Good evening and welcome to another expanded edition of Inside the Cover.

As always, it is an honor and pleasure to join you tonight wherever it is, you watch PBS Kansas.

And I'm excited about our guest and show tonight.

I am your host, Ted Ayres, and our guest tonight, Mark McCormick, is well known in Wichita, in Kansas and beyond.

His credentials could take up our whole time.

So let's get started.

It is now time to go inside the cover.

Mark McCormick is a New York Times bestselling author with 20 years of journalism experience as a reporter, editor and columnist.

He has served as a reporter and columnist for the Wichita Eagle and the Springfield News-Leader.

He has served as Director of Communications for Leadership Kansas, and he continues as a contributing columnist for their journal.

He currently serves as the deputy executive director for Strategic Initiatives for ACLU of Kansas.

Mark is also multitalented, having served two different stints as the Executive Director of the Kansas African American Museum.

However, in his soul, Mark is a writer.

Mark serves as a trustee at the University of Kansas School of Journalism, his alma mater, and he has been a professor in residence at the University of Oklahoma.

He is featured in the best reporting chapter of the journalism textbook, Writing and Reporting News: A Coaching Method.

He has won more than 20 industry and community awards, including five gold medals from the Kansas City Press Club.

Earlier this year, he took second place in column writing from the Kansas Press Association.

Mark has co-written a book about a Wichita legend, Barry Sanders.

In 2015, he coauthored African-Americans of Wichita and in 2017, his book Some Were Paupers, Some Were Kings: Dispatches from Kansas was published by Blue Cedar Press.

I am very proud of the fact that this was the first book we reviewed here on Inside the Cover.

In 2020, Governor Kelly appointed Mark to two commissions the Kansas African-American Affairs Commission, where he serves as chairman of the board and the Commission on Racial Equality and Justice.

And to top it all off, Mark is a member of the North High School Hall of Fame, and I was there at his induction.

Mark McCormick is a dear friend who has a great impact on many lives, including my own.

Tonight, Mark is going to assist me and talking about the books of Kansas's own Renaissance man, an internationally known creative genius, Gordon Parks.

And we may find time to talk about some other issues of interest to all of you, certainly to me.

Mark, welcome to the program.

We are so pleased to have you with us tonight.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

And I want to begin, as we said in the introduction, a brief introduction to Gordon Parks.

And I'm certain that all of our viewers out there are very well aware of Gordon Parks and his career.

But let me just summarize.

Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was born on November 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kansas.

He passed away in New York City on March 7, 2006 at the age of 93.

Gordon was the youngest of 15 children and at age 15, after the death of his mother, Sarah Ross Parks, he basically was put out on his own and had to fend for himself from age 15.

And during that time and as a young man, Parks worked in brothels as a singer and a piano player.

He was a busboy.

He was a waiter.

He also played semi-pro basketball and his talents in the creative area are just unbelievable and so widespread.

Gordon was a photographer.

He had a extremely successful career in film.

In fact, he was the first African-American chosen to direct a movie by a major Hollywood Studio.

Warner Brothers.

He was a musician and a composer.

He was a pianist, although he couldn't read music.

He was a writer of 15 plus books, novels, poetry, autobiographies, nonfiction, photography, instruction manuals.

He was a painter, a choreographer.

He did the ballet in honor of Martin Luther King.

He was a poet.

He worked at Life magazine for 20 plus years.

And again, just an amazing career.

So let's start, Mark, with do you have a favorite Parks book?

I actually do.

I love A Choice of Weapons.

I love the idea of him having to choose which weapon he wanted to confront life with.

I love that.

I actually, though, grew up with a copy of The Learning Tree in our household.

This very this very version.

And what I remember about it was just how battered it was, which meant it had been read several times by my mother, by my sister, and then by me.

It was one of those where I had seen the film, kind of identified with people in the film.

Particularly-- How old were you at this time, Mark?

I was about the same age as the character in the film.

I was about the same age as Newt, and there was so much about him that I could see myself in.

And I think I mean, if you're going to be successful in any kind of literature, it's you're going to have to have some kind of universal quality.

And he had this universal quality in that Newt character, at least as far as I was concerned.

Those were the two.

But A Choice of Weapons was really my favorite.

And what was it about it you started to touch upon it.

What was it about Choice of Weapons that really you found so validating, so impactful?

