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    ‘South to Black Power’ Review: A Great Migration in Reverse

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    In a new documentary, the opinion columnist Charles M. Blow calls for Black Americans to move to the South to gain political footholds.The documentary “South to Black Power” — directed by Sam Pollard and Llewellyn M. Smith — employs many of the gestures a newspaper opinion piece might. Which is apt, since Charles M. Blow, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, is the film’s searching guide — but also, at times, its expounding subject.Based on his 2021 book, “The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto,” the film revisits Blow’s argument that the only way for Black Americans “to lift the burden of white supremacy” is head to the South. With this “Great Migration in reverse,” they can build a majority and take hold of the political levers of those states and their legislatures.During the 2020 presidential election, Georgia, where Blow now resides, offered tantalizing evidence of the kind of might he envisions. In this documentary, which is filmed in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, Blow visits Mississippi, Alabama, the Carolinas (with a warm stopover at his childhood home in Gibsland, La.).He bolsters his thesis but also stress tests it with people who have never left, who have left and returned, or, like the author Jemar Tisby, who have put down new roots with uplift in mind.In a nice bit of journalistic even-handedness, several of Blow’s interviewees are not entirely convinced by his thesis, or they believe there are other paths to political gains. For example, the community strategist Asiaha Butler shares why she decided to stay in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, despite the gun violence and the tug of family in the South. Her story of how seeing a young girl playing alone in a vacant lot and throwing bottles into the street cinched it — she had to remain — is as moving as it is authentic. And her reasons are as committed to empowering Black Americans where they are as Blow’s call for mass migration.South to Black PowerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      Two Documentaries on School Integration Offer New Views of an Old Problem

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      Premiering in September, the films take very different looks at what has and hasn’t changed in the almost 70 years since Brown v. Board of Education.You most likely know that the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education ruled that racial segregation in U.S. public schools was unconstitutional. You may also know that the decision ordered states to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.”Less talked about is the 1969 decision in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, which, after years of obstruction by many states through the 1950s and 60s, ordered that racially segregated schools must immediately desegregate. In other words: You know what we said back in 1954? We actually meant it.Black and white students rode the bus together as Black students from the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston were bused to mostly white enclaves of South Boston.Associated PressSome of the ramifications and subsequent events are captured in two complementary documentaries from the PBS “American Experience” series. “The Busing Battleground,” directed by Sharon Grimberg and Cyndee Readdean, explores the long buildup to and catastrophic results of busing in Boston, by which students were bused to schools outside their neighborhoods in an effort to desegregate the public school system. Busing saw the city explode in violence and exposed the ferocity with which residents were willing to defends ethnic neighborhood borders. It premieres on Sept. 11.“The Harvest,” produced by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Douglas A. Blackmon and the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sam Pollard, takes Blackmon back to the small Mississippi town where he grew up, where he was part of the first local class of integrated students to matriculate from first grade to high school. It premieres on Sept. 12.The films arrive at a time when many of the hard-fought gains of desegregation have been reversed and when some schools, according to a report released in May by the U.S. Department of Education, are more segregated than they were before courts intervened. Both underscore what has changed — and what hasn’t — in the almost 70 years since Brown while also questioning tidy presumptions.