Documentary Inspired By Charles Blow’s Bestseller ‘The Devil You Know’ Coming From HBO Documentary Films And This Machine
deadline.comEXCLUSIVE: Production is underway on a feature documentary from HBO Documentary Films and This Machine inspired by New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s book The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto.Oscar-nominated filmmaker Sam Pollard and Llewellyn Smith are directing the as-yet-untitled documentary.
Blow’s book, published last year, “calls for a reverse ‘great migration’ of African Americans from the North back to the South to reclaim the land, political representation, and culture that they left behind,” according to a release from HBO, “and in so doing, forever transform the power structure in America.”Between 1916 and 1970 roughly six million African Americans migrated from the rural South to other parts of the country, to seek better economic opportunities and to escape Jim Crow segregation.
Blow writes in his book, “Black people fled the horrors of the racist South for so-called liberal cities of the North and West, trading the devil they knew for the devil they didn’t, only to come to the painful realization that the devil is the devil.”If racism exists everywhere in the U.S., Blow argues, that eliminates one rationale for African Americans to live outside the South.
Not only that, he says the South of today is thriving economically, offering Black people a better standard of living in general than they enjoy in Northern, Midwestern and Western cities.
Read more on deadline.com