The 1976 Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts: A Speculative History of the First Black Women’s Film Festival

Filmmaker Monica Freeman programmed the films at the festival, and she described the event in an interview in 2000 at Camille Billops and James Hatch’s salon on Black art.¹⁶ Speaking with filmmaker Kathe Sandler, Freeman remembered the festival with obvious pleasure and argued for its historical importance. She recalled that it was the brainchild of Faith Ringgold, an acclaimed visual artist, who “decided that film was hot and wanted to have a Black women’s film festival.”¹⁷ Ringgold’s daughter Michele Wallace “took care of the literature part,” while Freeman oversaw “the film part,” which was the festival’s “main highlight.” In addition, Freeman explained, “Michelle Parkerson from Philadelphia came up and we showed her film. Alice Walker came, Ntozake Shange came. At the time, these people weren’t as known as they are today.” “It really goes back,” Freeman exclaimed, “It was very well attended and was a great experience.” Yet, she concluded, “I don’t think we had Black women’s film festivals too much after that,” a point that indicates both the festival’s significance and its limited impact.

Freeman’s behind-the-scenes programming work has largely been missed by narratives about Black independent film. Yet her efforts were never lost on filmmakers themselves, especially Black women. In a 2018 interview, Michele Prettyman asked Julie Dash and Chenzira to identify other figures who should be included in the story of New York’s Black film scene. Chenzira responded with one name, “Monica Freeman,” to which Dash responded, “Yes, yes.”¹⁸ In Freeman’s own interview at Billops’s salon, her memories of the festival were specifically prompted by Sandler, creating one of the few published records about the festival. With an interviewer less intimately versed in Black feminist filmmaking than Sandler, Freeman might have skipped over the event. Such is the precariousness of Black women’s film history: The kind of Black feminist community the Sojourner Truth Festival sought to create in 1976 is also a precondition for preserving the festival’s memory.

Organized to coincide with Mother’s Day, the festival received sparse newspaper coverage. That had not been the plan. In a letter to a Women’s Interart Center administrator in March 1976, Freeman wrote, “I am anxious to see how the press release will be when you have it redone!” and she included two handwritten pages with contact info for university and independent press outlets, as well as a two-page typed list of “Black Media” compiled by Ringgold.¹⁹ Despite Freeman’s hope for a comprehensive publicity campaign, though, the printed commentary on the festival was limited to a short overview in Mel Tapley’s “About the Arts” column in the Amsterdam News, another Tapley article about Ringgold’s performance piece at the festival, and short announcements and recaps in a few feminist-leaning publications.²⁰ Wallace also describes the festival in a few sentences in her 2004 book Dark Designs and Visual Culture.²¹ Faced with such a sparse printed record, I reached out directly to the festival’s organizers. Wallace responded immediately: there is “much to say,” she wrote.²² But neither Wallace nor fellow organizer Patricia Spears Jones had immediate access to a program or any other festival-related materials.²³ So I turned to the archive.

I managed to access a trove of materials, across numerous collections, related to the Women’s Interart Center. But while much ink was devoted to the center’s annual video festival, the Sojourner Truth Festival was largely absent. I also looked for discussions of the event in the collected papers of various participants, and I searched for the festival films that had not been distributed—some are available in archives, while others appear to be lost. Although the COVID-19 pandemic caused most archives to close to researchers, it also prompted archives to prioritize remote research services, which enabled me to access materials from over twenty archives. Crucially, I found a festival program among the recently deposited papers of the artist Charlotte Moorman, who was on the mailing list for the Women’s Interart Center. Of the many copies of the program that must have been printed, I have located only three.

The program is a key piece of the puzzle, and it allowed me to reach out to additional artists who participated in the festival. In the next section of this essay, I discuss several of the films and panels listed on the program in depth in order to build a sense of what it might have been like to attend the festival. But it is also important to note that the program is explicitly provisional. Several events are labeled “to be announced,” and two roundtable discussions do not list participants. Additional film screenings might also have been added later: Freeman vaguely recalls screening Stig Björkman’s Georgia, Georgia (1972), a film that Maya Angelou wrote, scored, and wanted to direct.²⁴ There are misspellings, too—“Jesse Marble” for “Jessie Maple”—and at least one misattribution: Michael Schultz directed Young, Gifted, and Black, not Stan Lathan. In turn, Black Woman, credited to Schultz, was likely a 1970 episode of the television show Black Journal about “The Black Woman,” which was directed by Lathan. And some planned events might not have occurred: festival co-organizer Patricia Spears Jones thought Lorde and Walker might have cancelled.²⁵

