Good Poor Kids Gone Wrong:
The Backstory to Gordon Parks's “Harlem Gang Leader”
John Edwin Mason
Department of History, University of Virginia
Using my camera against intolerance was not so easy as I had assumed it would be.
—Gordon Parks
A seemingly incongruous headline—"There Are No Bad Kids"—lies just below
a photograph that has the look and feel of classic film noir. The hard light of Gordon
Parks's flash reveals a group of African-American boys and young men in what is an
otherwise dark Harlem alleyway. One of the youths, standing in the foreground,
wears a fedora and light jacket. The magazine's caption tells readers that he is Bob,
the leader of a juvenile gang. Behind him, other gang members huddle around a
game of cards. Another photograph on the same page shows Bob sitting at the
counter in a soda shop. Still wearing his jacket and fedora, he seems to be engaged
in an intimate conversation with an older black man. The mood is more relaxed, and
the caption explains that the older man is the psychologist Kenneth Clark, who is
listening as the young gangster "unveils [his] woes."
Parks's final photograph in the essay establishes another mood entirely. It is a
family portrait, and Bob, at its center, has been transformed. He sits at the table in a
comfortably furnished dining room, with a book open before him and a typewriter
standing ready at his side. His father, dressed in a smoking jacket, hovers over him
as if to offer support and advice. His mother gazes at her son with maternal affection.
Bob has traded his fedora for a white shirt and tie and seems happy and animated.
The caption tells readers that the guidance of a concerned psychologist has worked
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its magic, allowing a loving son and an eager student to emerge from underneath a
gangster's rough exterior. The magazine affirms that Bob "was not 'bad' but bored."
Despite the apparently unimpeachable authority of Parks's photographs, Bob
never existed. He was an actor playing a role—one of several "hypothetical cases"
—that Parks created to illustrate a photo-essay about Mamie and Kenneth Clark's
Northside Testing and Consultation Center, one of the first two mental-health clinics
in Harlem. The story appeared in Ebony magazine in July 1947, more than a year
before Life magazine published "Harlem Gang Leader," the photo-essay that is the
subject of the current exhibition, Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument. In many
ways, Red Jackson, the teenaged gang leader that Parks put at the center of the
later essay, is Bob come to life.
***
While Ebony's story on the Northside Center has been all but forgotten,
"Harlem Gang Leader" remains one of Parks's best-known photo-essays. In a
memoir, Parks called it one of the most important stepping stones in his career. In
addition to attracting considerable acclaim, it led to his appointment as the first—and
for 20 years only—African-American photographer on Life's staff.
Parks had been looking for an opportunity to create a photo-essay on juvenile
delinquency in Harlem for at least a year before the Ebony story appeared. He
believed that it was both an urgent problem and a manageable one. Influenced by
the social psychology of the day, he identified poverty and racial oppression as the
root causes of the psychological turmoil that, in turn, produced symptoms such as
delinquency in black youth. Mental-health clinics, such as the Northside Center,
could heal the damaged psyches of young people, he believed, thereby reducing
and even eliminating the appeal of gang life.
3
In a 1946 profile of Parks, Ebony described how this reasoning shaped his
plans for the photo-essay. As he saw it, gang members were simply "good, poor kids
gone wrong." He felt that if he could "show enough of the kids' home background on
film, he can...show the way out of juvenile crime to any social agency which wants to
wipe it out." Parks hoped to "get the boys' confidence" and become "a member of a
gang himself" in order to produce photographs that spoke with sufficient power and
authority to sway public opinion. Two years before the fact, Parks might as well have
been describing the hopes, as well as the techniques, that he brought to "Harlem
Gang Leader."
Parks's hunger to do a photo-essay about juvenile delinquency was not
satisfied by the story about the Northside Center. Bob and his gang were fictional
after all, and the part of the photo-essay that was devoted to them was confined to a
single page. For Parks, there was an additional limitation. Ebony reached relatively
few readers, the majority of whom were African American. Parks wanted to speak to
an audience that was larger and whiter. This was not because he was dismissive of
his own race, but precisely because of his commitment to the struggle to improve the
condition of blacks in America.
