ABOUT THE FILM
ONCE UPON A TIME IN HARLEM captures an extraordinary evening in 1972, when pioneering documentarian William Greaves gathered surviving luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance at Duke Ellington’s Harlem townhouse. Over four hours, artists, writers, and intellectuals, many of whom had not seen one another in fifty years, reminisced, argued, laughed, and debated their place in a rapidly changing cultural landscape. Greaves considered it the most important event he ever filmed. Decades later, his son David Greaves, one of the original camera operators, restored the 16mm footage and completed the film, creating both a vivid time capsule and a searching inquiry into one of the most creative periods in American history.
PANEL DISCUSSION FOLLOWS
Our panelists will discuss the Harlem Renaissance and its legacy, the remarkable figures gathered in Greaves’s footage, and the story of how this film was made and, fifty years later, finally completed.
KENDRA FIELD
Kendra Field is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Public History at Tufts University. She is author of Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War and the winner of numerous awards, including the 2025-26 Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellowship at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. Field co-founded the Du Bois Forum, a retreat for writers, scholars, and artists, and serves as chief historian for the 10 Million Names Project. She has advised and appeared in historical documentaries including Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” and “Roots: A History Revealed.”
KHARY JONES
Khary Jones is Professor of the Practice, Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies at Tufts University. As a writer-director, his work includes the award-winning documentary Night Fight and the short films Hug, Three and a Half Thoughts, and Chrysalis. He has also served on the editorial teams behind the documentary features Where the Pavement Ends; Black Memorabilia; Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart; He Named Me Malala; Sembene!; and The World According to Dick Cheney.
JESSE MCCARTHY
Jesse McCarthy is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Social Sciences and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War; Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? Essays, which won the 2022 Whiting Award for Non-Fiction; and the novel The Fugitivities, featured on NPR. He is editor of the Norton Library edition of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and the co-editor with Henry Louis Gates Jr. of The Norton Critical Edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane.