On Gordon, by Those Who Knew Him

Lonnie Ali
Businesswoman, Philanthropist, and Advocate. Muhammad Ali's Widow

Gordon Parks and Muhammad Ali were two men thirty years apart who grew up in very humble households in a segregated America. Little was expected of them, but they expected much from themselves and from the country they loved. They defied those low expectations from others and charted their own course, becoming transformational cultural figures, global icons, and the greatest in their respective fields.

Both used their platforms and their fame for a higher purpose. Their goal was never to lift only themselves. It was also to lift others. Both challenged America’s comfort zones and forced the difficult conversations that were needed. Never bending, never allowing Black stereotypes to define or defeat them. They crossed racial and cultural boundaries and wove themselves into the very fabric of American life.

Gordon, through his photography, his journalism, and his films, forced a global audience to confront the harsh realities of racial inequity and social injustice. He did not ask permission to tell the truth.

Muhammad did the same. Through his artistry in the ring, his poetry, and his fearless command of the media, he spoke simple but powerful truths at a time when the world told athletes to be seen not heard. I knew Muhammad, and I can tell you silence was never an option he considered.

They were both Black and beautiful. There’s a photo of Muhammad and Gordon, taken by Howard Bingham, walking down the street in New York. Such beautiful Black men. Black men who were not afraid to say that they were pretty, were not afraid. In fact, Muhammad said it a lot.

They were both Black and beautiful. They accomplished so much during their lifetimes, transcended barriers, expanded what was possible, and moved this country closer to the promise it has always made but struggled to keep. And though they are no longer with us, they remain profoundly relevant, inspiring us and generations of change makers still to come. They passed the torch, and they passed it fully lit.

Kathleen Cleaver
Activist, photographed by Gordon Parks in 1970

The circumstances weren’t exactly social. Gordon was doing a story on the Black Panther Party around the time when the Chicago police murdered our chairman in Chicago in a predawn raid and injured several other Panthers. It was a very difficult time, but we were determined as revolutionaries, as Black revolutionaries, as American revolutionaries, to change this country. And we knew that some people would be killed. We knew that some people would have to go into exile, and we were not deterred by that. Eldridge was very inspiring and brilliant and helped attract a lot of people to the Black Panther Party. He also helped attract a lot of attacks against the Black Panther Party.

This photograph was taken in an isolated place. The neighborhood in Algiers was called El Biar. Gordon came to our apartment right on the edge of the Mediterranean, and we’re sitting in a leather chair, and he took this photograph, which is historic and amazing. If you saw where we lived, it was not that historic and amazing. That’s the joy of photography—you isolate what’s important.

Many years after the Black Panther Party, there was a film, Half Past Autumn, made about Gordon Parks. And the man I was living with, St. Clair Bourne, was the producer in charge of that project. Just to get to know Gordon and to see him, looking in retrospect at his gorgeous work—he was such an elegant person. He was charming, he was a brilliant photographer, but as a person, he was something quite exquisite and quite different. He was of my father’s generation. And so I really appreciated the opportunity to get to know him when I first met him in Algiers.

Anderson Cooper
Broadcast Journalist, Author, and Son of Gloria Vanderbilt

My mom met Gordon on a photo shoot for Life magazine in 1954. She was in a play called The Swan, and Gordon was the photographer assigned to do a story on her for Life. They met and instantly clicked, and that was the beginning of a relationship that lasted for the rest of their lives. I grew up knowing Gordon Parks as a family friend.

Gordon was kind of a ladies’ man—he had many admirers and certainly my mom was one of them, but they also had a real connection. I got to spend time with him, and that was incredibly important to me. There was an attraction between them, a physical attraction, an emotional attraction. They also had a connection based on loss and on grief: Gordon lost a child to an accident, and my brother died by suicide. Gordon was one of those people who understood that pain.

They both spoke the language of loss, and that’s a particular language you can learn, unfortunately, only by losing somebody and by losing many things. Gordon, as a kid, also pulled himself out of the circumstances he was born into, and he was able to move forward, and that takes extraordinary power. I certainly think Gordon had that power. And my mom’s circumstances were completely different—she grew up surrounded by great wealth, but was taken from her mother during a custody battle and had no real idea of what a family was. I think Gordon and my mother saw it in each other that they were both survivors. What’s remarkable about both being survivors is that they both remained completely open and able to be vulnerable again. That’s a particular strength, to survive through things and not have those things change who you are to the extent that it shuts down who you are. They blossomed in their survival.