“These two stories are in conversation with each other,” said Cameo George, the executive producer of “American Experience.” “In some ways they’re almost counterintuitive, because we are all accustomed to thinking that integration in the South was violent, and in the North communities were much more open and progressive. By putting the films together, it just challenges your assumptions in a really interesting way.”Both films also grapple with an unavoidable question: Why has the process been so difficult?Today, when segregation is rife in even some of the country’s most ostensibly liberal enclaves, the reasons aren’t always plain or openly acknowledged. In the decades following Brown, they were often pretty overt. A lot of white parents, in the supposedly enlightened North as well as the historically segregated South, were willing to go to great lengths to keep their children away from their Black peers. And a lot of politicians were happy to help them make it so.When many people think about segregated facilities — schools, water fountains, restrooms — they think about the Jim Crow South. But “The Busing Battleground” shows just how determined many white citizens were to keep Boston schools segregated, particularly in the largely Irish enclaves of South Boston and Charlestown.Many teens and parents hurled bricks, bottles, rocks and racist insults at the buses bringing Black students to South Boston High School in 1974. Donald Preston/The Boston Globe, via Getty ImagesThese were self-enclosed neighborhoods that didn’t cotton to change, or to Black people. “The Busing Battleground” shows how Black Bostonians, led by the tireless Ruth Batson, tried to integrate the city’s schools by way of the ballot box, direct action and the courts. The white people in power, led by Louise Day Hicks, then the head of the Boston School Committee, stonewalled and riled up public support for the status quo.“All the liberal, white, ‘Oh, that stuff happens in the South, we’re so progressive’ stuff just got thrown right out the window,” Readdean said in a video this month. “Nobody was progressive anymore.”Grimberg, on the same video call, added: “Our hope is that people see this as an important Northern civil rights story. We’ve heard lots of Southern stories, but this is a story of a very long, protracted struggle for educational rights for Black kids in the North.”By 1974, when the Federal judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. mandated the integration of Boston schools by busing, the tension had long been building. Images captured from the first days of busing, when Black students from Roxbury came to South Boston High School, remain disorienting in their violence. Many teens and their parents hurled bricks, bottles and rocks at the buses — and hurled the N-word with abandon. As you watch, you have to keep reminding yourself that this is a Northern city in the 1970s.One of the most potent and memorable images of the period, a Pulitzer-winning photo by Stanley Forman, shot during a Bicentennial protest by white high schoolers against busing, shows a Black attorney and civil rights activist, Ted Landsmark, being held by a couple of white protesters while another moves to assault him with an American flag. Landsmark is interviewed in the film, describing how he feared for his life on that day.“The Harvest,” too, features an image from Bicentennial commemorations, this one from Blackmon’s small hometown, Leland, Miss. The home movie shows a festive and peaceful parade through downtown, with Black and white Cub Scouts stepping in unison while a band, which includes a young Blackmon, marches along.As seen in “The Harvest”: Striking sharecroppers camped out in Washington, across from the White House, in 1966 after being kicked off their land near Leland, Miss.Scherman Rowland/UMass AmherstThe integration of Leland public schools wasn’t always so idyllic, as the film makes clear. But compared to what was happening in Boston, which one observer describes as “up South,” the Leland process was indeed a stroll down the street.Blackmon, who is white, was part of Leland’s class of 1982, the first integrated group of students to matriculate through the town’s public schools. (He did his senior year in another town after his father got a new job.) He recalled an upbringing defined by interracial friendships at school that generally didn’t carry over after the final bell rang — when, for instance, he wanted to play G.I. Joe dolls with his Black friends, and parents on both sides of the racial divide discouraged it.What he didn’t realize then was that the new private schools popping up after the 1969 Supreme Court decision were organized largely by White Citizens’ Councils — essentially white-collar versions of the Ku Klux Klan — with secret covenants to exclude Black teachers and students. Beneath the placid surface, Leland’s schools were resegregating.“There really was this overt plan to create a whole new system of schools, and to try to extract, if possible, all white kids from the public schools and then to actively undermine those schools,” Blackmon said from a family lake house in South Carolina. “But Leland was different in that it avoided some of that incredibly rough stuff that did happen in some other places in the South, and that we certainly saw in Boston.”Blackmon and his co-producer, Pollard, who is Black, worked together previously on the 2012 documentary adaptation of Blackmon’s 2009 book “Slavery by Another Name,” an account of the Jim Crow-era convict leasing system, for which he won a Pulitzer. It made sense to have a racially integrated creative team for such a contentious story. The makers of “The Busing Battleground” also found this to be the case.