The 1943 Harlem riots broke out on August 1, just a few days after the photographer Gordon Parks moved to the neighborhood. He considered shooting the chaos around him, but decided against it. “The police would only think I stole the camera and take it from me,” he wrote in a memoir years later.
“Harlem Is Nowhere” was intended to focus on the Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic, the first racially integrated psychiatric clinic in New York City. Ellison considered it a haven from racism and the alienation of northern blacks, who had been cut off from the tight familial and community bonds of the south. “When things take on special significance because you’re black,” he wrote in one of the captions, “a cold, unseeing eye seems to judge your every act. It makes you feel guilty, hostile, ‘nowhere.’ ” One of Parks’s photos is of a man in silhouette wandering through a maze of brick walls; sunlight shines through clotheslines hung with white laundry, showing the way out. Unfortunately, ’48: The Magazine of the Year, which had commissioned the essay, went bankrupt before it could be published, and most of Parks’s photos were lost.
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