In March 1968, Gordon Parks introduced readers of Life magazine and viewers of public television to the Fontenelles, an impoverished family living in a Harlem tenement. Across the magazine's pages, Parks paired photographs with a text whose opening lines reached well beyond the story of one household: "I too am America. America is me. It gave me the only life I know—so I must share in its survival. Look at me. Listen to me. Try to understand my struggle against your racism."
The Fontenelles' story remains among the most significant works of Parks's career. Gordon Parks: Diary of a Harlem Family, 1967/1968, published to mark the twentieth anniversary of The Gordon Parks Foundation in 2026, returns to that story to deepen what we know of Parks's interdisciplinary approach to the project.
A contact at a local welfare office connected Parks to the Fontenelles: Bessie, Norman Sr., and their eight children, then living on Eighth Avenue in Harlem. Bessie agreed to let Parks into their lives. He later recalled, "I wanted to get to know them first. I wanted them to get to know me and trust me as a friend. . . . I tried to work in such a way that I wasn't reporting anything, I was just a part of them." The text Parks wrote to accompany the photographs was just as significant as the images themselves. His editor and confidante, Genevieve Young, pushed him to find language capable of carrying his vision. Writing to him in September 1967, she advised him to create text that feels to readers as though they “had been in the minds of your family, and have seen the world through their eyes."
"The Cycle of Despair," Life magazine, March 8, 1968. Photographs and text by Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks, Bessie and Little Richard the Morning After She Scalded Her Husband, Harlem, New York, 1967
In the book Diary of a Harlem Family, Leigh Raiford—scholar, writer, and 2026 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellow in Writing—situates this directive and the resulting project within its political moment:
“’A Harlem Family’ emerged at a crossroads when the investment in urban social programs was being channeled toward law and order, as the War on Poverty was giving way to the War on Crime, and what was increasingly perceived as the dangerous problem to be contained was Black cultural pathology rather than the alleviation of poverty as an economic state. Against this backdrop of fear and disdain, while he bore the responsibility of Bessie Fontenelle's trust, Parks's task was clear—and difficult: How does one document the ways in which a racial capitalist system has failed its citizens rather than the other way around?"
The same week the Life essay appeared, the public television series Public Broadcast Laboratory aired a segment of the short film Diary of a Harlem Family. Directed by Joseph Filipowic and produced in collaboration with Parks, the film opened with Parks seated with the Fontenelles in their apartment and moving through a montage of his stills—many never published in the magazine—layered with his own narration of the family's story.
Diary of a Harlem Family was Parks’s second short film, and an important early milestone in his influential career in film. Scholar and writer Michael Boyce Gillsepie writes in the book about the film’s significance:
“Never just a filmic replication of the Life photo essay, Diary of a Harlem Family persists as a generative text for thinking about film blackness and the politics of film form. The film, like all films, can never really be positive, negative, authentic, true, real, accurate, honest, or any other term best reserved for people and not films. Yet what film can do and does do is attempt to draw us to feel and consider. Parks knew a great deal about this scheme, and Diary of a Harlem Family remains a testament to his practice.”
Once the Fontenelles' story reached print and television that week in March 1968, readers responded immediately and in force. Letters arrived at Life by the hundreds, some written directly to Parks, others to the family itself—messages of grief, empathy, and recognition, alongside discomfort and criticism. Donations poured in as well—food, clothing, money—and Life collected thousands of dollars on the family's behalf, enough to relocate the Fontenelles to a home in Queens.
Diary of a Harlem Family, 1968, Public Broadcast Laboratory, Episode 116. Director: Josef Filipowic; Photographer and narrator: Gordon Parks
Gordon Parks, Jr., Gordon Parks with members of the Fontenelle family, Harlem, New York, 1967
Even with that outpouring of support, the Fontenelle’s story didn’t end well. Less than a year later, a fire took the Fontenelles' home, killing Norman Sr. and eight-year-old Kenneth. Reflecting back, Parks often spoke of both the tenderness and pain woven through the project. Decades later, this complexity is what continues to draw interest to this story. As Leigh Raiford notes:
“Parks often referred to his camera as a weapon, which he wielded “against all the things I disliked about America—poverty, racism, discrimination.” This is a powerful way to understand both the potential of the camera and the responsibility of the photographer. But in the context of “A Harlem Family” we must ask: If the camera is a weapon against, what is the camera for? What or, more urgently, who are the casualties of such a disposition? “A Harlem Family” presented to white audiences an urgent statement about the damages of racialized poverty, but the story nearly devoured the Fontenelles whole. Parks’s camera made promises it could not keep. What if the camera does not always need to be ammunition but can act as a shield or provide safe harbor? Can the camera function as an object of care, as an antidote to the violences of racial capitalism?”
Gordon Parks, The Fontenelles at the Poverty Board, Harlem, New York, 1967.
Gordon Parks, Fontenelle Children Outside Their Harlem Tenement, Harlem, New York, 1967.
Gordon Parks, Norman Jr. Reads in Bed, Harlem, New York, 1967.
Gordon Parks, Bessie and Little Richard the Morning After She Scalded Her Husband, Harlem, New York, 1967.
Gordon Parks, Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1967.
Gordon Parks, Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1967.
Gordon Parks, Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1967.
Gordon Parks, Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1967.
Gordon Parks, Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1967.
Gordon Parks, Untitled, Harlem, New York, 1967.
