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Individuals with Disabilities Education Act 

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Individuals with Disabilities Education Act 

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This is the official U.S. Department of Education page that lists policies related to inclusion and education and the legal implications when schools do not adhere to these policies. Students could  examine this and other government policies (such as the Equal Opportunity Employment Act) as part of a summative research paper project related to the concept of diversity (reading these policies also complicates the notion that diversity is not limited to race and ethnicity). A teacher might also be able to use excerpts of these policies during a lesson on strategies to comprehend informational text.

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This 1952 photographic exhibit was shot and compiled by Gordon Parks to promote his Life Magazine colleague Ralph Ellison's novel, The Invisible Man. While some of the photos here might not be appropriate for a unit exploring the concept of diversity, there are several that might be useful, such as "The Invisible Man," and "Hope at the Citadel." Both of these images might complicate students' ideas about diversity, helping them to understand that the concept is not limited to race and ethnicity, as well as question whether diversity has been / will ever be embraced in America. Examining these photos also offers students a chance to refine their capacity to make inferences and notice key details.

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By the end of 1948, Gordon Parks (1912-2006) had cemented his reputation as a successful photojournalist by becoming the first African American staff photographer at Life magazine. Ralph Ellison (1913-1994) was three years into writing Invisible Man, regarded today as one of the most important American novels of the postwar period. That year, Parks and Ellison undertook the first of two magazine collaborations, inspired by a shared view of racial injustices and a belief that, when carefully chosen, words and photographs could effect meaningful change.

The two friends sought to undermine stereotypes of African American life that filled mainstream publications in their day. They first joined forces on the 1948 essay "Harlem Is Nowhere" for '48: The Magazine of the Year, which focused on Harlem's Lafargue Mental Hygiene Clinic. In 1952, months after Invisible Man was published, they worked on a story for Life, "A Man Becomes Invisible," to introduce Ellison's novel. Both projects aimed to bring to national consciousness the black experience in postwar America, with Harlem as its nerve center.

Invisible Man was Ellison's first and only finished novel. Written in the first person, the book recounts the journey of an unnamed black protagonist from the Deep South to Harlem. It is also a stark account of America's racial divisions and of the narrator's awakening to his condition of invisibility within the surrounding cultures of white and black alike-a realization that no one can see beyond what is projected onto the color of his skin.

For "A Man Becomes Invisible," published in the August 25, 1952 issue of Life, Parks shot photographs that depict the novel's key Harlem scenes. The resulting images are strikingly varied, including street photography, staged images shot in elaborately constructed sets, and surreal photomontages. They hew to Ellison's prose style, which collapsed distinctions between realism and fantasy-depictions that are true not just to Ellison's words, but also to the emotions underlying them.

Only four of these photographs were published in Life, but the dozens of surviving prints and contact sheets in Parks' archive point to a larger, unrealized project. Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are by Gordon Parks (1912-2006). All quotations are by Ralph Ellison (1913-1994).

The only published evidence of the sustained collaboration between Parks and Ellison is the three-page photo story "A Man Becomes Invisible," included in the August 25, 1952 issue of Life. The magazine's editors included only four of Parks's most fantastical images as part of a regular feature called "Speaking of Pictures," which offered a space for photographic reporting with a creative bent. Notably, two additional features by Parks appear in the same issue: a four-page spread on Alexander Calder's colorful sculptural mobiles and a three-page fashion shoot titled "Campus Come-Ons," the latter in fact the cover story.

For this website, passages from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) have been paired photographs by Gordon Parks taken for the Life August 1952 story "A Man Becomes Invisible."

"I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.... When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed, everything and anything except me."

"Now, aware of my invisibility, I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century. The point now is that I found a home-or a hole in the ground, as you will. . . . Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in a state of hibernation. Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action."

"My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. . . . In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 lights. I've wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. And not with fluorescent bulbs, but with the older, more-expensive-to-operate kind, the filament type. An act of sabotage, you know. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being invisible."

"A flash of red and gold from a window filled with religious articles caught my eye. And behind the film of frost etching the glass I saw two brashly painted plaster images of Mary and Jesus surrounded by dream books.... I passed on to a window decorated with switches of wiry false hair, ointments guaranteed to produce the miracle of whitening black skin. "You too can be truly beautiful," a sign proclaimed. "Win greater happiness with whiter complexion. Be outstanding in your social set." I hurried on, suppressing a savage urge to push my fist through the pane."

