other young men” who drink and party in boisterous manner and, occasionally, slip over the line of acceptable behavior; therefore, what is happening to them is a horrible injustice. Their offense has to decrease in size and severity.

In this moment, my concern is with the attractiveness either of the dynamic of the construction or the utter dissolution of perfect victimage and perfect offenders and, by extension, the demand that any offense itself be perfect or perfectible. Whatever is routine about this incident is marginalized while a desire for the incident to live up to its most horrific possibilities fights it out in public discussion with its rhetorical other – the desire to mitigate the routine ugliness by insisting that the most horrific possibilities are impossible under the particular circumstances of the case. This fight of desires then extends to the question of evidence – a demand for perfect evidence on the part of the defenders of the team (a demand most spectacularly articulated by, but not limited, of course, to their lawyers). The idea that evidence, like all other aspects of the incident, is part of a circulation of narratives seems to be lost as the newspapers and the television move from one flash point to another.

Now, why am I talking about what is happening in discussions about this incident in this way? Why am I raising these questions? I want to move from the specific harms associated with the incident alleged at the house on N. Buchanan Blvd. in order to look at the more difficult to “see,” the less spectacularly visible harms of more generally structured and distributed sexism and racism. I want to do this for what I consider two imporant reasons.

1. I want to help clarify thinking and discussion around what has happened in the aftermath of March 13th. If a crime occurred, I want to insist that the victim need not be spectacularly represented or constructed as a perfect victim; the offenders need not be spectacularly represented or constructed as perfect offenders; the crime need not have the contours of the worst possible set of actions that can be imagined for great harm to have been done to this young woman. Gendered violence is much more often banal and routine as much as it is horrific. I want us all to remember that.

2. As a precondition of thinking through the complexities of necessary institutional change in this moment, I offer my critique of perfect offender, perfect victim, perfect crime, and perfect evidence construction and dissolution as an analogy for thinking about such change. I offer this to all of us but especially to individuals, newspaper editors, and columnists weighing in on this matter in print on this campus. I do think that the Duke administration is getting the point.

In other words, (1) Duke need not be proved to be the worst or the only institutional sinner ever to have inhabited the earth, (2) not every single person of color and/or woman on this campus needs to have been harmed moment-by-moment by either the most horrific presence of racism and/or sexism or their most routine manifestations, and (3) Durham does not need to have to prove that it never benefitted from Duke’s presence, in order for change in the institution to be undertakened. And the proving of all acts of individual racism, sexism, and gendered violence is not necessary before structural racism and sexism are addressed.

Different versions of this desire for perfection that I’m talking about become visible in a kind of dominant or mainstream discourse and call for a perfect proof of harm: within that discourse, all people of color must be called some version of nigger, raghead, or wetback for racism to register its presence; all women must show themselves to be of sterling character and careful of their dress, behavior, and location when sexism is demonstrated in order for its workings to be acknowledged; all those who are less well-off must certify their lack of income and its relation to their diminished social and economic opportunities in order for classism to be raised as a concern.

What attention to spectacularity brings with it is a hideous cost: the absolute worst that can be imagined must be shown to be present for any harm to be perceived as possible. Such thinking, if extended to a history of the institution’s past or a history of its present, means that harms can’t be addressed unless the worst possible individual subjects are caught in the act of behaving in the worst possible fashion to the most severely injured and worthy victims. A movement away from the demand for spectacularity of sexism, racism, and gender violence toward understanding and consideration of the everydayness of those things could work toward erasing or at least easing the almost knee-jerk dismissal of charges of racism, sexism, and a critique of class entitlements, a dismissal continually on display in newspaper editorials and columns, and by individual speakers and groups that insist on spectacularly visible expressions of such. We don’t have to wait for fully attested to conspiracies among highly placed officials, or cross burnings on the quad or in dorm halls, or assaults attested to by perfectly placed witnesses and evidence in order to undertake change.

Regardless of the “truth” established in whatever period of time about the incident at the house on N. Buchanan Blvd., the engine of outcry in this moment has been fueled by the difficult and mundane reality that pre-existed this incident and that continues to occur in everday and non-spectacular life in this place. Whatever happens with the court case, what people are asking is that something changes.

