In September 1967, as Gordon Parks was preparing a story for Life magazine about an impoverished Harlem family, he received a letter from Genevieve Young, his literary editor, offering advice about writing the text that would accompany his photographs: “The camera can show, with unparalleled vividness, the facts, the present, the tangible,” she told him. “But only words can convey the web of thought and emotion, the influence of the past and the fears and hopes for the future, all the things that go into the way an individual faces his world.” His task, she argued, was “to show, not tell; to dramatize, not lecture,” what life was like for Black Americans, through his images and words. Young only amplified what Parks had keenly understood—the power of combining his photographs with his words on the printed page. Words, like the camera, had by then become another of Parks’s “choice of weapons,” and nowhere is that made clearer than in his 1971 book, Born Black, the first to feature a selection of his groundbreaking writing and photographs for Life.

More than fifty years after its original publication, the significance of Born Black has risen as a record of a pivotal moment not only in the history of the struggle for Black freedom, but also in Parks’s life and career. While his best-known work was as a photographer and filmmaker, Parks was an accomplished writer of memoirs, poetry, and novels, publishing twenty books in his lifetime; writing was in fact his most personal and intimate form of expression throughout his life. For at least a decade, through his photographic archive, the Gordon Parks Foundation’s mission has been to expand and deepen the understanding of Parks as an artist who partook in the “common search for a better life, a better world.” Most of the Foundation’s projects have been in-depth studies of his complex, groundbreaking assignments for Life magazine. Born Black, created near the end of his tenure at Life, collected nine of his writing assignments for the magazine—some published, others not—focusing on the people and events that catalyzed the civil rights and Black Power movements. The 1971 book had the format and scale of a literary publication and notably included only twenty-four out of hundreds of photographs from the corresponding photo essays. The result, which was likely constrained by the literary publisher’s requirements for size and copyright, nonetheless highlights the importance of writing to Parks’s process. The expanded edition of Born Black, which presents the book’s texts alongside additional photographs and material that led to its formation, the depth and complexity of his relationship to his subjects is revealed. It also provides further insight into a book that Young described as capturing “Gordon Parks’s black America.”

By the time Born Black was released, Parks had already established himself as a writer as much at ease with his typewriter as he was with his camera. In 1963 he published The Learning Tree, a semiautobiographical novel that was adapted into a Hollywood feature film released six years later, which Parks wrote, directed, and scored. That seminal book was followed by the autobiography A Choice of Weapons (1966) and then by A Poet and His Camera (1968), a collection of poetry with color photographs. As a staff photographer for Life, Parks was periodically asked to contribute articles, many of which accompanied his photo essays—an unusual role for any photographer. The articles he was commissioned to do for Life, whether ultimately published or not, were for him more than reportage—they were deeply personal observations of people, places, and events that shaped his own view of Black life in America. As he explained in his foreword to Born Black, “My own background has enabled me, I hope, to better share the experiences of some other black people. I do not presume to speak for them. I have just offered a glimpse, however, fleeting, of their world through black eyes.”

Parks’s unique personal approach was the driving force behind Born Black when it was first proposed in 1969. The book materialized largely thanks to the efforts of Genevieve Young, who pitched it to publisher J. B. Lippincott the following year when she was appointed executive editor there. Parks and Young met during her formative years as an editor at Harper & Row, when she was assigned to work on The Learning Tree. Young—who would go on to become a publishing powerhouse—became his longtime editor, confidante, and literary executor. The two married in 1973 and later divorced. Born Black was a meeting of minds and an expression of their ongoing collaboration. In 1966, Parks had signed a two-book contract with Harper & Row for an autobiography and a novel, neither of which he ever completed. When Young transferred to Lippincott, she proposed a collection of his Life pieces as a way of wiping the slate clean and foregrounding a tightly framed selection of work that had helped establish his reputation during the climactic years of the civil rights and Black Power movements. Parks dedicated Born Black to Young, as his editor.