So Gordon was kind of in that book, kind of an everyman, and there was an innocence and earnestness about him and that's kind of where I kind of put myself as a teenager.

But all those struggles that he went through and despite that, he was using all of his creative outlets almost simultaneously to move out of these bad situations that he was in.

And he was constantly climbing and he was constantly looking for new things to challenge himself with.

Well, absolutely.

And of course, that is one of the things about Gordon that I so admired and so loved was that he was always creative and he never stopped trying to develop himself and enhance his talents.

And as we know, he began his photography career at Life magazine, where he spent 20 plus years as a photographer and as a writer telling so many powerful stories.

And of course, at that point in time, Life magazine was the Google of the time.

It almost every home had a copy of Life magazine on the coffee table and his work there with the black and white photography.

But as we've talked about, he continued to expand and got into color photography and the work that you mentioned in his later years is just fabulously creative.

You were-- I was listening to th which was a fantastic intro, by the way, but it would almost be easier to talk about what Gordon Parks did not do as opposed to all the things that he did do.

It's a much shorter list.

Yeah, exactly.

Again, Choice of Weapons is a very powerful book.

And of course, it is one of four memoirs that Gordon wrote about himself.

And I think you probably recall the a little story that his son David told about.

David said, “Dad.

Why is it that you write so many books about yourself?

” and Gordon said, “I just have more things to say, ” but and Choice of Weapons, as you know, he really talks about his time in Kansas and the struggles that he had as a black young man and a black young adult, but consciously chose his camera as a way to expose, discuss, address racism and discrimination.

And I think that's one of the reasons why that book is so powerful.

It really resonates with me on a number of levels.

On one level, it's almost unfair that this one person had so much talent.

You're talking about a person who not long after he had picked up a camera for the first time, people were already admiring his work.

Right.

And then he decides, well, maybe I'm going to write.

And then he writes with such power.

There a reference to a tense situation that he was in on a streetcar.

He was young and he was hungry.

And he had noticed that the conductor had, you know, a big wad of bills.

And the way he describes that moment about pushing the button on the blade and hearing it click, and that click made the conductor turn.

And then he he described the conductor looking calmly at him and looking calmly at the blade.

And then he's talking about perspiration rolling down his armpit.

And it was fantastic writing.

Nobody has any business with that kind of talent.

And we're only scratching the surface.

And, you know, he is a kid basically telling that story when it happened.

And it's just he had an indescribable talent for communication.

And I would be remiss because I think Gordon is overlooked as a poet.

I love his poetry and he has a number of books, including this one called A Poet and his Camera.

And probably my favorite poem of Gordon Parks is called Kansas Land.

So I'd like to read that for our audience.

“I would miss this Kansas land that I was leaving wide prairie field of green and corn stalk, the flowering apple tall elms and oaks bordering streams that gurgle, rivers rolling, quiet and long summers of sleepy days for fishing, for swimming, for catching crawdads beneath the rock cloud tufts billowing across the round blue sky Butterflies to chase through grass high as the chin Junebugs, swallowtails, red robin and bobolink, nights filled of soft laughter, fireflies and restless stars The winding sound of crickets rubbing dampness from their wings Silver September Rain, Orange Red brown October and white Decembers With hungry smells of hams and pork butts curing in the smokehouse.

Yes, all of this I would miss, along with the fear, hatred and violence we blacks had suffered upon this beautiful land.

” So, so powerful.

Did I ever tell you that that poem inspired a stanza in a poem that I wrote in college?

No.

“A child chasing butterflies through summer warmed weeds.

Later mama kisses and caresses his knees.

” Wow.

Awesome.

Well, and of course I am, I believe I know.

I certainly am hopeful that the life of Gordon Parks should be a symbol, a encouragement for young-- all of us, actually.

But certainly young people.

I mentioned in the introduction, Mark, that the book about Barry Sanders.

First of all, tell us, tell our audience how you came to write that book.

Well, Barry and I were were friends from the time we started school.

In fact, we met on the kindergarten bus.

You know, that we would take home every day.

Did he make the North High School, the Hall of Fame, before you did?

You know, I think so.

Strange.

You know, how do these things happen?

Yeah.

I mean, you know, what does the person have to do to get recognized around here?

So but yeah, that was first.

But we'd always been friends.

And I think what really what really put me in that position, you'd have to go back to when he was a sophomore at Oklahoma State and he was having this incredible breakout season.