In addition, some of the events that the organizers hoped to hold likely never materialized. Toni Cade Bambara, for example, was invited to participate in a panel on “The Image of Women in Black Literature,” and Zeinabu irene Davis recently suggested to me that Bambara must have been “at the forefront” of the festival, because “it just looks like the imprint” she would have made.²⁶ But no such panel is listed on the program, and there is no evidence that Bambara managed to attend the festival. Similarly, when I spoke with Margo Jefferson, she speculated that the “Dear Joanna” project, a collection of letters addressed to a young Black girl, might have been scaled back or abandoned, even though it was listed at the top of the program.²⁷ The “Dear Joanna” project, organized by Ringgold, was itself an exercise in another form of speculation. “Suppose a girl of 12,” Ringgold’s prompt read, “who had been blind, deaf and dumb, found on her 13th birthday that she could see and hear for the first time. Further suppose that she now wanted to know everything that she had not had an opportunity to learn before about her past, her present, and her future, about her blackness and her femaleness. What would you most want to tell such a girl on her 13^th birthday? Write her.”²⁸ A press release, unearthed by Freeman in her personal files, states that two hundred such letters would be on display, including ones by Pearl Bailey, Sammy Davis, Jr., Rose Kennedy, Naomi Sims, and Charles Rangel. As yet, neither the festival organizers nor I have been able to locate those letters.

As incomplete as it is extraordinary, the program, which features an original drawing by Ringgold, offers the most comprehensive map of the Sojourner Truth Festival. It was an essential tool for my interviewees as they tried to recall the event. Indeed, some festival participants could not remember it at all, while others characterized their memories as “vague” or “partial,” if wonderful. One participant even sent me an article she had recently written on the fallibility of memory.²⁹ Seeing the program helped participants, but it was sometimes a painful memory of what they had missed or failed to appreciate fully at the time.

The ephemeral nature of film festivals in general, and the decidedly fragmentary record of this one in particular, meant that informed guesswork became necessary. As I contacted participants, for example, I started to wonder who might have been in the audience. Warrington Hudlin, I thought, who founded the Black Filmmakers Foundation in 1978, surely would have wanted to be at the festival. So I emailed him. An hour later, we were talking on the phone. “You gave me severe flashbacks!” he exclaimed, saying he was “90% sure” he had attended.³⁰ A day later, after checking with his friend Cheryl Hill, he confirmed that they both were there. And even when I guessed wrong about potential attendees, it was often illuminating: Fronza Woods, who made both of her now-acclaimed short films Killing Time (1979) and Fannie’s Film (1981) at the Women’s Interart Center, emailed me with the subject line, “The party was over by the time I got there!” She then lamented that she had not known about the festival and its filmmakers at the time.³¹

In all, I contacted over seventy people, talking on the phone or emailing with almost forty. The volume of responses I received itself indicates the excitement the festival did, and still does, inspire. And the generosity of my interviewees, whether they were connecting me with friends, sending follow-up emails, or simply thinking with me about what might have happened, gave me some small sense of the collaborative work that created the festival itself.

Some of the filmmakers I spoke with had difficulty recalling the festival simply because they had been part of so many screenings, panels, symposia, and festivals in the period. Indeed, as more opportunities emerged for Black artists to make films in the 1970s, there was a corresponding proliferation of Black film festivals at museums, universities, and community centers, creating the necessary spaces for Black films to be seen. The Studio Museum in Harlem was at the vanguard, starting with a 1969 film program entitled “Bout Us.” And the Studio Museum was also where Monica Freeman, as an intern in the early 1970s, started learning to curate film programs. She collected brochures for Black film festivals, kept a growing list of Black filmmakers, and began working on her first film, a documentary about the artist Valerie Maynard, whom she had met at the Studio Museum.³²

