ld what the [your] great city of Washington, D.C. is really like."Gordon Park’s quest lead him to Ella Watson, a middle aged African-American woman employed by the White House as a cleaning lady. Her chief responsibilities included the cleaning and maintenance of a posh White House office occupied by a white woman of her same age and educational background. Seeing this blatant display of hypocrisy of the United State’s creed of “justice and freedom for all” in the nation’s capitol of all places, Gordon used Ms. Watson as the subject for an intensely moving photographic layout entitled “U.S. Government Charwoman.” One of these such pictures of Ms. Watson standing between two upright brooms in front of an American flag in the White House was shown in class and caught my attention. The reason for my curiosity was the way in which Gordon Parks manipulated the background, props, and Ella herself in order to portray a vividly clear image of the miseducation of the American masses. With the American Flag being hung on a wall backwards behind Ms. Watson, the photograph relays a sense of unintentional, yet intentional wrong-doing. The fact that the flag is backwards and appears blurry as well signifies the fact that African-Americans were being treated as second class citizens in a country where everyone was supposed to be equal. I believe that Parks is attempting to expose the truth behind what many white Americans believe to be “justice.” In his portrayal, it is not meant “for all”, but for a privileged race of Caucasians who have black people to clean up after them. While slavery may be illegal at this time, the actual truth that Gordon was exposing showed just the opposite, but in a different light. Standing between an upright broom and a mop, Watson, like many African-American citizens in the 1940s, was enslaved in a way to a life that left her few options but to be ...