“It was valuable to have the two of us on this project,” Readdean, who is Black, said. “Sometimes, especially because the subject’s so raw for the people that lived through it, some of the whites maybe were more forthcoming talking to Sharon than they would have been with me. We wanted interviews with truthful recollection, not something where they’re trying to be all P.C.The Leland High School basketball team, as seen in the 1979 yearbook. The journalist Douglas A. Blackmon is at the far left in the back row.Leland School District“I felt the same way when we were talking with the Black participants, that they could just reveal what they wanted to reveal talking to me.”Both films come to the same unfortunate if inevitable conclusion: The schools of Boston and Leland have largely resegregated since the ’70s, with many white families fleeing to private or parochial schools, or to the suburbs. But Blackmon found some silver linings in the lives of his Black former classmates, some of whom left and came back to fill key municipal positions.One, Jessie King, is now the school district’s superintendent, at a time when Mississippi’s public schools are on the upswing. Another, Billy Barber, is police chief.They are the better part of the harvest that gives the film its title, residents who seized new opportunities and then gave back to the community where they were raised. They’re a reminder that not all of the purpose and intent that accompanied the integration of Leland schools have faded.“At a very fundamental level, the lesson and the takeaway is that you reap what you sow,” said George, the executive producer. “If you want a better educated population, and you want kids to graduate with not just academic skills, but personal skills, so that they can become productive members of the work force and productive members of society, you have to invest in that. 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      Five Questions for the Director of the Documentary ‘The League’

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      Five questions for the director Sam Pollard about his documentary, and the preservation of the history of the Negro leagues.Sam Pollard’s documentary “The League” introduces audiences to the teams, stars and little-known figures who populated the Negro leagues by chronicling how Black professional baseball first sprouted. It covers the period from just before the majors instituted a gentlemen’s agreement banning African Americans from playing with white players, to the Negro leagues becoming one of America’s biggest Black-owned businesses, to its demise.Archival footage and interviews with former players, along with the words of the former Negro league umpire Bob Motley (narrated by Pollard), bring to life the athletic feats and civil rights achievements by people like Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson and more who made the space between the white lines a more fully realized Black experience.In an audio interview, Pollard spoke about how he set about constructing his film, and the ways he connected the Negro leagues to the Civil Rights movement. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation.Where did you find the archival Negro league interviews?We were very fortunate that the project was initiated by Byron Motley, who, with his dad, Bob Motley, a former Negro league umpire in the 1940s and 1950s, wrote a memoir about those days growing up in the South, becoming a baseball fan and loving the Negro leagues, and after World War II becoming an umpire. Byron also interviewed, through his dad, former Negro league players on video. He had access to that material too. That was a very important element.With Negro league box scores difficult to come by, how were you able to formulate the statistics that appear in the film?One of our advisers and one of the people we interviewed is a fanatic about Negro league statistics. That’s Larry Lester. He’s done a deep, deep dive into the statistics of players like Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. That’s where we were able to compare the batting percentage of Josh Gibson against Barry Bonds. That’s where we were able to compare the pitching percentage of Satchel Paige versus Nolan Ryan. Because Larry Lester really has done his homework. So, these stories don’t feel apocryphal anymore. They feel very cemented in facts.The director Sam Pollard.Magnolia PicturesHow does the film tell the story of Black baseball in Latin America?I mean, the fact that a lot of Latin players who were dark-skinned couldn’t play in major leagues, they had to play in the Negro leagues; and vice versa, when the Negro league season was over, a lot of these players went to the Caribbean and Mexico to play. It’s amazing to think about when the major leagues were integrated, by the 1960s, a lot of Latin players who had been informed by watching Negro league players play, were inspired to play baseball.It’s a rich story. Some of the footage we got, for example, the American poet and writer, Quincy Troupe, who wrote the book “Miles: The Autobiography” with Miles Davis; his dad, who’s also named Quincy Troupe, was a Negro league catcher. Some of the footage in this film was from his archives, such as footage of him traveling to these Latin American countries. So, it was an opportunity to tell a richer and more complicated story.Why link the Negro leagues to the Civil Rights Movement?America as