Early in his career, Parks had chosen the camera and the typewriter as what
he would later call his "weapons" in the fight for social justice. Yet the work he was
doing for Ebony, as well as for Vogue as a freelance fashion photographer and for
Standard Oil as a documentary photographer, did not give him the freedom to bring
the issues that he thought mattered the most to an audience that could do something
about them. Only Life, with its millions of middle-class white readers, could provide
the platform he wanted. As he put it in a 1979 memoir (“To Smile in Autumn”), a
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"vast and restless audience was waiting. The problem was to move within range of
its understanding. Life magazine was the most likely prospect."
By the late 1940s, Life was at the height of its influence. Its blend of serious
reporting and entertaining fluff, combined with its embrace of the drama and
excitement of photography, allowed it to dominate the media landscape like no
magazine had. While it boasted well over five million subscribers, it reached many
millions more—one in every five adult Americans—because of its high "pass-along"
rate. A large proportion of readers were the professional and managerial movers and
shakers whom Parks wanted to address.
The magazine attracted Parks for yet another reason. Despite its well-earned
reputation for political conservatism, Life was comparatively liberal on racial issues. It
took its cue from Henry Luce, its editor-in-chief and the founder of a magazine
empire that included Life, Time, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated. In his biography of
Luce, for instance, Alan Brinkley quotes a 1943 memo to Time's editorial staff in
which he emphasized that the magazine was "unshakably committed to a pro-Civil
Rights policy and pro-square deal policy for Negroes as for every kind of American.”
A year later, Luce declared in a Life editorial that "Negro rights" were "America's No.
1 social problem, its great, uncured, self-inflicted wound." While the magazine was
far from radical on race, it was consistently one or two steps ahead of the majority of
white Americans.
***
Sometime during the summer or early fall of 1948, Parks presented his
portfolio to Wilson Hicks, Life's photo editor. He thought that his prospects of being
offered an assignment were slim, despite the magazine's broad-mindedness on
racial matters, as most mainstream media outlets were reluctant to employ African
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Americans. (Vogue was a surprising exception. It offered Parks freelance work, but
Harper's Bazaar, its competitor, turned him away.) In fact, getting a job at Life was
difficult for anyone. As Parks put it in “To Smile in Autumn,” "a multitude of White
photographers had tried and failed to join the staff of that prestigious publication."
Parks underestimated the strength of his portfolio. As a regular freelancer for
Vogue, he had demonstrated a flair for fashion photography. His work so strongly
impressed Sally Kirkland, Life's fashion editor, that she urged Hicks, who had called
her into his office, to hire Parks on the spot.
Fashion, however, was not Parks's ticket to Harlem. Hicks and John Dille, a
Life reporter who was also present at the meeting, were more interested in Parks's
potential as a photojournalist, and his portfolio contained images that especially
interested them. He had made some of them in Harlem—but not for Ebony
magazine. He had made them while collaborating on a project with Ralph Ellison, the
novelist.
In early 1948, Ellison worked on an essay for the small magazine '48 about
Harlem's Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, which was in many ways similar to the
Clark's Northside Center. The clinic shared the Northside Center's desire to bring
low-cost mental-health treatment to Harlem's residents and its commitment to
treating psychological problems that were rooted in the racial discrimination and
segregation that African Americans endured. The clinic attracted considerable
attention because of the well-known names associated with it, such as
psychoanalyst Fredric Wertham and novelist Richard Wright; because its
professional staff was interracial, a rarity at the time; and because of the novelty of
its location in Harlem.
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Ellison was an enthusiastic supporter of the clinic. As Russell Lord writes in
his essay in this exhibition's catalog, "Ellison saw its importance as 'transcending
even its great value as a center for psychotherapy: it represents an underground
extension of democracy.'" Ellison, himself an avid photographer, thought that
photography—innovative photography—would enhance his text, and he invited
Parks to collaborate on the project. Lord quotes from a letter that Ellison wrote to
Wright: "I've worked out a scheme to do...with photographs, which should make for
something new in photojournalism—if Gordon Parks is able to capture those aspects
of Harlem reality which are so clear to me." Ellison was imagining photography that
avoided literal depictions of people and places and captured instead the elusive
reality of psychological states.
Lord argues that Parks's sense of Harlem and juvenile delinquency was
"profoundly informed by his experience with Ellison on the Lafargue clinic project."
