In the early 1960s, as the civil rights movement accelerated, Life sought to gain access to the increasingly bellicose Black Muslim movement. When several white reporters were rebuffed in their requests for an audience with the group’s leaders, Parks—the only Black member of the magazine staff—was asked to try.

His first contact was with perhaps the most renowned and tendentious member of the group, Malcolm X. After hearing a fiery speech in Harlem, Parks introduced himself, only to find that the charismatic minister already knew who he was. He invited Parks to a special meeting with Elijah Muhammad, who had been the spiritual leader of the Nation of Islam for nearly 30 years, to discuss the possibility of a story in Life. The slight and gentle-looking Muhammad asked Parks sternly: “Why does a bright young man like you work for the white devils?” Malcolm X later told Parks, grinning, “I think he likes you” (Half Past Autumn, 1997).

Muhammad ultimately agreed to the article, which became one of Parks’s groundbreaking pieces. He documented virtually every aspect of the Black Muslim community, in a full spectrum of images ranging from children and families at prayer to grown men exercising their physical strength in self-defense drills. In addition to piercing portraits of Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, the story featured one of Parks’s masterpieces: a photograph of Muslim Sister Ethel Sharrieff in Chicago. She stares resolutely, with an almost disconcerting calm, into the camera as her sisters in a V-shaped column fall out of focus behind her. Especially impressive is the contrast between their dark skin and their white clothing and veils.