In 1969 a struggling Hollywood studio handed a major feature film to a Black director who had never attended film school and had survived his teens playing piano in Midwest brothels. This episode explores the life of Gordon Parks, born in 1912 in segregated Fort Scott, Kansas, the youngest of 15 children, told by a teacher that college would be a waste of money, thrown into a river at 11 by boys who assumed he could not swim, and cast out onto the streets of St. Paul at 15 after his mother's death.

We trace how he quietly studied the wealthy patrons of the Minnesota Club as a busboy, bought a $12.50 camera from a Seattle pawn shop in 1940, and rose with startling speed through fashion work, the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship, and the Farm Security Administration, where his portrait of cleaning woman Ella Watson before an American flag alarmed  ...