The precise extent to which the project with Ellison shaped Parks's vision is not
clear, as he was already an accomplished photographer. He also knew Harlem well,
having lived there briefly and unhappily in the 1930s and for a short period in the
1940s before moving his family to a middle-class black enclave in suburban White
Plains. He photographed the neighborhood on assignments for Ebony, including
stories about the black elite of Sugar Hill and, of course, Bob and the Northside
Clinic.
A number of the photographs that Parks made while working with Ellison are
housed in the Gordon Parks Foundation’s archive. Some have much in common with
the hallucinatory images of Harlem that Ellison conjured up in his text for the '48
article. He described the neighborhood as "a ruin...its crumbling buildings with
littered area-ways, ill-smelling halls, and vermin-invaded rooms...distorted images
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that appear in dreams, and which, like muggers haunting a lonely hall, quiver in the
waking mind with hidden and threatening significance." But other photographs veer
away from the hallucinatory toward images that are more conventionally
documentary. Some images depict, for instance, crowds of black men and women at
protest rallies with grim white policemen looking on. Photographs like these suggest
that Parks was as interested in Harlem's political realities as he was with the
psychological health of its inhabitants.
'48 went bankrupt before Ellison's essay and Parks's photographs could
appear in print. The text was tied up in litigation for years, before finally emerging in
Shadow and Act, a 1964 collection of Ellison's essays. Parks was the luckier of the
two. He kept copies of the photographs that he made for the project, and it was
those that he showed to Hicks.
Suitably impressed with what he saw, Hicks offered Parks two freelance
assignments. The first was a fashion shoot, and Parks's work evidently pleased his
editor Kirkland. His graceful black and white images of the season's new fur coats
were spread over three pages of Life's 18 October 1948 issue, two weeks before
"Harlem Gang Leader" appeared. Remarkably, the magazine even devoted its cover
to one of the photographs from this assignment.
Parks himself suggested the second story—the photo-essay on juvenile
gangs in Harlem that he had long been planning. In “To Smile in Autumn,” Parks
wrote that Hicks liked the idea immediately but doubted his ability to pull it off. Parks
admitted that he secretly shared the editor's concern that finding a cooperative gang
to work with would be an impossible obstacle to overcome.
As it happened, enticing a gang leader to cooperate on the story proved to be
easier than Parks had anticipated. He recalled that a Harlem detective, Jimmy
8
Morrow, a friend and tennis partner, steered him toward Red Jackson, who had been
cooperating with efforts by the police to ease tensions between rival gangs. When
Parks approached Jackson, he was aloof but also intrigued by the idea that Life
found him important enough to put at the center of a story. He agreed to let Parks
shadow his gang, the Midtowners.
***
Barbara Baker Burrows, a long-time Life staffer, once wrote that one of the
most important benefits that the magazine offered its photographers was "the luxury
of time." Lord agreed. In his catalog essay, he shows that for "about two
weeks...Parks slowly established a level of trust with Jackson, never employing the
camera" and throughout, Jackson remained hospitable and wary. Parks says that
shortly before he began making photographs of the Midtowners, Jackson told him
that the gang liked him, but that they "don't like double-crossers." Parks got the
message. He recognized, as he put it, that he would have to "walk the line between
what they considered betrayal and what I felt was reporting. And the difference was
thin."
The trust that Parks earned allowed him to produce hundreds images of
unprecedented intimacy. They possess, as Lord puts it, "a silence and an emptiness
that all but erase the photographer’s presence behind the camera, appearing more
as objective transcriptions of an authorless device." Parks's invisibility gave his
photographs the illusory aura of unimpeachable truth. No one had seen anything
quite like these photographs of the Midtowners. They were, in Lord's words, "artful,
emotive, poignant, touching, and sometimes shocking."
Despite the strength of the photographs that he was producing, Parks had
another worry, one that he seems not to have shared with Jackson. His experience
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as a freelancer had taught him that once he turned his undeveloped film over to the
technicians in a magazine's darkroom, the fate of his photographs was largely out of
his hands. In the case of "Harlem Gang Leader," Parks provided the raw materials
out of which Life's editors and layout artists created the photo-essay. Lord describes
that process: "...he had little control over the use (or misuse) and presentation of his
pictures, which would have been in the hands of editors…two weeks after Parks shot
his last frame, the story was on the stands. The interval was short, but it was
significant, for the story would be shaped by the selection of pictures and words,
layout, captions, titles, and other text."