When Freeman programmed the Sojourner Truth Festival, she was also likely influenced by the 1975 “Seminar for Black and Third World Filmmakers,” which Madeline Anderson had organized under the auspices of the Flaherty Film Seminar. In a report on that event, Anderson wrote that it “was a good beginning” and that “enthusiasm for another seminar was high.”³³ “Continuous and intensive screening and discussion” was necessary, she argued, to “build that body of critical analysis so needed by Black and Third World filmmakers, critics and scholars.”³⁴ By organizing the Sojourner Truth Festival, Freeman, who had participated in Anderson’s seminar, helped continue that conversation. Indeed, of the forty-three filmmakers who participated in the Flaherty event, ten were also part of the Sojourner Truth Festival seven months later.³⁵

But although there was an increasing number of Black film festivals in the 1970s, only rarely did a panel, let alone a full festival, focus on Black women. In 1974, Freedomways, a leading Black cultural journal with radical roots, devoted a special issue to mass media. In a “reader’s forum” article, Barbara Smith recounted her experience the year before at a Boston University symposium on “Black Image in Films, Stereotyping and Self-Perception.”³⁶ Smith focused on a single panel discussion that emphasized Black actresses—a “unique” occurrence, Smith said, which she suspected was not planned by the organizers.³⁷ The panel featured Ruby Dee, Beah Richards, and Cicely Tyson, among others, and in describing it, Smith powerfully advocated for more three-dimensional roles for Black actresses. Smith’s advocacy did not, however, extend to any mention of Black women filmmakers. In hindsight, that omission is telling. A few years later, Smith would co-author the Combahee River Collective’s famed “A Black Feminist Statement”—she is among the most influential Black feminist activists from the period—but if there were Black women film stars for her to discuss in 1974, Black women filmmakers were still not part of critical or popular conversations, even those initiated by a Black feminist like Smith.

That trend continued even after the Sojourner Truth Festival. The fall 1978 issue of the Black film newsletter Chamba Notes included a notice that “Marti Wilson and Clyde Taylor, two AFS [African Film Society] founding members, are researching the area of Black women filmmakers for a forthcoming article with an international slant. If you’re a Black woman filmmaking [sic] (or know one), write to the AFS.”³⁸ The fact that Taylor, a strong advocate for Black independent cinema, had to place what was in effect a wanted ad for Black women filmmakers demonstrates the degree to which Black women’s cinema remained obscure. The following year, in 1979, Taylor did curate a one-day program titled “Films By Black Women,” which included work by three UCLA filmmakers associated with the L.A. Rebellion—Julie Dash, Alile Sharon Larkin, and Barbara McCullough—as well as Freeman. But Freeman’s own festival, held three years earlier, showed how many more Black women filmmakers could have been spotlighted.

The Sojourner Truth Festival’s film program thus emerged from a larger boom in Black film festivals and an expanding discourse about Black film, even as the festival’s unique emphasis on Black women crucially aimed to place them at the center of that film movement and to tie their burgeoning filmmaking to a wider Black feminist culture.

In the spring of 1976, probably, the organizers of the Sojourner Truth Festival got together for publicity photos. Michele Wallace unearthed the one above (see figure 2) after we started corresponding. This particular snapshot never made it into print—no images of the organizers ever did—but it powerfully conveys the lived relationships behind the festival, the pleasures of the process. The picture is, of course, a performance: At least some of the five women are posing. But the casual intimacy between them was real. Not only was Wallace the daughter and frequent co-conspirator of Ringgold, but multiple artistic, political, and personal networks connected the organizers, as well as the festival participants they invited.³⁹ The festival should thus be read as a celebration of those ties and an attempt to use film to build new forms of Black women’s community across the arts.

Of the five organizers, Freeman was the only one who had made, or would make, a film. But they all shared a vision of Black art in which the boundaries between different arts, and between art and politics, were fundamentally fluid. Jefferson and Wallace, who were both aspiring writers, met through the National Black Feminist Organization, where they became “fast friends,” and by 1974, they were working full time at Newsweek.⁴⁰ After the workday, they would often visit Ringgold in her studio. At the time, Ringgold was busy teaching herself photography and was eager to shoot portraits of anyone who stopped by.⁴¹ She was also a painter, sculptor, and soon-to-de dramaturg, to say nothing of her later work as a children’s book author and maker of “story quilts.” In Ringgold’s home, experimentation across the arts was the norm.

