Gordon Park Exhibit On Black Religion On Display Howard University Museum Until Dec. 1, 2025

By Rosaland Tyler
Associate Editor
New Journal and Guide

Guests are streaming through the doors of the Howard University Museum, checking in, and strolling past about four dozen Gordon Parks’ photos that effortlessly channel the mind back to sacred spiritual spaces in Black neighborhoods, at a time when federal troops are patrolling and arresting people in the city.

The exhibit includes more than 40 photos and artifacts by photographer Gordon Parks. It features numerous sacred Black spaces in the USA. The exhibit runs through Dec. 1. It is called, “Temples of Hope, Rituals of Survival: Gordon Parks and Black Religious Life.”

“At a time where, especially in Washington, D.C., we’re experiencing a lot of gestures to change history, to whitewash history, this type of exhibition is kind of necessary,” said Curator Melanee C. Harvey, who has edited a book on the series that will be released in December.

“It’s like serendipity or just perfect timing that this is offered as a kind of guidebook or a salve for this kind of moment,” Harvey told Religion News in a recent interview.

One crisp photo in the exhibit, for example, shows Blacks ministering to the homeless and to those who have lost hope on Chicago’s busy streets. Another photo shows Black men and women clad in white raising their arms at a worship service at Chicago’s Nation of Islam. Another photo by Parks shows a woman sitting in a church pew breastfeeding her child. Other photos show Malcolm X and the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who pastored Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church.

Thanks to a partnership between the Gordon Parks Foundation and Howard, whose Moorland-Spingarn Research Center acquired a collection of 244 of Parks’ photos from the foundation in 2022, you can now revisit sacred religious places in Black neighborhoods. This means Howard’s exhibit walks visitors through numerous churches, mosques and temples located in the USA.

Parks shot many iconic photos including the memorable 1942 “American Gothic.” This photo shows a Black federal government custodian, Ella Watson, with a broom in her right hand and a mop in her left, in a pose reminiscent of a 1930 painting of Iowa farmers by Grant Wood.

Parks, who was a photographer for Ebony and Vogue, before he became a staff photographer for Life magazine for more than 20 years, was not deeply religious. He received more than 20 honorary doctorates, including a 1991 honorary doctorate from Wichita State University, a school located near his hometown, Fort Scott, Kansas. Parks was born to Andrew Jackson Parks and Sarah Ross, on Nov. 30, 1912, as the youngest of 15 children. His father was a farmer who grew corn, beets, turnips, potatoes, collard greens, and tomatoes. They also had a few ducks, chickens, and hogs.

He managed his mother’s death at age 14 – (which occurred after a group of White boys tried to drown him) – by spending his last night at the family home sleeping beside his mother’s coffin, seeking not only solace, but a way to face his own fear of death. Parks left Kansas and went on to become “The Godfather of Cool,” according to a New York Times article.

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Parks became Hollywood’s first Black director. He worked behind the scenes during the shooting of the 1971 Hollywood film, “Shaft,” a Black private eye and superhero. Parks also wrote fiction and was an accomplished composer before he died in 2006 at age 93 in New York.

His exhibit at Howard is channeling minds back to other Black sacred spaces. Another memorable photo shows the Rev. Ernest Franklin Ledbetter Sr. with his arms raised and eyes closed while he urges his parishioners to pray and endure the harsh treatment they are receiving at work. Ledbetter pastored Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago, a more than 100-year-old church on the city’s west side, for about 30 years, from 1939 until his passing in 1969.

“They had a stately structure, it was filled to the brim every Sunday, and they had a lasting impact in terms of the social gospel ministries,” said Harvey, who is an associate professor at Howard.

Pointing to a thought-provoking 1965 photo on display, Harvey told Religion News in a recent interview, that the two Black women were not extraordinary. The photo shows one woman inside the church and the other standing at its window.

“Here we see two women look like they’re maybe gossiping or just exchanging important community information, but then when you look closer, you see that the woman inside the church is actually breastfeeding,” Harvey said. “These very intimate, life-sustaining things happen in that space,” Harvey said.