ion of the white race against the innocence and actual humanity of the African American race.Moving ahead into a time period still fresh in the minds of most Americans - the depression ridden early 1940s - an African American gentleman named Gordon Parks set out to use his camera as a way to expose the evils of racism, the evils of poverty, the discrimination and the bigotry, “by showing the people who suffered most under it."Although he had experienced racial discrimination outside the South, it was in the southern city of Washington, D.C., that Parks "found out what prejudice was really like." In 1942, an opportunity to work for the Farm Security Administration brought Gordon to the United States Capitol on a fellowship for the study of the south deemed ” a fund set up for exceptionally able spooks and white crackers." by a white “friend”. Nevertheless, he ignored this stereotype and took advantage of this once in a lifetime opportunity to explore his photographic talents in a city where "discrimination and bigotry were worse there than any place he [I] had yet seen. Upon his arrival in Washington D.C., Mr. Parks was sent around the capital city in order to familiarize himself with the city’s culture and to scout out photo opportunities. He was initially instructed to study the works of photographers who had also used discrimination as their subject, but found fault with the way the subject matter was portrayed and viewed. He felt that what people attribute the suffering of immigrants and minorities in the photographs of the Depression and World War II time period in America is wrong and that they are being vastly miseducated in thinking that the suffering was caused by God and the uncontrollable. Parks pointed out that "the research accompanying these stark photographs accused man himself--especially the lords of the land." and he set out on a fervent journey in order to "show the rest of the wor...
