A choice of weapons
By: Gordon Parks ; with a new foreword by Wing Young Huie
Contributors: Huie, Wing Young, 1955-
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: St. Paul, MN
Language: eng
Number of pages: 274
ISBN-13: 9780873517690
Description: Gordon Parks--photographer for Life magazine, writer, composer, artist, and filmmaker--was only 16 in 1928 when he moved from Kansas to St. Paul, Minnesota, after his mother's death. There, homeless and hungry, he began his fight to survive, to educate himself, and to "prove my worth." Working as a janitor, railroad porter, musician, or basketball player in such places as St. Paul, Chicago, and New York, Parks struggled against poverty and racism. He taught himself photography with a secondhand camera, worked for black newspapers, and began to document the poverty among African Americans on Chicago's South Side. Then his photographic work brought him to Washington, D.C., as first a photographer with the federal Farm Security Administration and later a war correspondent during World War II. This compelling autobiography, first published in 1966, tells how Parks managed to escape the poverty and bigotry around him, and launch his distinguished career, by choosing the weapons given him by "a mother who placed love, dignity, and hard work over hatred."--Publisher.
Notes: Originally published: New York : Harper & Row, 1966.