we know it is a very complicated place, but its history is based on systemic racism. We’ve gone through many trials and tribulations in the evolution of this history. Black folks had to build our own communities. You saw these communities built in places like New York’s Harlem or Chicago’s Bronzeville, or Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Okla. By living together, we had to rely on each other in terms of entertainment and economics. There was no way you could tell the story of the Negro leagues without telling the story of the larger perspective of Black communities from the 1920s all the way up until integration really took hold.Why did you decide to end the story before getting to African Americans in contemporary baseball?Think of it this way, this film is an hour and 46 minutes. If we were to go into the material you’re talking about, which is obviously very vital and important in understanding the state of American baseball today — that story needs to be told — you can’t do justice to that story by trying to cram in another four or five minutes in this film. That wouldn’t be fair. From my perspective, we’re still a little tight because we’re still trying to get some information in at the very end. If I can raise the money, that’d be the next film: What happened to the African American explosion in baseball? By the late 1970s, early 1980s, it dwindled. Why did it dwindle? That’s a good question. More

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      ‘The League’ Review: A Crucial Baseball Legacy

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      Sam Pollard’s new documentary traces the history of the Negro leagues.If you thought that Jackie Robinson was the first Black player in professional baseball, “The League” would like to offer a correction. Moses Fleetwood Walker became a catcher for the Toledo Blue Stockings in 1884, before organized baseball was segregated and more than 60 years before Robinson broke the major leagues’ color line.This documentary from Sam Pollard (“MLK/FBI”) traces the history of the Negro leagues that formed in the intervening years. And while the sport’s post-World War II integration was long overdue — one commentator cites the absurdity of Black and white men fighting together at Guadalcanal but being banned from competing on a diamond — “The League” notes that, as the majors grabbed star players without buying out their contracts, the Negro leagues and the economic communities built around them never received adequate compensation.Pollard presents the subject matter straightforwardly, occasionally dryly, with authors, historians and — in archival material — the players themselves sharing stories of team rivalries and of visionary owners. Among the (sometimes tragic) figures singled out are Rube Foster, credited here with increasing the tempo of the game and persuading other team owners to form a league; Josh Gibson, who still has one of the best season batting averages ever recorded; and Effa Manley, an owner of the Newark Eagles, a team raided for talent after the color barrier fell. The film even complicates the picture on some baseball legends. Larry Lester, a founder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, notes that when Babe Ruth set the home run record — later broken by Hank Aaron — he did it at a time when racism had kept out many of the best pitchers.This history has surely been well-covered elsewhere, but “The League” recounts it movingly.The LeagueRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power’ Review: A Movement That Changed America

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      With arresting interviews and archival footage, this documentary looks back at a 1960s voting-rights campaign in Alabama that gave rise to a national movement for Black power.“Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power” opens with interviews with men and women who grew up in the titular Alabama county in the 1960s. The Black interviewees, children of sharecroppers, recall an atmosphere of poverty, racism and bloody violence; their white counterparts, members of landowning families, remember a “peaceful, almost idyllic place.”These discrepant versions of life in Lowndes set the stage for Sam Pollard and Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary, which retraces the story of how one of the most inequitable, fiercely segregated counties in America gave rise to a national movement for Black power. In 1965, Lowndes had no registered Black voters, despite its population being 80 percent Black. The directors follow the ripples of change that started when a local man, John Hulett, began organizing Black voters, culminating in the founding of a new party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, with an influential symbol: the black panther.The film teases out one of the many microhistories in the Civil Rights movement. Notably, Lowndes did not see the sustained involvement of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; instead, its grass-roots struggle drew the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, led by Stokely Carmichael, which took a more local — and more radical — approach.Yet the power of the collective, more so than any individuals, is the focus here. The film is anchored with the arresting faces of Lowndes locals and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizers, who recall a range of stirring details — from setting up camp in a house with no running water to internal debates over the term “Black power.” The archival footage, too, mixes protest images and quotidian scenes, illustrating the simple acts of community that underlie any political movement.Lowndes County and the Road to Black PowerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Black Art: In the Absence of Light’ Reveals a History of Neglect and Triumph

