'Shaft' Director Gordon Parks Dies at 93

By Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times
March 8 2006, 5:48 AM PST

Gordon Parks, who became the first African American staff photographer at Life magazine in the late 1940s and broke more ground in Hollywood two decades later as the first black person to direct a major studio film, "The Learning Tree," followed by the landmark black private eye movie "Shaft," has died. He was 93.