‘South to Black Power’ Review: Back to a Future

The documentary “South to Black Power” — directed by Sam Pollard and Llewellyn M. Smith — employs most of the gestures a newspaper opinion piece would possibly. Which is apt, since Charles M. Blow, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, is the movie’s looking out information — but additionally, at instances, its expounding topic.

Based on his 2021 e-book, “The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto,” the movie revisits Blow’s argument that the one approach for Black Americans “to lift the burden of white supremacy” is head to the South. With this “Great Migration in reverse,” they will construct a majority and grasp the political levers of these states and their legislatures.

During the 2020 presidential election, Georgia, the place Blow now resides, provided tantalizing proof of the type of would possibly he envisions. In this documentary, which is filmed within the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections, Blow visits Mississippi, Alabama, the Carolinas (with a heat visit his childhood house in Gibsland, La.).

He bolsters his thesis but additionally stress assessments it with individuals who have by no means left, who’ve left and returned, or, just like the creator Jemar Tisby, who’ve put down new roots with uplift in thoughts.

In a pleasant little bit of journalistic even-handedness, a number of of Blow’s interviewees aren’t solely satisfied by his thesis, or they consider there are different paths to political positive aspects. For instance, the group strategist Asiaha Butler shares why she determined to remain in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, regardless of the gun violence and the tug of household within the South. Her story of how seeing a younger lady enjoying alone in a vacant lot and throwing bottles into the road cinched it — she needed to stay — is as shifting as it’s genuine. And her causes are as dedicated to empowering Black Americans the place they’re as Blow’s name for mass migration.

South to Black Power
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch on Max.