Remembering St. Clair

By Jacquie Jones One of my earliest memories of St. Clair Bourne was winding up at a party at his old apartment at 105th and Broadway, right in the heart of what was becoming, in those days, in the 1980s, the “Upper West Side.” It was still kind of Harlem, then, old Harlem, fringe and kind of sexy. But what impressed me at the time – and I was barely out of Howard University, mind you, if at all – was the company that was kept there. The writer Quincy Troupe and film historian and scholar Clyde Taylor, Hugh Masekela, Kathleen Cleaver, the father of all Black documentary filmmakers, Bill Greaves – all the people who had chronicled and given life to the history and struggle that had brought us up to that moment. So, I just smoked my cigarette (it was the 80s, remember) and tried to look like I belonged. That was twenty years ago.

Since then, somehow, my distanced awe of Saint and all he represented to me turned into something else, something more.

It is true that with over forty titles to his credit, St. Claire Bourne is easily one of our most prolific filmmakers in any genre. And with a list of titles that reads like the who’s who of great Black men, he had, throughout his career, an agenda no self-righteous “Afro-American” – a term he stuck with til the end, could argue with: Black filmmakers have to right the wrongs of the past, cover our heroes in glory, speak the truth.

Avon Kirkland, director of Street Soldiers a film about the work of MacArthur Genius Joe Marshall and the PBS biography of Ralph Ellison and another real veteran of these wars, said of our friend, “his most outstanding virtue: his bone-deep commitment to black people and racial justice. We argued all the time about craft, didacticism, the nature of the universe, etc., but hugged each other warmly, whenever we encountered each other, as if we increasingly came to understand and eventually celebrate that we were, after all, brothers in a (still) strange land.”
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