“American Gothic,” considered to be Parks’s signature image, was taken in Washington, D.C., in 1942, during the photographer’s fellowship with the Farm Security Administration, a government agency set up by President Roosevelt to aid farmers in despair. “It’s the first professional image I ever made,” Parks says, “created on my first day in Washington.” Roy Stryker, who led the FSA’s very best documentary photographers—Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, etc.—told Parks to go out and get acquainted with the city. Parks was amazed by the amount of bigotry and discrimination he encountered on his very first day. “White restaurants made me enter through the back door, white theaters wouldn’t even let me in the door, and as the day went on things just went from bad to worse.” Stryker told Parks to go talk with some older black people who had lived their entire lives in Washington and see how they had coped. “That’s how I met Ella,” Parks explains. Ella Watson was a black charwoman who mopped floors in the FSA building. Parks asked her about her life, which she divulged as having been full of misery, bigotry and despair. Parks’s simple question, “Would you let me photograph you?” and Ella’s affirmative response, led to the photographer’s most recognizable image of all time. “Two days later Stryker saw the image and told me I’d gotten the right idea but was going to get all the FSA photogs fired, that my image of Ella was ‘an indictment of America.’ I thought the image had been killed but one day there it was, on the front page of The Washington Post .” At the time, Parks couldn’t have realized that the image would go on to become the symbol of the pre-civil rights era’s treatment of minorities. (PDN)
Not everyone is allowed the same opportunities and privileges, however…
Equal Rights Amendment protest.
First Lady Betty Ford works at her desk, where a “Don’t Tread on Me” Equal Rights Amendment doormat hangs. June 30, 1975.
Stonewall uprising, 1969
Finally, some fun times and Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., circa 1920. "Father Fealey and family." Ignatius Fealey, post chaplain at Fort Myer and future pastor of St. Agnes Catholic Church. National Photo Company Collection glass negative.
Washington, D.C. "Helen Davis, 1924." Helen's father, Dwight Davis, was Secretary of War in the Coolidge administration and a tennis champion who founded the Davis Cup. National Photo glass negative.
January 22, 1926. Washington, D.C. “Arcade Hockey Club.” And if roller hockey isn’t your cup of tea, we also have Billiards Dancing Bowling.
Washington, D.C., circa 1919. “Sennett girls.” Producer Mack Sennett’s comedy reels featured a bevy of “bathing beauties,” among them Marvel Rea, seen here in the harlequin costume. National Photo Company.
1962, Seattle, Washington, USA – A little girl listens in on The Hearing Exhibition at the Seattle World’s Fair.
Space Pilots. Minneapolis, Minnesota: A small boy’s dream of piloting a rocket ship through outer space came as nearly true as modern science could make it for plastic-helmeted Johnny Bower (left), and Neil Smith, both seven years old. The youngsters got their big break when Minneapolis-Honeywell’s Aeronautical company invited them, among other young sons of technical employees to visit the plant and see what their dads were doing. “Pilots” Bower and Smith are manipulating special computing equipment developed to duplicate characteristics of supersonic craft and the flight conditions they might be expected to encounter.
Host Bud Collyer brings laughter and smiles to the faces of panelists Polly Bergen, Ralph Bellamy and Kitty Carlisle while Hy Gardner remains only mildly amused.
Nazis burn the library of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, 1933. In doing so countless texts and documentation of early 20th century LGBTQ* history disappears. Remember, it’s never “just some books.”
Nun using card catalogue in the New York Public Library, 1944. Alfred Eisenstaedt.
One of my favorite shows I grew up watching on Nick at Night, “Dobie Gillis” was my introduction to beatniks. See also Pia Zadora in Hairspray and the Cool Cat from Looney Tunes.
Wow. I mean, seriously. Wow. How was this acceptable in the 1980s on a television show with children? He even attempts to bribe one of the girls with winning the Canadian game show Just Like Mom if she allows him to kiss her. When she still refuses him, he tells her, “Well, I guess you can’t win the show then, if I don’t get a hug and a kiss.” No, seriously. Props to her (I assume) mother for being the only adult on the show to call out his creepy perversion for what it is – she calls him a “dirty old man.” Disturbing much?
