The Harlem Renaissance Is Still Alive In ‘Once Upon A Time In Harlem’

On a hot summer day in August 1972, actor-turned-documentarian William Greaves orchestrated a cocktail party at Duke Ellington’s home. He invited the surviving architects of the Harlem Renaissance and encouraged them to bask in impassioned discussion of the history and legacy of that period. Greaves, along with his son David and two other cameramen, captured 60,000 feet of film of the entire event. Throughout the remainder of his life and career, he wrestled with how to use the footage. At one point he hoped to use it in the award-winning documentary From These Roots (1974), but instead decided to set it aside, giving it room to breathe. Greaves died in 2014 at the age of 87, with the raw footage still unfinished and fragmentary. His son, David, and granddaughter, Liani, then took up the mantle of this important restorative project. They were helped in this effort by Greaves’ widow, Louise Archambault Greaves, who preserved and safeguarded the archive with a grant from the Ford Foundation until her passing in 2023. Shot on 16mm, Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a work of historical immersion animated by the very participants of one of the most influential eras in cultural history. Over the course of the documentary, the surviving members of a once-vibrant community of Black artists, poets, musicians, and writers from the 1920s—now senior citizens, dressed in their Sunday finest—recollect, reflect, and contest each other's memories and anecdotes of a period in which they not only lived but helped define. By interlacing the party scenes with other interviews conducted by William Greaves, archival material, literary texts, and cultural iconography, David resurrects the Renaissance period they all gathered to recall. Cinema becomes a vault for Black oral histories, to be passed down for generations to come. Born and raised in Harlem to a working-class Caribbean family, William Greaves grew up at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance. At the behest of his religious parents, he was introduced to Black performance, poetry, culture, and radical histories. In his younger years, Greaves performed in African dance troupes. He later became interested in acting and worked with the American Negro Theater before transitioning into radio, television, and film. In an interview with the film scholar Scott MacDonald, Greaves recalls an epiphany about discovering the works of pioneering independent Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux:

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