I think he was the first or the only person to begin two football seasons with a 100 yard kickoff return.

And so as his star was rising, people were showing up at the Oklahoma State practices, wanting to sign him for commercials, wanting to sign him.

You know, there were agents there trying to recruit him.

And it was all overwhelming.

He gave me a call in Lawrence and he said, this is this is crazy.

Do you think you could get away and come down and hang out for a couple of days?

So I went down there and hung out for a couple of days and I ended up writing a piece for the Wichita Eagle while I was still a student at t I wrote a piece for The Eagle about what the Heisman race was like for him.

And so that was like the first time that we had written together.

So years later, we're on vacation and it's just a down moment.

And he said, I'm thinking of retiring.

And I was I was stunned for a moment.

And then he started to talk about, you know, what it took for someone like him to perform at such a high level for so long.

And then it began to make sense.

And he did another season went into that last season, and I think that was the season where he decided, Hey, this is time.

And I had told him that if you ever do that, I'd like to write about it.

And then sometime later, he said, Now's the time.

I'm writing the letter.

Can you help me with the letter?

And we were faxing it back and forth to each other.

His letter of retirement.

A letter of retirement that we were working on.

And, you know, this wasn't really pre email, but I was trying to be conscious of how we could be discovered emailing back and forth.

So we were using the fax machine and we were using a fake name.

I think I had named him B Abernathy, and that's how we were faxing the letter back and forth, working on it until we got it done.

And then when he sent the fax, he immediately got on a plane and flew to London.

And so then when did you begin writing of the book?

Maybe a year or two later, maybe a year or two later.

And that a project where you worked together or you led in the writing and Barry would comment, how did that work?

It was a little bit of both.

Having known him for so long and and us having been as close as we were for so long, I knew a lot of the stories.

A lot of what I didn't know came out of maybe two or three really long interviews where I went to where he was visiting or had business.

And I-- wed sit and we'd talk f hours and I would take notes.

It was basically from those meetings and all those notes that I would go back and write.

We had three chapters that we were using to shop the book to publishers.

And this is interesting.

There were a lot of people who at the time didn't think that Barry was going to be a Hall of Famer.

Which is-- Which blows my mind.

Exactly.

These are clearly people who didn't know football.

I mean, Barry was something like Halley's Comet.

You just.

Didnt know football.

And they didn't know Barry Sanders.

Didnt know either.

And we were at practice, for example, I was on the team and we're playing the Oklahoma drill and it's just two tires and two people.

And, you know, you're supposed to be in between those tires.

People still couldn't touch him.

It was almost like you could be in a phone booth with him and you couldn't touch him.

It was that amazing.

And so anyway, we we did finally manage to sell the book to a publisher, and we decided we wanted the book to be released right after Thanksgiving.

You know, that Black Friday day.

And we started counting back.

They said, oh, we'll need this book in two weeks.

So I wrote the the bulk of the book in two weeks beyond those three chapters.

Wow.

Well, and as I understand it, I think around 20 years later, you there's an update of the book out now.

Yes.

Since Barry was number 20 when he played for the Lions, his agent was thinking, hey, a 20 year reflection on that book would be appropriate.

And so we started working on on some updates.

You know, Barry lost his dad.

His kids grew up.

He has a kid now who's a walk on at Michigan State playing basketball for Tom Izzo.

And so there were a lot of things that we wanted to to update, and we did that.

And at the same time, NFL Films wanted to do a biography or documentary of Barry that looked more at his life.

And it was the same person who did the NFL films version of his documentary.

And so the book and the documentary have the same name.

And what is that name?

Bye bye, Barry.

Like, “bye bye Barry ”.

And can our viewers, that available to the public either way?

It absolutely is, Amazon.

And I think we had a conversation it's an e-book.

It's an e-book.

But you can also purchase a paperback version of it as well.

All right.

Well, congratulations on that.

Well, thank you.

We'll be excited because as you know, I read the first one.

And so I'll be excited to read this update.

And in the time we have left, I mean, there's so many things we could talk about.

That's what I love about this show and the guest we have.

But I'd seen recently a I'm going to call it an editorial commentary that you wrote about the 1619 Project.

Can you tell us a little bit about what your comments were, what you were writing about?

Well, the 1619 Project has become the focus of a great deal of frustration for some people.

And I think that's because so much of our history as a country is history that people do not know about.