"Perhaps that's my greatest social crime, I've overstayed my hibernation, since there's a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play.

"Ah," I can hear you say, "so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving. He only wanted us to listen to him rave!" But only partially true: Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which frightens me:
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"

Gordon Parks was born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. An itinerant laborer, he worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself, and becoming a photographer. During his storied tenures photographing for the Farm Security Administration (1941-1945) and Life magazine (1948-c. 1971), Parks evolved into a modern-day Renaissance man: he found success as a film director, writer, and composer. The first African American director to helm a major motion picture, he introduced the Blaxploitation genre through his film Shaft (1971). He wrote numerous memoirs, novels, and books of poetry, and received countless awards, including the National Medal of Arts, and more than fifty honorary degrees. Parks died in 2006.

Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1913. His love of music led him to enroll at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama, as a music major. In summer 1936 he went to New York City and befriended established authors and intellectuals who encouraged him to pursue a career in writing. He joined the Federal Writers' Project, and began writing essays and short stories for publications such as New Masses, The Negro Quarterly, The New Republic, and Saturday Review. With the outbreak of World War II, Ellison joined the U.S. Merchant Marine as a cook. By 1945 he signed a contract to begin writing what was to become Invisible Man (1952); it won the National Book Award in 1953 but remained his only novel published during his lifetime. He published two subsequent collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). For many years Ellison worked on a second novel, which he never completed; its central narrative was published posthumously in 1999 as Juneteenth. Ellison died in 1994.

The Gordon Parks Foundation permanently preserves the work of Gordon Parks, makes it available to the public through exhibitions, books, and electronic media, and supports artistic and educational activities that advance what Parks described as "the common search for a better life and a better world."

The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879, is a world-renowned museum housing one of the largest permanent collections in the United States. Encyclopedic in its scope, the Art Institute collects, preserves, exhibits, and interprets artworks in every medium from all cultures and historical periods.

Selection and text
Michal Raz-Russo, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography, The Art Institute of Chicago

Production assistance
Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Executive Director, The Gordon Parks Foundation; Amanda Smith, Assistant Director, The Gordon Parks Foundation; James Jordan, Collections Manager, The Gordon Parks Foundation; Amanda Clizbe, Intern, The Gordon Parks Foundation.

Copyrights:
© 2016 The Gordon Parks Foundation for images by Gordon Parks.
© 2012 Time Life Magazine for images of Life magazine.
Excerpts From Invisible Man, copyright © 1947, 1948, 1952 and copyright renewed 1975, 1976, 1980 by Ralph Ellison. Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC.

The story featured may in some cases have been created by an independent third party and may not always represent the views of the institutions, listed below, who have supplied the content.

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Gordon Parks: "A Man Becomes Invisible" - Google Arts & Culture

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By the end of 1948, Gordon Parks (1912-2006) had cemented his reputation as a successful photojournalist by becoming the first African American staff photographer at Life magazine. Ralph Ellison (1913-1994) was three years into writing Invisible Man, regarded today as one of the most important American novels of the postwar period.

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A TED talk that addresses both narrative form and the notion of stereotypes, and celebrates multiplicity of perspective.  Sharing Adichie's talk with students might help to initiate conversation on stereotypes near the outset of the unit, as well as

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The danger of a single story

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Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

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Nina Simone wrote the lyrics to this song after MLK was assassinated. With its allusions to the "I Have a Dream Speech," the song could assist students in grasping the concept of intra-textuality.

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Nina Simone  Why  The King of Love Is Dead (live)

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Billie Holiday's song interrogates the racism of the American South, and raises the question of whether an American South that welcomes and embraces people of all races and cultures is ever possible. Some of the key details featured in the lyrics are also referenced in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, one of the potential major anchor texts for this unit. Introducing Holiday's music prior to the novel might prepare students for interpreting Harper Lee's work and serve as a powerful framework.

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In his celebrated speech, Dr. King articulates a vision for an America that embraced and celebrated diversity, identifying it as an absolute necessity for social progress. This text is also a Common Core State Standards Exemplar for grade nine (for more information, see http://www.corestandards.org/assets/Appendix_B.pdf). Teaching "I have a Dream" in juxtaposition with excerpts from Malcolm X's  speeches might complicate one of the essential questions for unit, which is, "How do I navigate fundamental differences in values between others and myself?"

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Martin Luther King | "I Have A Dream" Speech