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Wahneema Lubiano is Associate Professor of Literature and African and African American Studies(Ph.D., Stanford, 1987). Before coming to Duke she taught at Princeton, the University of Texas at Austin, and Williams College. Her essays and articles have been published in Social Text, Cultural Critique, boundary 2, American Literary History, Callaloo, New Engladn Quarterly, among other publications. She is author of the forthcoming books Messing With the Machine: Politics, Form and African-American Fiction and Like Being Mugged by a Metaphor: "Deep Cover" and Other "Black" Fictions, and editor of The House That Race Built: Black Americans, U.S. Terrain (1996). Her current research interests include African-American literature, African-American popular culture and film, womens' studies, black intellectual history, and nationalism.

Forum: Thinking About This Social Disaster

African and African American Studies at Duke University

Presents

Thinking About This Social Disaster


Wednesday, April 12, 2006
7:00p.m-8:30p.m.

Franklin Center, Room 240

Wahneeema Lubiano (AAAS and Literature)
Thavolia Glymph (AAAS and History)
Serena Sebring (Sociology)
TBA

The presenters will talk about what has happened, what is happening, and what is coming together in the framing of the incident and its afterlife.

There will be plenty of time for audience members to be part of the discussion.

"RACE, FAITH, & SEXUALITY: OR A SNAPSHOT GENEALOGY OF THE GRATEFUL NEGRO": A Lecture by Dwight McBride

The Program in African and African American Studies Presents

"RACE, FAITH, & SEXUALITY: OR A SNAPSHOT GENEALOGY OF THE GRATEFUL NEGRO"


A Lecture by Dwight McBride
Leon Forrest Professor and Chair of African American Studies &
Professor of English and Communication Studies
Northwestern University

Author of Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality in America (New York University Press, 2005)

Wednesday March 29, 2006
John Hope Franklin Center
Room 240
4:00 PM

**Booksigning to Follow**


*AND*


“HEAD NEGROES IN CHARGE?: BLACK MASCULINITY IN THE ACADEMY”
A Panel Discussion Featuring

Dwight McBride, Leon Forrest Professor and Chair of African American Studies &
Professor of English and Communication Studies, Northwestern University

Houston Baker, Jr., Susan Fox Beischer & George D. Beischer Arts & Sciences Professor of English and Professor of African and African American Studies, Duke University

Maurice O. Wallace, Associate Professor,
English & African & African American Studies, Duke University

and

Mark Anthony Neal, Associate Professor,
African & African-American Studies, Duke University

Moderated by Alisha Gaines, Doctoral Candidate English, Duke University

Wednesday March 29, 2006
John Hope Franklin Center
Room 240
7:00 PM

Sponsored by African and African-American Studies, The Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Life, The Literature Program, the Program in Women’s Studies and the Institute for Critical U.S. Studies

Naming Moments Properly: Gordon Parks and Americas History by Lee D. Baker

Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was one of the most provocative and celebrated photojournalists in the United States. His gripping images of such celebrities as Duke Ellington, Gloria Vanderbilt, Muhammad Ali, Ingrid Bergman, and Malcom X helped to make these famous people into enduring elements of American iconography. An icon in his own right, he is perhaps best known as the pioneering director of the 1970s blockbuster Shaft, and his overriding legacy is probably Essence magazine, which he helped launch during the turbulent Black Power movement. The subjects of some of his most moving and poignant images, however, were everyday, hard-working people without history who would have been erased from the historical record had he not artfully and thoughtfully crafted their images on gelatin silver prints. He first shot these subjects for the Farm Security Administration during the 1940s, and Parks often wrote crafty and pointed editorial commentary that he appended to these photographs as rather lengthy captions or titles for his work. In Parks own words, he was trying to document moments without proper names (Parks 1975:128).

Gordon Parks was born in Kansas in 1912, the youngest of fifteen children. Parks terminally ill mother arranged for him to stay with his oldest sister in Minneapolis when he was 15 years old (Moskowitz 2003:102). Talented on many fronts but desperately poor, Parks worked hard to support himself by doing everything from playing the piano to playing basketball. At the age of 25 he began to seriously consider photography as a career and talked his way into photographing models for Frank Murphys, a fashionable womens boutique in St. Paul. He was discovered by none other than Marva Louiswife of the famous boxer Joe Louiswho convinced him to move to Chicago to hone his craft and make more money.

It was in Chicago where he became part of the legendary South Side Community Arts Center, which birthed the so-called Chicago Renaissance during the 1940s. Rivaling in historic import Harlem in the 1920s, it was an important period when luminary artists and scholars such as Katherine Dunham, St. Clair Drake, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Catlett, Richard Wright, and Nat King Cole flourished amid one anothers creative genius. Parks artistic expression was quickly recognized, and the Julius Rosenwald Foundation awarded him one of their prestigious fellowships. As a Rosenwald Fellow, Parks joined the ranks of some of the twentieth centurys most influential artists and intellectuals: Marian Anderson, Augusta Savage, Katherine Dunham, James Baldwin, John Hope Franklin, Jacob Lawrence, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Bunche. By 1942, he was working closely with Roy Stryker, who headed the historical section of the Farm Security Administration. He joined Strykers impressive team of photographers who captured thousands of stunning images of everyday life during the Depression and the early years of World War II (Norton Museum of Art 1999).