The tension between Parks's vision and that of Life's editors is the central
question that the exhibition explores. Parks hoped to depict a young man who was
troubled and redeemable. The second part of the equation—rehabilitation—was as
important to him as the first. Lord's research in the Gordon Parks Archive shows that
indeed many of the several hundred photographs that he made depict Jackson as "a
complex and conflicted teenager" who leads a sometimes violent neighborhood gang
and who, at other times, "shoulders the rote burden of daily chores" at home and
stands as "a symbol of community leadership" in his neighborhood.
The Red Jackson who emerges from the pages of Life has been stripped of
much of this complexity. Lord notes that the darkly dramatic opening spread features
a sub-headline, printed in large type, that sets the story's tone: "Red Jackson's life is
one of fear, frustration and violence." "An overwhelming majority of the pictures
selected," he points out, "underscore violence, fear, frustration, aggression, or
despair. Of the twenty-one images reproduced, only five strike a lighter note." The
very look of the photographs reinforces the mood. Deep shadows lend a sense of
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foreboding; sharp contrasts between the light and dark tones of the photographs
recall the tensions and anxieties of film noir.
Life's text devoted most of its space to descriptions of the fights, early deaths,
and ever-present apprehension that it said defined Jackson's "unhappy life." It did,
however, take pains to place Jackson's delinquency into context. Drawing heavily on
Parks's notes, the text admitted that he had initially joined the gang because he was
"tired of getting beaten up by older boys" and that membership in a gang offered a
measure of protection. The gang's "acts of violence are no worse than those of white
gangs in Brooklyn and other parts of the city, but," Life added, "with more to
frustrated about, and to fear, they have given Harlem one of the highest delinquency
rates in the nation."
The magazine offered a contradictory assessment of Jackson's prospects for
escaping a life of crime. It saw glimmers of promise in a young man who did not
"spend all of his time fighting, by any means." He spent some of it "visiting his
friends, and nearly every day he looks around for a job." Jackson, the piece
suggested, was "beginning to change" because he had "found two men in Harlem
upon whom he can depend for help." The first was Detective Morrow. The second
was the Reverend Shelton Hale Bishop, the rector of the Episcopal church that
housed the Lafargue Clinic in its undercroft and someone who had been working to
end gang wars for several years.
Ultimately, however, Life's view of Jackson's future was bleak. The text closed
with a description of a youth program where he had been named Harlem's "boy
mayor," but the program amounted to little more than a spectacle "cooked up" by a
"publicity-wise Negro businessman." After the event, Jackson was left to walk "the 25
blocks home alone." "When all was said and done," Life concluded, "Red could
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count the people—white or colored—who were seriously and practically interested in
his troubles, on the fingers of one hand."
The final photograph echoed the text's troubled tone. Parks photographed
Jackson from the rear and isolated him on a lonely Harlem street that stretches far
into the distance. Jackson walks away from the camera as tenement buildings,
shrouded by dark shadows, threaten to engulf him.
***
On many levels, "Harlem Gang Leader" was a success. It was, as Lord puts it,
"without question a powerful and emotive photojournalistic representation of postwar
Harlem." It was also a largely compassionate portrait of Jackson and his gang. Many
of Life's readers saw it in just those terms. In “To Smile in Autumn,” Parks
remembered that "[s]ympathetic letters, along with a few vitriolic ones, poured in" to
the magazine's offices" and that Luce sent him "a congratulatory note." When Hicks
offered him a position as a staff photographer soon afterwards, he happily accepted,
making him the first, and for many years the only, African-American photographer at
the magazine.
Parks certainly realized that the published photo-essay was not the nuanced
and ultimately optimistic portrayal of a young delinquent's life that he had hoped it
would be. Because Life chose to "focus on the violent behavior of Red Jackson and
fellow gangmembers," it was not, as Lord argues, "an accurate representation of the
body of photographs that Parks created." Life depicted the Midtowners more as
perpetrators of violence than as victims of an unjust social structure. This limited
"view of gang violence as a localized problem" prevented the magazine from
"drawing attention to the systemic reasons behind the violence." At the same time, it
reinforced the stereotype of black youths as natural predators.
