“Once Upon a Time in Harlem” Is a Film for the Ages

The Harlem Renaissance—the subject that everyone had gathered to discuss—is described in the film by Major as the first time that Black people were recognized as creative people; by another participant, as affirming the greatness of Black people; by Bontemps as “a prism” reflecting Black experience of all times; and by George Schuyler as not a renaissance at all but an “awakening.” Individual reflections often revolve around personal experiences that illuminate matters of the widest historical and political importance, reaching far beyond specific works of art. Blake repudiates a much-repeated rumor that he would never shake a white man’s hand, explaining that he just never put his own hand out first, lest he give the man a chance to snub him. Whipper describes an occasion when the great dancer Bill (Bojangles) Robinson was snubbed in just this way by Charles Lindbergh, only for Jimmy Walker, then the mayor of New York, to save the situation by rapidly shaking Robinson’s outstretched hand himself. Whipper also discusses his friendship with the poet and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar, who died in 1906, at the age of thirty-three; the two men had been neighbors and fishing buddies. Blake describes the commanding stage presence of the grievously short-lived actress Florence Mills. The artist Ernest Crichlow summons the memory of the sculptor Augusta Savage, whose studio, in a Harlem basement—amid furnaces and stacks of coal—was a paradise of enlightenment and a hive of creative effort.

That studio is one of many spaces, official and unofficial, cited throughout the film as meeting places where artists, activists, journalists, and other notables met, and where a wide variety of activities were fostered, sustained, financed, and brought to public attention. Magazines such as The Crisis, Opportunity, and The Messenger are mentioned as venues where poets such as Langston Hughes and Cullen were published, and where Douglas was commissioned to do the covers. Black writers also found work at a batch of Black-owned newspapers, including the Amsterdam News. (Money mattered, whether got through work or through the patronage of the businesswoman A’Lelia Walker or of the “gangster philanthropist” Casper Holstein.) The 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library—where Andrews was the city’s first Black head librarian—was a center for writers, the unofficial daytime workspace for Cullen, Claude McKay, and others. Andrews’s apartment, at 580 Saint Nicholas Avenue, was something of a salon for writers and artists, and Major’s position as a society-page writer made her parties a vital hub of the Black élite.

Bontemps, who, in addition to his writing, worked as a librarian and teacher, provides some keen historical reflections, averring that the Harlem Renaissance started with three events: Marcus Garvey’s first convention in Harlem, in August, 1920; the production of the musical “Shuffle Along,” with music by Blake and lyrics by Noble Sissle, in May, 1921; and, in June of that year, the first publication of a poem by Langston Hughes (“The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” which appeared in The Crisis). This confluence of literature, politics, theatre, and music, condensed within a single year the mighty span of the Harlem Renaissance, its inspirations, and its influences.

The participants candidly discuss the racism of those early years, including the prevalence of lynchings and the massacres of Black people in Tulsa, in East St. Louis, and in Elaine, Arkansas. They remember the community’s responses to atrocities, including the Silent Parade of 1917, in which thousands marched down Fifth Avenue. There are recollections of the infuriating daily norm of racial insults and exclusions, of the daring plot to integrate the Copacabana, and the unredressed outrages suffered by previous generations; Whipper tells of the Ku Klux Klan’s threats to his father, a lawyer and state legislator in South Carolina, after Reconstruction.

For all the shared sense of purpose, there was also conflict within the Harlem Renaissance. In the filmed discussions, people acknowledge that the Harlem Renaissance wasn’t a single-minded movement but had “many intellectual centers” and was more like a “forum.” Richard Moore, a writer and activist, argued against Garvey’s belief in the separation of the races and the leadership of Black Americans in African politics. In 1926, Schuyler published his essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” in The Nation; the following week, the magazine ran Hughes’s sharp response, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”

This dialectic was part of a flourishing realm of glorious language. The Harlem Renaissance was filled with poetry and song—and with performance, as enshrined in Greaves’s footage which features many spontaneous, thrillingly theatrical recitations of poems by Bontemps, Hughes, Cullen, and McKay. Sissle sings one of his songs in the movie, and there’s even a monologue from a Hollywood movie (“Mission to Moscow,” from 1943) in which Whipper had played Haile Selassie; among friends, three decades later, he delivers the speech from memory. Similarly, the dozens of people whom Greaves interviews in the film aren’t delivering a single and univocal history of the Harlem Renaissance but a polyphonic transmission of it. Telling the stories of their lives, bearing witness to crucial times, and reflecting on what they did and saw, they offer not a backward look but a present-tense reincarnation, a rebirth of a renaissance.

Greaves, who was born in 1926 in Harlem and grew up there, was himself an heir of the Harlem Renaissance, imbued with the cultural currents that issued from it. By inquiring into the movement, Greaves (as the film itself makes clear) was inquiring into himself. Perhaps that’s why, though he had little trouble completing the arm’s-length, encyclopedia-like documentary “From These Roots”, he struggled with the interview and discussion footage. He was contending both with history and with his own life. The Greaves family is hoping to release the film in time for his hundredth birthday, in October, 2026. “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” when it’s finished and widely seen, will take its place as a crucial bearing of witness to history, and as the film of a lifetime. ♦