It is the earthly heights and peace pipes of the Lenape and Wappinger; it is the Dutch colonizers spray-painting the community of “Nieuw Haarlem” as if the Indigenous were an abandoned subway tumbling down mean streets; it is the ghetto cries of immigrant Italian, Jewish, Irish and German babies nestled in Lady Liberty’s copper-green arms; it is the crossroads blues of the Great Migration to America’s ebony Casbah; and it is, indisputably, the most iconic and historic village of African descendants—from Down South, from the West Indies, from the sub-Saharan motherland, from Latinx strongholds like Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, from like everywhere—on this here whole planet. Harlem is also where William Greaves, the late, legendary Black filmmaker, was born and nurtured, and where he determined, in August of 1972, to assemble, at Duke Ellington’s regal townhouse, 26 artistic and social justice luminaries who had marched and mingled through the Harlem Renaissance and the Garvey Movement of the roaring 1920s. Greaves had been an actor and dancer, among other imaginative endeavors, but realized early on it was behind the camera—as director, writer, producer and cinematic revolutionary—that he not only could and should elevate narratives ignored or forgotten because of racism, but would also have full creative control over his mind, his soul and his content.
Which is why, for four hours at that sun-washed summer rendezvous in Harlem in the age of Vietnam and Nixon and Black Panthers and Watergate and The Godfather saga, we see smartly attired “New Negro” influencers of literature, intelligentsia, theater, the visual arts and political dissent like Eubie Blake (composer) and Noble Sissle (lyricist), who were the innovators of Shuffle Along, the first Broadway musical ever written, produced and performed exclusively by African Americans; like prolific portraitist, muralist and illustrator Aaron Douglass; like the celebrated people’s photographer James Van Der Zee (10 years later in 1982, at 96, he would shoot a 21-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat); like Richard Bruce Nugent, multitalented and multidisciplined truth-teller who was one of the first and only openly queer voices of the Harlem Renaissance; like the women present who highlighted, methodically, the critical contributions of their gender so they would not be taken for granted in this space, nor deleted from memory (speak, Regina Andrews, speak); and like the women and men who worked and/or roamed Harlem libraries, salons, parties and the inner sanctums of Marcus Garvey’s mass appeal, which still happens to be the largest African American protest crusade in the annals of the United States, despite the fact that Garvey was an expat from the Caribbean island of Jamaica. But little did Greaves know a great day in Harlem would become a 50-plus-years odyssey to complete what he proclaimed as the most important motion picture of his life. Greaves, who died in 2014, would have been 100 in 2026.
Thankfully his son David Greaves, one of four camerapersons that August afternoon, is the director of the finished documentary, Once Upon a Time in Harlem. Meanwhile, William Greaves’ granddaughter, Liani Greaves, who had a super-close relationship with her grandpa, is the producer. And William Greaves’ beloved widow, Louise Archambault Greaves, co-carried the torch of this project tirelessly, until she passed, in 2023.
So, yes, every now and again a movie comes along that effortlessly swipes my breath away, and dabs at the raw and delicate parts of my ancestral emotions. Once Upon a Time in Harlem is unequivocally such a movie. It is an automatic classic, a mesmerizing movie of its time, of these times, and for all times.
Nestled in the upheavals and footprints of the Civil Rights era, it is a marvel to view and hear elders ruminate on the past while grappling with a tumultuous contemporary scene most of them had but just a few pages left to digest. In that regard, Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a joyous, thoughtful, powerful and thrilling example of cinematic achievement and persistence. For sure, what the Greaves have done with Once Upon a Time in Harlem is not simply and meticulously craft one of the greatest and most engrossing documentary films I have ever experienced, but they have also rescued from the vaults of indifference and woeful ignorance a crucial and undeniably American and African American chapter of history.
A history which, quite frankly, made it possible for writers like me to exist and be 100 years since the jazzy bustle and glow of the Harlem Renaissance. Indeed, I sat there captivated by the cast of otherworldly characters who gathered in the spacious home of an absent Duke Ellington (his sister and business manager, Ruth, is present as Duke was ill). Because Once Upon a Time in Harlem is actually about three distinct periods in this nation’s journey: the 1920s, which saw Black wordsmiths like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes dreaming a world, with their collective genius and excellence, in a way that could not have been imagined a mere 60 years before, as the brutality, shame and horror of American slavery was violently ending.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
