[Gordon Parks, Sr.] made a short, Flavio, about a boy in a Brazilian favela, in 1965. It was well received, but it took him more than three years to put together his first feature, The Learning Tree…. Finally Hollywood was ready for its first prominent Black director.

The Learning Tree (1968) based on Parks's own memoirs, is a visually stunning evocation of his childhood in Kansas in the twenties. Because the setting is Midwestern, the story is also rather novel, successfully avoiding the clichés and truisms of growing up Black in the South, or in a Northern ghetto. Yet, Parks's childhood wasn't particularly dramatic—no great traumas—and so Learning Tree is rather static, a fact which would have caused no problems if the film had been European, but which did not do much for his reputation as a bankable director in late-sixties Hollywood.

The emphasis in the moving-picture...