The Learning Tree (Winger Enterprises, Warner Bros., 1969)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next film up on Turner Classic Movies’ schedule Saturday, November 8 was one I’d been curious about but had never actually seen: The Learning Tree (1969), written by, directed, and produced by Gordon Parks, who also composed the musical score (adding him to Charlie Chaplin, Victor Schertzinger, and Clint Eastwood among the few directors who’ve also composed music for their films) and based it on an autobiographical novel about growing up as a young, rural Black boy in Cherokee County, Kansas. I’d alternately wanted to see this film and consciously avoided it because I’d assumed it was just a pastoral coming-of-age story in a rural setting, sort of like The Waltons with a Black family. It was considerably deeper and richer than that; Parks, making his debut as a filmmaker after years of working as a photojournalist for Life magazine, created a tale in which both white-on-Black racism and Black-on-Black hostilities play an important part in the story’s events. The Learning Tree is more a series of vignettes than a coherent plot with a through-line, but it’s still quite an impressive movie. It’s set in the 1920’s, in Cherokee County, Kansas (and the place name evokes comparison between white America’s oppression of its Black population and its genocidal attempts to eliminate its Native population: the Cherokee were originally from modern-day Georgia until President Andrew Jackson forced them out of the South on the so-called “Trail of Tears”). The central character is Newton “Newt” Winger (Kyle Johnson), who along with some other boys is shown stealing apples from the plantation owned by white farmer Jake Kiner (George Mitchell). Kiner catches them and goes after them with a long whip, and one of the boys, Marcus Savage (Alex Clarke), fights back and beats Kiner to within an inch of his life. Even before that we’ve seen a scene in which the landscape is menaced by a giant cyclone in the background – which couldn’t help but remind me of the most famous movie (partially) set in Kansas, The Wizard of Oz. Newt is taken into a storm cellar by a young woman who proceeds to undress him, though she gets no farther than that.

Later a Black family from Canada, the Jeffersons, moves into town. The Jeffersons attend the same local Black church as the Wingers (the scenes in church seem to be designed to show that a Black church can be just as boring as a white one), and their daughter, Arcella (Mira Waters), attracts Newt’s attentions even though they don’t get that physical. Newt and Arcella start dating, albeit innocently, and the two get taken into a drugstore with a lunch counter by young white kid Chauncey Cavanaugh (Zooey Hall), who treats them to Cokes. Unfortunately, the white guy who runs the place has a racist hissy-fit over having to serve Black people and insists that Newt and Arcella take their drinks outside. Later Newt is called into the office of his school’s principal after he gets into an argument with one of his teachers, Miss McClintock (Peggy Rea). Newt insists that he wants to go to college, and McClintock tells him to forget about it; she says all Black people, even well-educated ones, can only hope to be servants and porters. The principal, one of only two sympathetic white characters in the entire story, makes it clear to Newt that he doesn’t share McClintock’s racism and allows him to return to class. But while Newt has been sitting helplessly in the principal’s waiting room, he sees Arcella getting into Chauncey Cavanaugh’s car. We already knew Chauncey was sexually precocious because we’ve seen him in bed with a white girl and his mother caught them together, so it’s no particular surprise later when Arcella turns out to be pregnant. Newt’s parents Jack (Felix Nelson) and Sarah (Estelle Evans) accuse him of having had sex with Arcella, but he blurts out that Chauncey is really the father of her unborn child. After the incident, Arcella turns inward and refuses to talk to anybody (which may be what led the author of the film’s Wikipedia page to assume Chauncey raped her), and though Newt buys her a bottle of perfume, he’s unable to give it to her because the Jeffersons suddenly leave town without warning. Later, because he thinks he owes it to Jake Kiner, Newt offers to work on his farm for a summer without pay, while Marcus is sentenced to six months in a reformatory. When Marcus is paroled, his father Booker (Richard Ward) is required to sign a paper certifying that he’ll be responsible for him, and when the white man who offers him the paper calls him “Boy,” Booker makes an X on it and says that’s all the signature the white man who’s disrespected him will get. (Later Marcus explains to the man that his father can’t write.)

While eating his lunch in the hayloft, Newt watches as Kiner is physically attacked by a white farmhand, Silas Newhall (Malcolm Atterbury), whom he’s tried to fire for being drunk on the job. Then Kiner is killed, not by Silas but by Booker Savage, who was there to steal some of Kiner’s bootleg spirits. Newt sees the whole thing but is afraid to come out because his father has warned him of the probable retribution the white community will visit on the Blacks if they find out that a Black man killed Kiner. Newt then tells his parents the whole story, and they meet with the judge in Silas’s trial (Russell Thorson), who happens to be Chauncey Cavanaugh’s father. The judge tells the Wingers that it’s improper for them to talk to him about the details of what Newt saw, but he should contact Silas’s defense attorney, Harley Davis (Don Dubbins). Harley hears Newt’s story and calls him as a defense witness, the prosecutor (Jon Lormer) offers no cross-examination, and with Newt having named Booker Savage as the real murderer, Booker grabs a court deputy’s gun and flees with it. Then he shoots himself to death in the courthouse’s stairwell, while the white trial attendees threaten to lynch every Black person they can get their hands on out of revenge for Booker having killed Kiner – just as Newt’s dad had feared they would. Judge Cavanaugh, who’s the second non-racist white person we’ve seen in this film, chews out the whites in the courtroom for having quickly descended to lynch-mob mentality when they’d been willing to let the judicial process play out when they thought Kiner had been killed by a white person. The film ends with the death of Newt’s mother and him on his way out of town to get his education and proceed as far as his talents can carry him. The Learning Tree has its flaws; one suspects Gordon Parks and his cinematographer, veteran Bernard Guffey, were going after the ironic contrast between the natural beauty of the settings and the sordid things taking place in them (much the way directors King Vidor and George Hill and cinematographers John Arnold and Charles Enger had done with the horrors of World War I in the 1925 silent The Big Parade), but they overdid it. Still, it’s a quite remarkable cinematic debut for a director with only 10 films on his imdb.com résumé – including his next one, Shaft, a far better directed film than virtually any other Blaxploitation movie and one with an ironic tie to his previous career. Among the Shaft dramatis personae are a group of Black militants called the Lummumbas, who have a large poster of Malcolm X on the wall of the apartment in which they live communally. The poster was printed from a photo of Malcolm X which Gordon Parks had taken in his previous career as a photojournalist for Life magazine.