Many American Dreams Deferred

"Young men and women roamed the desolate blocks--slowly going nowhere. Others hung out on corners with the trash swirling about their feet--hungry, jobless, and sullen with defeat. Harlem, a prison of crumbling squares, seemed to be sinking into itself. Its inhabitants were a long way from the promise of the American dream."--Gordon Parks, photographer/film director/author, from his book, To Smile in Autumn: A Memoir (W.W. Norton, 1979), Page 180.

The young people Gordon Parks witnessed in Harlem were among the many whose American dreams, if they had any, were deferred.

A Story Idea That Was Shot Down

In the early 1980s, I did a few taped interviews by phone or in-person for the Inquiry page of the newspaper USA Today. The Inquiry page used a Q and A format. Among the people I interviewed were Arthur Mitchell, the artistic director and co-founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem and the actress Cicely Tyson.

One person I wanted to interview was the African-American Life magazine photographer and film director Gordon Parks (1912-2006). Parks had written a series of autobiographies, beginning with A Choice of Weapons (1966). A subsequent book was called To Smile in Autumn (1979), which dealt with the latter years of his life.

In an interview, I wanted to focus on aging, not race or racial conflict. I pitched the idea by phone to Peter Prichard, an editor at USA Today. He wasn't interested.

If blogging had existed back then, I would have set up the interview and posted it. And today, in a society and at a time in which ageism has not receded, we would have had, I believe, a thought-provoking, life-affirming interview to add to the literature on gerontology.