Learning history at the Gordon Parks Museum

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

John Edwin Mason, a teacher of African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, speaks to attendees during a presentation Tuesday offered by the Gordon Parks Museum on the campus of Fort Scott Community College. Mason has written extensively on early 19th century South African history, especially the history of slavery, South African popular culture, including the Cape Town New Year’s Carnival and jazz, and the history of photography. His research now concerns African-American and South African photography. Mason is working on a book titled “Gordon Parks and American Democracy,” which is about the ways in which Parks’ magazine photo essay on poverty and the black liberation struggle in “Life” magazine, and Parks’ published books during the Civil Rights era made Parks one of the era’s most significant interpreters of the black experience.

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