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Parks celebration slated for Thursday
The Fort Scott Tribune
The Gordon Parks Center at Fort Scott Community College will celebrate the anniversary of Parks' birthday with a special tribute event on Thursday.
Starting at 7 p.m., the center will host a screening of the filmed version of the ballet "Martin: A Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.," which Parks wrote. The event is free of charge and open to the public.
Parks, born in Fort Scott on Nov. 30, 1912, would have been 96 years of age this year. He died in March 2006 at the age of 93.
"Gordon's birth date is a time to remember him as an artist and to show some of his body of work," Gordon Parks Center Director Jill Warford said. "This ballet is the only one he created and it was produced for PBS. It's just over an hour in length and I don't think many people have ever seen it. It's really a nice presentation."
Parks completed the musical score and libretto for "Martin" in 1989 and began filming it for PBS, where it was shown on King's birthday, in 1990. Grace Blake, the ballet's producer, told the Smithsonian, "Gordon's vision of this whole project is so important to all of us ... (Martin) is totally conceived by a black man who is an artist -- who wrote the libretto, the music, directed the film, worked on the choreography, narrated, did his own fund raising. Absolutely, we knew we were working with a genius."
The film will be shown in the Gordon Parks Center located in the Academic Building on the FSCC campus, 2108 S. Horton St. Refreshments will be served after the film.
For more information, contact Warford at (620) 223-2700, extension 515, or by e-mail at jillw@fortscott.edu.