Death Room

Parks included twelve photographs about Kansas in his gift of 128, most from the 1950 LIFE assignment that motivated him to return to Kansas after twenty years away. The resulting photo-essay, Fort Scott Revisited (Parks’s title), documented the lives of African Americans living in segregated Fort Scott and what happened to Parks’s classmates after graduating from their all-Black junior high school. Although the photo-essay went unpublished in the magazine, Parks included photographs taken in Fort Scott in his 1975 book Moments Without Proper Names and in a film of the same name that aired on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) in 1986. The afterlife of Fort Scott Revisited demonstrates the significance it held for Parks.