Angela Davis
Activist

Gordon Parks was a visionary, as we all know, who paved the paths that many of us, artists and activists alike, are still walking. In the 1980s, he composed the music to Run Sister Run, a dance performance choreographed by Cleo Parker Robinson [that was inspired by Angela Davis’s experiences as a fugitive]. I never got the opportunity to thank him personally. At that time, I was no longer running. Perhaps we should all be running, running toward a future when we will have figured out how to develop better ways of guaranteeing safety and security for our communities, because police and prisons aren’t doing it. Progressive change always happens because ordinary people stand together, imagine, demand, and struggle together.

Ava DuVernay
Filmmaker and Producer

I worked as a young publicist for the documentary Half Past Autumn, about Mr. Parks, and that’s when I had the privilege of meeting him and spending time in his presence. Although he had already been living in my imagination long before then. I remember encountering his photographs as a teenager . . . and feeling moved and curious and proud.

The Fort Scott, Kansas, photographs—officially titled The Learning Tree—are nothing short of revelatory to me. I return to those images often, and they have quietly shaped the choices I make as a filmmaker. I even paid homage to one of them in my latest film, Origin. There is something in his work that is so painterly and tender. The soft focus creates a kind of sacred distance between you and the subjects, even as it pulls you closer. Distance and intimacy, together somehow, at once.

There is one photograph I love, of a boy, alone in a field. On his head is a bandage that forms an X—perhaps a wound that’s been taped. But also, it evokes the feeling of a target on him. And yet there he sits, in the tall grass, completely at rest, belonging entirely to the day. That image moves me deeply. Because that is the contradiction Gordon Parks spent his life holding: the joy of living—pressed right up against the oppression, the poverty, the violence of being Black in America. That tension is why his work endures. And why he remains so utterly, achingly present.

He did not bring elegance to Black life. He captured the elegance that is Black life. At a time when Black people were told relentlessly, ruthlessly, that we were criminals, ugly and unworthy, Mr. Parks showed us ourselves. He asked us to witness the beauty of the lives we were already living, the dignity already present in the places where we already stood.

His work does something few artists ever achieve. It asks you to question your own eyes, your own lens. Why do we look at that same thing and not see beauty? And what would this world be like, if we did?

Thelma Golden
Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem

As someone whose vocation is a devotion to artists of African descent and artwork that resonates with Black life, Black culture, and Black history, I felt privileged that, early in my career, I had the opportunity to make the acquaintance of Gordon Parks. When I joined the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2000 as deputy director for exhibitions and programs, I took as my duty a full engagement with the Museum’s permanent collection. By then I was acutely attuned to the magnitude of Parks’s artistic practice, and I felt it was important, critical even, that he be reflected in our collection. Given the breadth and scope of his oeuvre, it felt almost impossible to begin thinking of what photograph we might steward. Through conversations with Parks, it became clear that an image from “A Harlem Family” would be deeply meaningful to us, especially as our collection is housed in the same neighborhood where these images were captured. With Parks’s guidance, in 2001, Fontenelle Children Outside Their Harlem Tenement (1967) joined our collection. This image would soon become the impetus for a desire to exhibit the full series of images from his Life photo essay.

These images and the circumstances that prompted them are as relevant as ever, and I find myself recalling the motivation for our 2012 Gordon Parks exhibition: to make visible the past in order to illuminate the present. Although I write this more than a decade later, the conditions that tethered the late 1960s to the early 2010s remain sadly similar today, as millions in this country bear the brunt of destabilizing funding cuts, inhumane practices toward immigrations, and a surge in discriminatory policies. While contemporary life is certainly distressing, art has always been a tool for all of us to better understand and affect the reality we, and others, are confronted with—a credo similar to one that appeared in the Museum’s founding documents, which expressed art’s ability to communicate across all manner of human boundaries, whether that be the divide between the past and the present, or oneself and another. I think Gordon Parks lived by this credo, too.

Kate Clark Harris
Social Worker and Daughter of Dr. Kenneth B. Clark and Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark

My mother wanted to be a doctor, and wanted to see that children had the same kind of happy childhood she’d had. And as part of that, she was interested in child development. She took a part-time job in the DC school system, and there it was very clear to her that the Black children were not being stimulated. This was an integrated school, and she noticed there was a difference in the way the Black children were being taught.

