A ’90s indie filmmaker introduced me to the writings of George Schuyler, so it feels right that another independent filmmaker, William Greaves, gives us a vocal and visual encounter with Schuyler in Once Upon a Time in Harlem. He was an adversarial critic who worked with H. L. Mencken and wrote the provocative “Negro-Art or Hokum” essay in 1926, and seeing him as he actually walked and spoke among his peers from the Harlem Renaissance is a moving experience that brings history alive.
In 1972, documentarian Greaves invited surviving participants from that legendary arts movement to the townhouse of the late Duke Ellington for a 50-year reunion. The footage captured by Greaves and his crew was unfinished when he died in 2014; his son David Greaves assembled it last year into its current form. These images are precious beyond estimation because — as Schuyler himself might say — they rectify the legacy of black American art and language that has been hijacked by recent political chicanery.
Through Greaves, Schuyler enters the room, looks around skeptically, and sets straight the true history of the Harlem Renaissance: “I don’t know that it was a ‘renaissance.’ It was an awakening, shall we say, of people who wrote and thought. And they came there to Harlem, which was a sort of a new mecca, and naturally they exchanged opinions.”
There’s never before been a movie about an African-American cultural salon, despite the coterie of musicians, artists, and writers during ’80s and ’90s hip-hop who received media attention — and who were exploited by academia — leading to prizes and charlatanism. But Greaves convened the real deal at the propitious moment, right after ’60s radicalism and when the Black Panthers seemed to have left their forebears behind.
Here are legends: Arna Bontemps; Eubie Blake; Noble Sissle; Bruce Nugent; John Henrik Clarke; William Patterson; Countee Cullen’s widow, Ida Mae Cullen; Aaron Douglas; Romare Bearden; Leigh Whipper; Abram Hill; Ernest Crichlow; Jean Blackwell Hutson; Ted Poston; Nathan Huggins; Richard B. Moore; Ruth Hill; Thomas Harvey; Gerri Major; and others. They commemorate famous, long-departed or absent colleagues, including Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Paul Robeson (made real in a Poston anecdote).
Greaves, not a cynical race-hustler like Spike Lee, went beyond PBS clichés. Schuyler has been the least celebrated of these figures, but his presence in this family-reunion atmosphere is testament to the African-American history and culture seen in Greaves’s extraordinary filmography of documentaries: Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class (1968), Nationtime (1973), From These Roots (1974), The Fighters (1974), Frederick Douglass: An American Life (1985), Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice (1989), and his diptych Ralph Bunch: An American Odyssey and Ralph Bunch: The Odyssey Continues (2001–2003).
It was Greaves’s erudition that made this gathering more than a party (as the New York Times review condescendingly described it). Inviting Schuyler guaranteed a lively variety of viewpoints, displaying sophistication worthy of people who struggled from youth to old age, expressing their deepest feelings, knowledge of the world, and political intelligence. In their 70s and older, they show something more than the fierce glamor of the Black Panthers and The Last Poets: They have the beautiful wisdom of experience. Schuyler and peers refused political manipulation such as would come in the next century.
Through personal recall, poet Arna Bontemps explains the so-called renaissance arc, beginning with the Broadway breakthrough show Shuffle Along:
From then, once very year, there was something dramatic: In ’22 it was Claude McKay’s novel Harlem Shadows. In ’23 it was Jean Toomer’s Cane, also in ’23 [classical and spirituals composer] Roland Hayes’s debut. By that time, it was wild, it was just gone. The renaissance had exploded by then.
Bontemps also reminds the group, “We’re going to find out that there’s a lot of conflict in the renaissance. [Activist Marcus] Garvey was very hostile to the art impulse, particularly to Claude McKay, his fellow countryman.” To deepen our sense of the past, Greaves inserts a glamorous photo of the obviously elegant, delicate McKay as a contrast to images of conventional masculinity[[ok?]]. Meanwhile, self-professed dilettante Bruce Nugent, cigarette in hand, brags, “I work sincerely at art, but not too strenuously.”
The perspicacious Schuyler remembers, “Every ethnic group in Harlem had a forum where they debated sundry questions. They quarreled and argued, there were different points of view. I think that’s a mark of a civilized community.” (Schuyler gets the last word in his contretemps with a Langston Hughes riposte that “didn’t seem sound in its thinking.”)
Friendly differences of opinion spark among these folk, as when Clarke adds, “We’re missing the fact that Garvey made us dream beyond our capacity.” Nugent differs: “I refuse to accept the ‘beyond our capacity.’” Louise Thompson Patterson urges, “I want to bring up the name [of sculptor] Agusta Savage.” Gerri Major insists, “Someone please talk about Zora Neale Hurston!” Greaves obliges, featuring Hurston’s famous “How It Feels to Be Colored” declaration: “I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who feel that nature has somehow given them a lowdown dirty deal. . . . Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life . . . I do not weep at the world. I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
It is an Altmanesque variety of personality and opinion holding forth on art as well as politics — climaxing in 96-year-old Whipper’s perfect memorization of his Haile Selassie speech in the 1943 Hollywood film Mission to Moscow.
This completes Greaves’s ultimate career practice of addressing his elders. Honoring Ellington, Greaves relates the Harlem Renaissance to revolutionary jazz, and Douglas answers, “It wasn’t revolutionary to us.” This matches Nugent’s cantankerous realization: “We’ve reached a point where we can look back and see other things.” Understanding the renaissance as he understands cinema, Greaves matches Schuyler’s realistic worldview: “First thing is, you need a voice for these people. Writing and getting paid for writing, and that broke the lock, as it were.” A montage compositing the mastheads of Amsterdam News, the Harlem Liberator, the New York News, the New York Age, the Tattler, and the Negro Liberator recalls the significance of the now-gone black press. This marvelous documentary picks up today’s lack.