What Became of Harlem’s Fontenelle Family?

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by

Trent
in

Gordon Parks’s Harlem Family Revisited

A Gordon Parks photo essay in Life magazine made the Fontenelle family in Harlem the face of American poverty. It also forged an enduring bond between Mr. Parks and Richard Fontenelle, the family’s only child to live past 30.

via Lens Blog: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/gordon-parks-harlem-family-revisited/

Telling the Fontenelles’ story was a personal crusade for Mr. Parks. As he recalled in his memoir “To Smile in Autumn,” the assignment came at the end of the long, hot summer of 1967, a period of urban uprisings in black America