She discussed that with my dad, and at some point, both of them came to the conclusion that she should study that and see what really was taking place. For her master’s program, she decided to examine the development of children’s ego and self-esteem. Her theory was that the children were being harmed, or their sense of self was not able to be developed because of how they were being treated in school. That was the beginning of the Doll Study, and it was a collaboration between them in the sense of the idea. But in terms of the execution, it was my mother’s; she took the lead. It was her master’s thesis. Children were given pictures of children who were white and Black. The same questions were asked as later in the Doll Study: “Who would you like to play with? Who is a good child, who is a bad child?” And the children unanimously gravitated toward the white figures as the good children they’d like to play with. It was very disturbing to my mother and father. She applied to the doctoral program in psychology at Columbia. They continued to conduct the study while she was at Columbia. It got a little bit more filled out, and there was a coloring book the kids would color; somebody had the suggestion of dolls.

Now I want to bring Gordon Parks in. He was assigned by Ebony to photograph the Northside Center for Child Development, which my parents had founded. And I think he and my parents were friendly before then, but certainly during the development of this article, they became friendly.

The thing that made Gordon great was his ability to look beyond the surface and get into the inner feelings of the children. The child who chose the white doll, you could see the hesitation, the sorrow, the negative feelings he was having. Gordon got it. He also got my father’s dismay. He got that. My father was deeply dismayed. He said to me at one point, “I didn’t want to do the test anymore. I couldn’t stand it.” Some of the children were so tortured by having to make a choice. He said he’d never forget that one little boy ran out of the room, just couldn’t take it. It was very serious evidence of lack of self-esteem, self-hatred.

Gordon captured the ambivalence and sorrow that the children had when they were faced with identifying themselves with the dolls. Gordon was so good at getting beyond the surface and getting the feelings beneath. The pictures convey that. You can’t ignore it.

Kyle Johnson
Actor, Portrayed Newt Winger in Gordon Parks's 1969 film The Learning Tree 

I began my relationship with Gordon Parks at a distance of space and time.

I was about thirteen when my mother, Nichelle Nichols of Star Trek, read his novel The Learning Tree, and passed it on to me with an unspoken prayer that it would not become a motion picture before I was old enough to fit the role.

I had been working as an actor since I was eight or nine years old and was accustomed to agents, casting offices, and the ritual of reading for parts in film and television. The Learning Tree was quite different. Rather than going to a casting call at a studio with several eager aspirants, I was to meet privately with Gordon at his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

There I found a soft-spoken, distinguished gentleman who asked but few questions and, though relaxed, had an unmistakable presence and focus. He thanked me for the visit and I left. I didn’t know it then but . . . I had the part.

That fall I arrived in Fort Scott, Kansas, his hometown, to begin filming. He came by my hotel room to welcome me and see that I was settling in. He assured me that he was available if I had any questions other than routine matters that were handled by the crew. It was obvious that he had any number of things on his mind, but he also conveyed the calm assurance that he was in his element.

Gordon was, aside from being the gifted and prodigious photographer the world had come to know, the author of his fictionalized autobiography, and the director and producer of the movie, and writer of the script and film score—and yes, he cut my hair. On the first day before the camera, he took me aside for a few minutes and again in his soft-spoken, confident manner told me that it was now in my hands to convey to the world the joys and pains of his life, the bitter experiences of his time, his rites of passage, the tenderness and loss of first love, the terrifying ordeal of standing for justice, and transcending the loss of his mother and separation from his family.

Throughout the filming, Gordon was very intuitive with the cast, confident in our abilities, and strictly attentive to our needs, and he provided the succinct direction and encouragement to support us as required. It was an honor and a pleasure to work so closely with a great artist, and my admiration continued and expanded with his further successes in the film industry and the continuing excellence of his photography, not least in Arias in Silence. This was the last of his works published before his passing, and I was able to review it with him, before its release, in his New York living room, where he had created its amazing images.

