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Gordon Parks' Diary of a Harlem Family

Narrated photo journal of time spent with a family to discuss poverty and race.

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Photographer Gordon Parks narrates photographs of Norman Fontanelli and his family, from the diary Parks kept of several weeks spent with them at their tenement apartment in Harlem in the winter of 1967 to chronicle the effects of poverty and structural racism on African American family life.

The Public Broadcast Laboratory (PBL) was a weekly live, experimental, and controversial television magazine program broadcast over National Educational Television (NET) from 1967 to 1969. The programs explore a wide range of social, cultural, and political topics, including school desegregation, environmental issues, avant-garde theater, police-minority relations, poverty, elections, student protests, civil unrest, the meat industry, the defense establishment, bias in TV news, and the Vietnam War. Created and funded by the Ford Foundation, and hosted by seasoned network radio broadcaster Edward P. Morgan with assistance from correspondents Tom Pettit and Robert MacNeil.

The full episode, and others from this program, can be viewed online via the American Archive of Public Broadcasting.