Bogle’s definition of “black filmic sensibility” in the 1990s largely applies to the “surprising subtexts” and “unusual ways” in which Black films depicted Black characters — circumventing the “old types” (295–296). This summer, before reading Bogle, I’d watched Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) and found myself pleasantly impressed with the pictures “Black filmic sensibility.” I most admired Franklin’s film for what Bogle calls “a distinct new twist: this time everything comes from the point of view of an African American man” (332). But rather than the twenty-first century cross-over films that continue to insert white savior characters into — sometimes historical — Black stories, the perspective lies solely with the protagonist, Denzel Washington’s Easy.
The first half of this chapter also intrigued me in its quick mention of a Spike Lee documentary, Four Little Girls (1997), “about the four black children who were killed in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. This was the first I’d heard of this film, despite being born in Birmingham and growing up in its suburb of Vestavia Hills, just minutes away. I immediately added the film to my watchlist and wondered how it was possible that I learned so little about a white supremacist terrorist attack that occurred not far from where I live and not far into the past. But this passing mention, along with Bogle’s book as a whole, serves as a sobering reminder that Black artists are hidden as often as Black history. The existence of a documentary by one of American cinema’s most talented directors about a tragedy that occurred in the city of Birmingham should not come as a surprise to a Birmingham native. And yet, overwhelmingly white education systems still silence the history of this city and its suburbs.