The above image was shot during one of his first assignments for the FSA, and it has endured as one of his signature images. Purposefully posed as an ironic counterpart to Grant Woods famous American Gothic, it is part of a touching photo essay that documented the textured and taxing life of Ella Watson, a government charwoman (housekeeper). According to Gordon Parks,

In one of the governments most sacred strongholds, I set up my camera for my first professional photograph. On the wall was a huge American flag hanging from the ceiling to the floor. I asked her to stand before it, placed the mop in one hand, a broom in the other, then instructed her to look into the lens. After placing her photograph on Strykers desk two days later, I nervously awaited the verdict. He looked at it and shook his head. Well, youre catching on, but that picture could get us all fired. Washington now had a black charwoman, standing erectly with mop and broom before the American flag. Her title: American Gothic. (Parks 1997:32)

Available online through the American Memory project of the Library of Congress, his photos of Ella Watson serve to document the socially rich and economically poor life of a working-class Black woman in the nations capital. He photographed Ms. Watson at church and with her grandchildren and adopted daughter. He included pictures of her neighbors and friends, and numerous stills of her small but immaculate apartment. He punctuated his images with pithy captions that emphasized the long hours she worked and the insidious exploitation she faced. For example, he chose to include specific details such as charwoman cleaning after regular working hours and documented what time she left for work and what time she returned home. In one photo, with a war bonds poster as the backdrop, he included this pointed caption: Washington, D.C. Government charwoman who provides for a family of six on her salary of one thousand and eighty dollars per year. She puts ten percent of her salary in war bonds. In the end, Parks documented the dignity, devotion, and indeed patriotism of Ms. Ella Watson, who contributed to the governments efforts to fight for democracy abroad while it denied her of her civil rights at home.

After the historical section of the Farm Security Administration folded into the Office of War Information, Parks was asked to follow Stryker and document the 332nd Fighter Group, better known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Although he documented their initial training, the government refused to grant him clearance to follow them to Europe. He summarily quit working for the government. Parks career took off after that, and he freelanced for Vogue magazine and became one of the staff photographers for Life magazine, where he did spreads on gangs in Harlem, Black Muslims, Muhammad Ali, the Black Panther Party, and various celebrities. He wrote books, poetry, and a ballet; he scored music, wrote and directed films, and provided editorial leadership for Essence. Amazingly, the nonagenarian continues to produce evocative prose and moving images up until the very end of his life.

With all of his successes, however, he never lost the desire to document moments without proper names and everyday people in their struggle to scratch out some dignity and respect for their lives, circumscribed by desperate poverty and virulent racism. For example, in 1956 he documented the impact segregation had on three generations for Willy Causey and Family, Shady Grove, Alabama; in 1961 he photographed Flavio, which was the moving story of a young boy and his family in the slums of Rio de Janeiro; and in 1967 he produced The Fontelle Family, a personal essay documenting the social drama and struggles of a family of ten in their fourth-floor walk-up during a cold winter in Harlem (Norton Museum 1999; Parks 1971:113-131; 1978). Although Gordon Parks logged many achievements, one of his most profound was documenting Ms. Watsons life, dignity, and lifes labor, which made her an indelible part of American history. By naming moments properly, Parks captured moments when regular folks made their own history, rendering otherwise invisible people visible and vivid historical agents. Gordon Parks passed away on March 7, 2007 at the age of 93. He will be missed.

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Lee D. Baker is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954,(University of California Press, 1998) and editor of Life In America: Identity and Everyday Experience (Blackwell, 2003)

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REFERENCES
Moskowitz, Milton
2003 Gordon Parks: A Man for All Seasons. Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 40 (Summer):102.

Norton Museum of Art
1999 Half Past Autumn. Electronic document,
http://www.norton.org/exhibit/archive/autumn/autumn.htm, accessed December 8, 2004.

Parks, Gordon
1971 Born Black. New York: Lippincott.
1975 Moments without Proper Names. New York: Viking Press.
1978 Flavio. New York: W.W. Norton.
1997 Half Past Autumn: A Retrospective. Boston: Bullfinch Press.

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