ROSSLYN SAMUELS, SHARON STANLEY, AND AUDREY JOHNSON, Family of Ella Watson

Working at the United States government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the early days of World War II, with support from a Julius Rosenwald Fund Fellowship, Gordon Parks sought to document the experiences of Black workers in Washington, D.C. Encouraged by FSA Historical Section director Roy Stryker, Parks met Ella Watson, a cleaning woman on the night shift at the Department of Agriculture. Parks learned about Watson’s difficult life: her parents died young and her husband and two of her children were gone; she was passed over for a promotion because she was Black; and she supported her adopted daughter Lauretta, along with Loretta’s niece and two nephews, on her government salary of one thousand eighty dollars a year.

One of Parks’s photographs of Watson at work, Washington, D.C. Government Charwoman, shot in July 1942 (which he later named American Gothic, a title borrowed from Grant Wood's 1930 painting), is among his most famous, in part because it points to the vivid complexity of his maturing style. In this photograph Parks connects us intimately with one person’s life and with critical and timely questions about the interconnected meaning of labor, race, and equality during a time when African Americans were asked to fight and die for their country in a segregated military. “I took [Watson] into this woman’s office and there was the American flag, and I stood her up with her mop hanging down, with the American flag hanging down, Grant Wood style, and did this marvelous portrait,” Parks later recalled. “Stryker thought this was just about the end. He said, ‘My God, this can’t be published, but it’s a start.’” Because of its direct and transparent message, Parks’s classic portrait of Ella Watson is now considered one of the most important photographs in the history of twentieth-century photography.

Our special guests are: Sharon Stanley, the daughter of  Watson's adopted daughter Mary Loretta Burgess - Watson's granddaughter; Audrey Johnson, the daughter of Ella Watson's son Eugene - Watson's granddaughter; Rosslyn Samuels, the daughter of Sharon Stanley - Watson's great granddaughter.