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It is perhaps too much to expect Life to have examined the ways in which
America's social, political, and economic structures created the poverty and
marginalization that, in turn, set the stage for juvenile delinquency. The magazine
was ideologically unprepared to follow that line of analysis. More importantly, that
sort of analysis is not something that photography does well. Photography excels at
showing surfaces, not underlying structures. It can bring symptoms, such as juvenile
delinquency, sharply into focus by showing viewers the lives of individuals caught up
in it, but it is less successful at capturing on film abstractions, such as racism, which
are at the root of the problem.
***
Parks would go on to have a brilliant career at Life. The best of his photoessays, all of which touched on issues related to poverty and social justice, are
among the strongest that the magazine ever published. Beginning in the early 1960s,
he also wrote some or all of the text for these stories. Among Life's distinguished
roster of staff photographers, his only peers as photo-essayists were Margaret
Bourke-White and W. Eugene Smith. The power of his photographs, the eloquence
of his words, and the platform that the magazine provided combined to make him
one of the most important interpreters of black experience in mid-twentieth-century
America.
In its focus on an individual and its commitment to social justice, "Harlem
Gang Leader" anticipated many of the photo-essays that Parks would produce
during his two decades on Life's staff. Among his most notable subjects were a
twelve-year-old boy in a Brazilian favela, a struggling family in Harlem, the messianic
leader of the Nation of Islam, exiled African-American revolutionaries, and, of course,
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a teen-aged gang leader. These are the kinds of photo-essays on which his claim to
greatness rests.
But as Parks never hesitated point out, there was "no special black man's
corner" for him at the magazine. His editors assigned him to "anything and
everything." During his first eighteen months at the magazine, he worked on fifty-two
wildly diverse stories about "crime, fashion, Broadway shows, sports, and politics,"
as well as an artists' colony in Rome and a "little world's fair" in Haiti. Life came to
value Parks as much for his versatility as for his ability to tell compelling stories with
his pictures and, sometimes, with his words. Parks's gift for story-telling would serve
him equally well in the novels and memoirs that he began to publish in the 1960s
and in the film-making career that made him a household name in the 1970s.
***
Shortly after "Harlem Gang Leader" was published, Parks and Jackson lost
touch with each other. There was no bitterness. In fact, there was a joking familiarity
in the relationship between the two men. In his catalog essay, Lord quotes Parks's
description of one of their last encounters. In it, Jackson pretended to have felt
betrayed, but, according to Parks, he was actually pleased with the photo-essay:
"Red's big smile belied his comment after we looked at the magazine together.
'Damn, Mr. Parks, you made a criminal out of me.' 'You know that's not so,
Red.'…He took another glance at [the photograph of] himself scowling at the
window. 'I look like Bogart and Cagney all mixed up together.'"
Parks and Jackson did not see each other again until they met by chance on
a Harlem street corner when both were elderly men. They exchanged a few words,
and Parks gave Jackson his telephone number with instructions to call. By the time
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Jackson reached out to him, Parks was too infirm to accept visitors. He died shortly
afterward in 2006 at age ninety-three. Jackson attended his funeral.
Red Jackson passed away in 2010. He was seventy-nine years old.
***
A Note on Sources:
I am very grateful to Russell Lord, the original curator of this exhibition, for his
comments and suggestions. His essay in Gordon Parks: The Making of an
Argument, the exhibition's catalog, is essential reading for anyone wishing to
appreciate "Harlem Gang Leader" in all its complexity.
Gordon Parks wrote several memoirs, and they remain the best starting points
for an exploration of his life. In this essay I drew most heavily on To Smile in Autumn:
A Memoir, 1979.
Peter Kunhardt, executive director of the Gordon Parks Foundation, and
Amanda Smith and James Jordan, at the foundation's archive, have been
extraordinarily kind and helpful in my research.
Alan Brinkley's The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (2010)
is a fine introduction to the career of Life's founder, and Looking at Life Magazine,
edited by Erika Doss, is an excellent overview of the publication's rise and fall.
Jean-Christophe Cloutier, of the University of Pennsylvania, has generously
shared with me his research into the collaboration between Gordon Parks and Ralph
Ellison.