Isabella Rossellini
Actress, Model, Director, and Daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini

Gordon Parks’s photos of my parents were not affected by the gossip and scandal that swelled around them. My parents had fallen in love with each other before obtaining divorces. They were banned from the United States. But Gordon Parks kept a firm eye on them as artists. With one photo alone he could capture the whole intent of their film Stromboli, that is, the cultural clashes that ravaged Italy after World War II. Parks had an incredible ability to synthesize complex realities in a single image.

Qubilah Shabazz
Daughter of Malcolm X

My father and Gordon initially assumed that they were different in many ways, and they were. But in the long run they wound up adoring each other, and that’s how I came to be Gordon’s goddaughter. I know that my father had a lot of respect for Gordon, and Gordon did really gain his trust. My first recollection of my uncle Gordon is when my father died. It was either the same day or shortly thereafter, when people were still gathering at my cousins’ apartment after the assassination. That was my first recollection of him.

Bryan Stevenson
Social Justice Activist, Attorney, and Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, Montgomery, Alabama.

What distinguishes Gordon Parks from a lot of other artists is that he had a quintessentially authentic Black experience. He was the descendant of Black people who had been enslaved, who had fled enslavement, and he grew up in Kansas proximate to lynching and racial terrorism. Understanding the weight that people of color felt in these spaces where you had to basically be two people—one person around white people, to keep yourself safe, and another person with your family—gave him an insight into the Black narrative, which is not a narrative that we understand very well. I met him once after he’d gone abroad to do some war documentation, and he and I spoke about how challenging it was to be in that environment. I remember him relating that to other things he had done in this country—times when he had been chased, times when he had been yelled at, times when he had been threatened.

Narrative work is the heart of how you change hearts and minds. You can change laws, but if you don’t work on people and the psychology behind bigotry and exclusion, then you’re not going to make any progress. There were so few people who understood this like Gordon Parks, and that’s why his work became so central to the civil rights space. And we are still battling images. If a Black person has been shot and killed by the police when they’re unarmed, some people will want to depict the sorrow and the grief and the anguish that such an event creates in an African American community. And other people will want to depict the angriest people doing the most violent things they can do in reaction to that, because it fulfills a certain kind of narrative. And this narrative struggle is at the heart of how we think about basic human rights. What we see is such an important part of what we think, what we believe, and Gordon understood early that he had a role to play if we were going to shape the things that people believe about equality.

You cannot be a person of color growing up in the urban North and not be mindful of the way in which police officers were symbols: they represented threat and menace. And it wasn’t because people didn’t want law and order; they did, they just didn’t want it imposed through abuse. When Life reproduced Gordon’s image of those police officers crashing down a door, gun in hand, the article writers tried to make that heroic and courageous and comforting, but the photograph is anything but comforting. The language the magazine used was “door of a suspicious room.” What’s a door of a room got to do to become suspicious? It’s just a door. It’s suspicious officers. That kind of language doesn’t create the kind of trust that we now recognize we need to create if we’re going to be effective at public safety. And Gordon got it in the images he presented. That perspective, that lens, was so necessary, so critical.

Cora Taylor
Photographed by Gordon Parks in 1956 in Alabama (at right, wearing sunglasses)

We got off the bus there to get some ice cream—that place had the best ice cream. Across the street, there was a Krispy Kreme. We would get ice cream and then go across the street and get Krispy Kreme. That’s what happened that day. Then this man came up and asked to take our picture. There was another man with these little girls, and he held them up to drink some water. Emmett Till had been killed the previous year, and we didn’t know what to expect. But I was there for a reason, and I was at the right place at the right time. When I saw that man taking a picture, I didn’t know why he was taking it—he didn’t say anything to us, but I remembered he had a New York license plate. I wondered what was going on, because you didn’t know who to trust and who not to trust. I let my mother know about the photograph, in case anything went wrong. A few weeks later I saw the picture in Life magazine, and I just couldn’t believe it.

Alice Walker
Author of The Color Purple, 1982

Unfortunately I was, during much of the filming of the movie, suffering from undiagnosed Lyme disease. A gift from three giant tick bites. It was hard to focus on very much, but of course the very handsome Gordon Parks was hard to miss. There is a photograph someone took of all of us together, Gordon included, that remains my favorite view of him: that he was with us, solidly, saving our determined efforts for posterity. A monument to his faith that though the subjects we tackled were scary and in some quarters taboo, he was our brother; as southern black folks like to put it: irregardless. Solid, gifted, his lens and his presence supporting us. Carrying us all into encounters with reality, intended to help us grow.