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘Black Art: In the Absence of Light’ Reveals a History of Neglect and TriumphAn HBO documentary explores two centuries of art by African-Americans, and the path they forged for contemporary Black artists.Kerry James Marshall’s ‘‘Untitled (Studio)’’ (2014) appears in “Black Art: In the Absence of Light,” a documentary film directed by Sam Pollard.Credit…HBOFeb. 8, 2021Updated 3:56 p.m. ETBlack Art: In the Absence of LightNYT Critic’s Pick“This is Black art. And it matters. And it’s been going on for two hundred years. Deal with it.”So declares the art historian Maurice Berger toward the beginning of “Black Art: In the Absence of Light,” a rich and absorbing documentary directed by Sam Pollard (“MLK/FBI”) and debuting on HBO Tuesday night.The feature-length film, assembled from interviews with contemporary artists, curators and scholars, was inspired by a single 1976 exhibition, “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” the first large-scale survey of African-American artists. Organized by the artist David C. Driskell, who was then-head of the art department at Fisk University, it included some 200 works dating from the mid-18th to the mid-20th century, and advanced a history that few Americans, including art professionals, even knew existed.The HBO documentary recalls a landmark show “Two Centuries of Black American Art” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1976. It was organized by David C. Driskell.Credit…Museum Associates/LACMAThe press gave that survey a mixed reception. Some writers griped that it was more about sociology than art (Driskell himself didn’t entirely disagree). But the show was a popular hit. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it originated, and then at major museums in Dallas, Atlanta and Brooklyn, people lined up to see it.What they were seeing was that Black artists had always done distinctive work in parallel to, and some within, a white-dominated mainstream that ignored them. And they were seeing that Black artists had consistently made, and are continuing to make, some of the most conceptually exciting and urgent-minded American art, period — a reality only quite recently acknowledged by the art world at large, as reflected in exhibitions, sales and critical attention.Driskell appeared in the HBO documentary before he died last year. “Isolation isn’t, and never was, the Black artist’s goal,” he said. “He has tried to be part and parcel of the mainstream, only to be shut out.”Credit…HBOThe HBO documentary introduces us to this history of long neglect and recent correction through the eloquent voices of three people who lived both sides of it: Driskell, a revered painter and teacher; Mary Schmidt Campbell, the president of Spelman College in Atlanta, Ga., and former director of the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Berger, an esteemed art historian and curator. (The film is dedicated to the two men, both of whom died from complications related to Covid-19 in 2020, Driskell at 88, Berger at 63.)They’re surrounded by artists, most of them painters, of various generations. Some had careers that were well underway by 1976 (Betye Saar, for example, and Richard Mayhew, who was in the survey). Others were, at that point, just starting out in the field. (Kerry James Marshall remembers being blown away by a visit to the show when he was 21). Still others — Kehinde Wiley (born 1977) and Jordan Casteel (born 1989) — weren’t born when the survey opened but still count themselves among its beneficiaries.The portraitist Jordan Casteel discusses how she finds her subjects on streets.Credit…HBOMarshall in his studio explains the many colors he uses that are “Black.”Credit…HBOThe question arises early in the film — in a 1970s “Today Show” interview with Driskell by Tom Brokaw — as to whether the very use of the label “Black American art” isn’t itself a form of imposed isolation. Yes, Driskell says, but in this case a strategic one. “Isolation isn’t, and never was, the Black artist’s goal. He has tried to be part and parcel of the mainstream, only to be shut out. Had this exhibition not been organized many of the artists in it would never have been seen.”The film refers, in shorthand form, to past examples of shutting-out. There’s a reference to the Metropolitan Museum’s 1969 “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900-1968,” an exhibition that was advertised as introducing Black creativity to the Met but that contained little in the way of art. And mention is made of artists’ protests of the Whitney Museum’s 1971 survey “Contemporary Black Artists in America,” which was left entirely