Once Upon A Time In Harlem drops us into a party 50 years in the making in new exclusive clip

In this scene from the movie, writer George Schuyler discusses defining Black art. It was the 1920s, when much of the country was still segregated, and he saw the segregation of Black artist as a means to devaluing their merits as artists. When Langston Hughes wrote a response to Schuyler’s article, the original author found it wasn’t “sound in its reasoning.” Poet Arna Bontemps looked at Hughes’ response much more kindly, summarizing that their generation of Black artists were going to do their own thing irrespective of the Black-white racial divide, calling it the “slogan of the Harlem Renaissance.”

The clip shows that even as these two literary minds remembered the same article from Hughes, they each felt differently about it, reflecting the way history can be remembered in different ways even by its participants. These deep and introspective conversations take place in-between rosy memories of first loves and a shared awe over the works of those colleagues who were no longer with them, the occasional squabble over details and passionate intellectual discussion. It’s an invite to the class reunion of alums nearly a century ago, and the conversations and first-hand accounts are so riveting the party feels like it should go on and on. 

As Greaves told The A.V. Club, there is an archive in the works of all the riveting conversations he and his dad and fellow crew members captured in the rooms of Duke Ellington’s old home. Until then, there’s many lively figures to learn more about and listen to in Once Upon a Time In Harlem.