Rebecca Walker
Writer, Producer, and Daughter of Alice Walker

I was fifteen and working fourteen-hour days in blistering North Carolina heat as a production assistant on the film. It was my first real job, and I took it—and myself—very seriously. Over twelve weeks of glorious chaos, of Steven yelling for a camera in the middle of a thunderstorm and trucks blowing fake snow over wheat-colored fields, Quincy became the uncle I didn’t know I needed, and Gordon Parks the distant cousin I finally got to meet.

To sit for the portrait, I had to get permission to leave my duties: wrangling child actors running wild through massive oak trees, and cycling “the talent”—Whoopi, Danny, Oprah—through hair and makeup, delivering them to set before we lost the light. In the days leading up to our session, I had watched Mr. Parks taking photographs and admired the figure he cut in his weathered brown fedora, the way he shifted his pipe from pocket to mouth and back again as he lifted one of several cameras slung over his shoulder to his face. I was struck by the way he moved, nimble and lithe like a cat, around and through the cast and crew, the producers and director: watching, framing, capturing.

The photograph was taken in the air-conditioned oasis of Mister and Celie’s living room, where, a few days before, we had filmed Mister’s father, played by the great Adolph Caesar, drinking a glass of water laced with Celie’s spit. When my mother and I wandered into the room, seeking both Mr. Parks and refuge from the heat outside, we found him sitting calmly behind his tripod, cleaning his pipe. He had already set up the shot, with the lighting just so and the sofa turned to catch it. He stood up and waved us in with a roguish smile, suggesting we sit on the sofa and talk as we normally would. Then he sat back down, present but just out of sight, focused but open. A living lens.

Forty years later, I cannot remember how I ended up with my head in my mother’s lap, stretched out on the prop sofa I wouldn’t have dared disturb while working. But there we are, in a familiar pose captured in several images over the years. In one version, like the one The New York Times would run a year later, my mother and I lie side by side on a sofa of green velvet, talking and gesturing to each other from either end. In another, she sits on my lap.

But this picture is infused with Color Purple magic: propelled by memory and genius, cultural knowing and technical skill, Gordon opened a portal for my mother and me that day in the summer of 1984, a way of seeing ourselves clearly, transcendent of time. We were in the 1980s as we would have been in the 1920s, and would be, still and again, in the 2020s: together and apart, inextricable, but each in her own place, dreaming her own dream.

Mother and daughter, rooted but free.

Deborah Willis
Author, Historian, Curator, and Artist

The first time I saw Gordon Parks’s photograph Washington, D.C. Government charwoman, later known as American Gothic—in a slide presentation in an undergraduate art school class in the 1970s—I was awestruck. As the professor moved to the next photo, I wanted to hold fast to the memory of that projected image of Ella Watson. Her polka-dotted dress with puffed sleeves and two missing buttons, her wire-rimmed glasses half in shadow. The inverted tools of her trade, the straw curve of the worn broom and the curl of cotton mop, made me curious, and since that moment I have remained curious about the photograph and about Ella Watson herself. I was impressed by the solemnity of her pose and the expression on her face as she looked toward the camera lens and yet beyond the photographer. Her gaze allowed me to enter the picture and wonder at her focus: Was she a willing model, did she satisfy the request of Parks, who undoubtedly directed this unconventional pose? Whatever their exchange about patriotism, inequality, commitment, Ella Watson took her role seriously as the artist’s muse.

In 2018, I had the opportunity to talk on the telephone with Ella Watson’s great-granddaughter Rosslyn Samuels. Rosslyn was a girl when her great-grandmother came to live in her family’s home in Washington, D.C. They shared a bedroom. Rosslyn told me how Mrs. Watson spent her life taking care of family—her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—and caring about other people’s welfare and comfort.

I had often thought of Ella Watson as an empowered woman who understood what it meant to be responsible for others. Rosslyn agreed, and spoke of her extraordinary heart and extraordinary faith: “She lived according to her faith and did not sway from it. She prayed every morning as well as every night and would instill in her family to be giving, kind, and forgiving.”