in the hands of a white curator.A book of essays titled “Black Art Notes,” printed that year in response to the Whitney show, accused white museums of “artwashing” through the token inclusion of African-American work, a charge that has continuing pertinence. (The collection was recently reissued, in a facsimile edition, by Primary Information, a nonprofit press in Brooklyn.) Even before the Met and Whitney shows, Black artists saw the clear necessity of taking control of how and where their art was seen into their own hands. Ethnically specific museums began to spring up — outstandingly, in 1968, the Studio Museum in Harlem.The 1969 exhibition “Harlem on My Mind” resulted in demonstrators picketing outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Credit…Jack Manning/The New York TimesWe’re talking about a dense, complex history. No one film can hope to get all of it, and this one leaves a lot out. (Mention of the Black Power movement is all but absent here.) Still, there’s a lot, encapsulated in short, deft commentary by scholars and curators, among them Campbell, Sarah Lewis of Harvard University, Richard J. Powell of Duke University, and Thelma Golden, the current director and chief curator of the Studio Museum. (Golden is a consulting producer of the film. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is its executive producer.)Rightfully, and delightfully, the majority of voices are those of active artists. Faith Ringgold, now 90, wasn’t in the 1976 show, or in big museums much at all, because, she asserts, her work was too political and because she’s female. (Of the 63 artists in “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” 54 were male.) Her solution? “I just stay out till I get in,” she says. And persisting has paid off: Her monumental 1967 painting “American People Series #20: Die” has pride of place in the Museum of Modern Art’s current permanent collection rehang.)Faith Ringgold said she was excluded from the black and mainstream art movement because she was female. “I just stay out till I get in,” she said.Credit…HBOThe artist Fred Wilson explains his use of objects and cultural symbols to explore historical narratives in sculptures and installations.Credit…HBOParticularly interesting are segments showing artists at work and talking about what they’re doing as they’re doing it. We visit Marshall in his studio as he explains the many, many paint colors he uses that are “black.” We follow Fred Wilson into museum storage as he excavated objects that will become part of one of his history-baring installations. We watch Radcliffe Bailey transform hundreds of discarded piano keys into a Middle Passage ocean. And we tag along with the portraitist Jordan Casteel, who recently wrapped up a well-received show at the New Museum, as she seeks out sitters on Harlem streets.There’s no question that the visibility of African-American artists in the mainstream is way higher now than it’s ever been. (Thank you, Black Lives Matter.) A big uptick in shows is one measure. Landmark events like the 2018 unveiling of the Obama portraits by Wiley and Amy Sherald is another.In an interview in the film Sherald brings up this sudden surge of attention. “A lot of galleries are now picking up Black artists,” she says. “There’s this gold rush.” But where some observers would see the interest as just a next-hot-thing marketing trend driven by a branding of “Blackness,” she doesn’t. “I say it’s because we’re making some of the best work, and most relevant work.”In 2018, Kehinde Wiley, left, unveiled his painting of Barack Obama, alongside Amy Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama, at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Credit…Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesThe point of Pollard’s film, which was also the point of Driskell’s 1976 survey, is to demonstrate that, and to demonstrate that Black artists have been making some of the best work and the most relevant work for decades, centuries. But they’ve been making it mostly on the margins, beyond the white art world’s spotlights.The artist Theaster Gates, who appears toward the end of the film, sees the advantage, even the necessity, of that positioning.“Black art means that sometimes I’m making when no one’s looking,” he says. “For the most part that has been the truth of our lives. Until we own the light, I’m not happy. Until we’re in our own houses of exhibitions, of discovery, of research, until we’ve figured out a way to be masters of the world, I’d rather work in darkness. I don’t want to work only when the light comes on. My fear is that we’re being trained and conditioned to only make if there’s a light, and that makes us codependent upon a thing we don’t control. Are you willing,” he asks his fellow artists, “to make in the absence of light?”Driskell, to whom this film really belongs and with whose presence it concludes, also leaves the question of the future of Black art open-ended. Around it, he’s says, “there’s been an awakening, an enlightenment through education, a desire to want to know. On the other hand, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. : We haven’t reached the promised land. We’ve got a long way to go.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More