I am convinced more than ever, and this is not my line.

This is a line that I got from a professor, Professor Hassan Kwame Jeffries at Ohio State.

And he says it's not history in this country that we love.

It's nostalgia.

And what the 1619 Project did was it exploded this notion of this common notion of history that we have that is little more than nostalgia.

Race was an organizing principle in the organizing of this society.

And yet so much of what has happened to African-Americans in this country, people have no clue about.

And so what we're getting now is this dissonance between the history that she's sharing and writing about in that book and the common ideas that we have about the culture.

And it's unsettling and it's unhousing for some people.

And so they're pushing back on it hard.

And the point I was trying to make in the piece was that this is not someone who should be attacked.

This is someone that should be listened to because it will make us all better.

You know, if we can't talk about that.

So important.

If we can't talk about what's on the table, we're never going to resolve it.

Well, I totally agree.

And for our audience, just to make certain that everybody knows.

The book is called The 1619 Project A New Origin Story and the-- I'll say author I think she was really editor.

There's Nikole Hannah-Jones and it's really an important read.

And as Mark has said, one and I think we all should be well aware of and not be fearful, but respect.

Well, another important point here.

So there is a professor at the University of Kansas named Shawn Leigh Alexander.

Shawn was one of the peer editors on that project.

So, you know, there's some there's a tie to Kansas here that we ought to be proud of.

And she spoke in Kansas City recently, and I got to see her in person.

And that was the impetus for that particular column.

Well, and I would be remiss-- You and I talked about it earlier, Mark, but we've talked about Gordon Parks as a Kansan and his impact on the world.

And I want to also point out and tell our viewers that the Gordon Parks Museum in Fort Scott is really well worth a visit.

Kirk Sharp is the director there.

And Kirk does a wonderful job and they've recently put together a tour of the various sites that were a part of the filming of The Learning Tree in Fort Scott.

So again, that is very, very wonderful.

But-- Could I say one more thing?

Sure.

I would be remiss if I didn't point out to the audience that we have the collection of his collected works here in the state in large part because of your efforts.

Yeah.

Thank you.

You're very kind.

And as I say, it was Mark McCormick that planted that seed.

So it was certainly a wonderful effort.

But I want to go back to the impact of Kansas and going back to Gordon Parks and and maybe I'll tell my director and staff here, this is the opportunity to work in the soundtrack from Shaft, but the soundtrack for Shaft that first movie that Gordon mad or the first one that really was not The Learning Tree, but the next one in the character Shaft.

Isaac Hayes wrote the music for that soundtrack.

And Isaac Hayes won an Academy Award for that soundtrack.

And I was just so interested to learn that he was the third African-American to win an Oscar.

After who?

Hattie McDaniel from Wichita, Kansas, and Sidney Poitier.

So again, the impact that Kansas has had, it just pretty amazing.

You know, when I was at the when I was at TKAAM, I used to tell people at national conventions that this was the indispensable state when it came to those those kind of discussions.

One last question, Mark.

What led you into journalism?

My sister.

My sister was 15 when I was born.

She was a lot like another mom.

But my sister was the high school journalist of the year.

Her name's Chandra McCormick.

She was the high school journalist of the Year at Southeast High School, and she had a little Jayhawk book.

And when she went off to school, she would write us letters.

And I remember my mother reading the letters and I would be sitting on the floor looking up at her while she was writing, the while she was reading the letters.

And I just remember being small and thinking, I would really like to write like that someday.

So she really was my inspiration.

That and then the fact that we had Gordon Parks photography books in the house and we had The Learning Tree in the house.

And I was, I was always interested in photography and we had photographs of my parents when they were young that hung on the walls.

And I was like kind of fascinated by it.

And when I got to middle school, that's when I, you know, really gotten to journalism and decided, Hey, I think this is what I want to do.

I think I have an aptitude for it.

And you certainly do.

And the world is a better place because of your career and your writing talents.

That's our show.

Mark, thank you so much for joining us.

I want the audience to know that Mark braved -16 wind chill to drive to Wichita.

Both ways!

Both ways.

And on Martin Luther King Day.

So very appropriate.

But thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for watching the show being with us tonight.

Hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

Again, our guest has been Mark McCormick, and we've covered a number of subjects and we always look forward to seeing you the next time here on Inside the Cover and our Expanded Edition.

Good night.