Parks photographed Ella Watson at work, at home with her family, in her Northwest Washington neighborhood, and at Verbrycke Spiritual Church. His American Gothic is a construction that afforded rare attention to a Black female subject who was not a celebrity or an entertainer but a mother and a worker. In this striking photograph, Parks forms an image of Mrs. Watson at work, her loosely fitted dress pinned closed, allowing the viewer to link the necessity of her role as a family provider with the harshness of her existence. The American flag that hangs behind her frames her with the tools of her labor. As Proverbs says, “She watches over the affairs of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. . . . Honor her for all that her hands have done, and let her works bring her praise at the city gate.”

Hank Willis Thomas
Artist

Gordon Parks has been described in many ways: photographer, artist, author, filmmaker, musician, composer, poet, activist, pioneer. The word that seems most fitting to me is sorcerer, or seer, or even alchemist. There are many moments in his life and career when he spun something more precious than gold from material so quotidian that it was virtually invisible. His mastery of this is encapsulated perfectly in American Gothic, the 1942 photograph of federal worker and cleaning woman Ella Watson, pictured with her mop and broom standing stoically at attention in front of an American flag. In the blink of an eye, Parks made something timeless.

I am writing this eighty years and several hundred miles from the spot where the photograph was taken, yet when I look at the image I have the sensation that I am peering through one of Einstein’s theoretical wormholes. Space and time are bending so that I am transported to the very consciousness that brought the photograph into being. I have no doubt that this photograph was taken with me—and you—in mind.

Parks was abundantly aware that he was making history when he clicked that shutter. He knew that he was sending a telegram around the globe and forward in time. Working as an agent of the U.S. government, Parks made this document of a woman who was a descendant of enslaved people, living in poverty and working in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol building. No one who sees it can deny the plain injustice and failure of the United States to live up to its founding commitment to ensure liberty and justice for all.

Gordon Parks reveled in poetic and sometimes ethereal titles, but in this case he chose to name the work after, and perhaps in response to, Grant Wood’s 1930 American Gothic, the well-known painting of a white farmer and his daughter. With this decision, Parks bookends Wood’s quintessential work of the Great Depression with his contrasting depiction of American life, principles, and struggle. He also puts his photograph in discourse with a masterpiece of American painting—especially notable at a time when documentary photography was still struggling to be fully accepted as an art form.

It is too easy to forget when we are looking at a photograph that we are actually partaking in an awakened moment in the consciousness of the image maker. Here, we are not only standing in Parks’s shoes but looking through his eyes at something he chose to aesthetically formulate and preserve for us. Even through this narrow frame and in shades of black and white, I see his admiration for his subject and his disdain for her plight. He is aware that, to a degree, it is his plight, too.

In his memoir Moments Without Proper Names, Parks writes: “I feel it is the heart, not the eye, that should determine the content of the photograph. What the eye sees is its own. What the heart can perceive is a very different matter.”
Can you feel it?

Ambassador Andrew Young
Politician, Minister, and Civil Rights Leader, Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Mayor of Atlanta, and U.S. Congressman 

Before I met Gordon Parks, I heard the power of Gordon Parks. I heard that he had had a skiing accident and was told he would never walk again. And while he was still in the hospital, every time the doctors and nurses left, he would drag himself out of that bed and walk around the bed holding the bedposts until he literally willed himself to walk. And that’s what Gordon Parks did with everything he’s done. He came back not only able to walk, but when I met him, he was playing tennis with Arthur Ashe. Gordon and I teamed up in a match to benefit the United Negro College Fund and beat David Dinkins and Ron Gault. They may have slacked off to let us old folks have it.

Ours is a long-distance, broad-base, in-depth struggle. Gordon, for me, provided an introduction to the power of art in sharing those ideals, building up those institutions, and inspiring and recording all that it takes to really and truly be a great nation, or one nation indivisible under God, or one world where peace and justice reign and where hunger and war cease. That really is not an impossible dream.

Why isn’t peace possible all over the world? I contend that it is, and that people will learn to live together as brothers and sisters before they perish together as fools. We have to let a lot of people know the power of the arts, and the freedom that comes with sharing, and giving, and knowing that everybody wants to have the same opportunities and evaluations of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But it won’t happen unless we all rise.

Martin Luther King, Jr. used to quote a poem by James Russell Lowell, “Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, / Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, / Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.” There’s nothing you can do to prevent your existence, you exist without your permission. And so you have to serve with your permission, but there’s a lot of work to do, and we can’t have a few people doing it alone. So keep on keeping on.