Born: November 30, 1912, Fort Scott, KS

Education: Fort Scott, KS high school

Died: March 7, 2006, New York, NY

Growing up poor with fourteen siblings, Parks struggled to succeed and did so remarkably. The camera “was to become my weapon against poverty and racism,” he declared. He took many pictures of everyday life on his train stopovers as a Pullman porter in the mid-1930s. Those photos not only earned him a Rosenwald Foundation Fellowship but also attracted the attention of Eastman Kodak Company, which exhibited them at its store in Chicago.

Parks rose to be an award-winning photographer, writer, and filmmaker. He worked for the Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information in the 1940s. His photo of black housekeeper Ella Watson, posing with her broom and mop beside the US flag in a federal building, is an American classic. He desegregated the photography staffs of Vogue and Life, completing more than 300 assignments between 1948 and 1972 for Life alone. He photographed racial and social conditions from Harlem to Latin America as well as 1960s civil rights protests and race riots. In its effort to address issues that the rioting bared, the motion picture industry named Parks director of The Learning Tree (1969), based on his autobiography (1963) and the first Hollywood film directed by an African American.