Jefferson took a similarly capacious approach to criticism in her job at Newsweek. She was a book critic, a position she used to draw attention to writing by women of color.⁴² But she also reviewed music, film, visual art, dance, and theater. While completing her journalism master’s at Columbia, she had earned a coveted spot in famed film critic Judith Crist’s movie reviewing course, and in 1975 she reviewed a video art festival at the Whitney Museum in a Newsweek article titled “Veni, Vidi, Video.”⁴³ She was even more familiar with the world of theater and dance: Her sister was an actress, appearing in Ringgold’s performance piece The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro at the Sojourner Truth Festival, and Jefferson herself had done amateur theater, including a play in Boston with filmmaker Stan Lathan.⁴⁴ Unsurprisingly, the language of the other arts infused her book reviews, as when she compared Gayl Jones’s novel Eva’s Man to photography.⁴⁵ Most importantly, Jefferson’s criticism, like Ringgold’s artistic practice, exemplified the tenor of the times. “I mean, God, we were so excited about all this stuff emerging,” Jefferson said in our interview, “everyone is making their way and making ways out of no way and out of many ways…What can we do? What comes next? What am I going to try?”⁴⁶

The Sojourner Truth Festival embodied that experimental ethos. One of the participants, for example, Barbara Ann Teer, was an actress, dancer, dramaturg, and director of the National Black Theatre (NBT). In founding the NBT in 1968, Teer was in the vanguard of Black theater companies seeking to revolutionize America’s white-dominated theater scene, a goal she pursued by developing a highly experimental form of ritual theater.⁴⁷ The NBT was also located next to the Studio Museum in Harlem, which is where a high school-aged Julie Dash took her first filmmaking classes. “Due to the shared walls with the National Black Theatre next door,” Dash recently recalled, “something extraordinary evolved. Once we were watching Sergei Eisenstein’s Russian film Battleship Potemkin at the same time we were listening to the rhythms of spoken word poetry, African drummers, meditative chanting, and a cappella voices lifted in song.”⁴⁸ In the NBT’s early days, Teer herself experimented with the radical possibilities of film. She transformed NBT into her own amateur film company, and she screened independent films, including Freeman’s 1975 documentary Valerie: A Woman, An Artist, A Philosophy of Life.⁴⁹ Teer’s foray into film is part of a larger story about the interplay between Black theater and Black film in the period: Melvin Van Peebles, Bill Gunn, and Woodie King, among others, all toggled between film and stage projects. But what has often been overlooked is that women, from Teer to J.E. Franklin to Kathleen Collins, were central to the interlocking theatrical and cinematic scenes.

Within NBT’s first two years, Teer used her acting ensemble to make a film about Malcolm X. She did this at the same time James Baldwin was struggling with Columbia Pictures to bring his vision of Malcolm to the screen. Teer, however, bypassed Hollywood and took matters into her own hands. Made in and for Harlem, her film, Rise: A Love Song for a Love People, screened a handful of times in the 1970s, always in New York City. And, according to the program, it showed at the Sojourner Truth Festival. Many planned Malcolm X films, including Baldwin’s, never got off the ground, so it’s a minor miracle that Rise, a non-theatrical film by a theater company, was even made. Yet no extant copy has surfaced, and it has largely been forgotten within critical discourse about Black film. Teer’s filmic foray thus underscores both the possibilities and the liabilities of truly independent Black filmmaking.

In the 1970s, Rise did garner a few newspaper blurbs, and more recently, Teer mentioned it during her interview for HistoryMakers.⁵⁰ But for those who have heard of it, Rise exists less as a material object than as a series of speculations—what Samantha N. Sheppard might call “phantom cinema.”⁵¹ Likely made in 1969, Rise featured Duane Jones, who had recently gained attention for his role in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). Rise was no genre flick, though: It likely included some filmed street theater, and judging from Teer’s general approach, Jones probably did not so much star as perform within an ensemble. The film also must have been provocative enough—because of its subject, style, or both—to be part of an NBT Sunday symposium featuring energetic debate about issues affecting the Black community.

Whether Rise actually screened at the Sojourner Truth Festival, however, is unclear. Neither Freeman nor anyone else I spoke with remembered seeing it, and only Oz Scott, who did not attend the festival, could say anything about the film. Scott did not even recall watching it, but he did remember a rumor: Apparently, while filming in the theater, all the lights went out, but Teer called out to “keep the cameras rolling” because Malcolm’s spirit was speaking to them.⁵²

Of all the festival’s participants, Ntozake Shange is probably associated with multi-arts experimentalism the most. In June 1976, just a month after the festival, Shange’s play for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf debuted at The Public Theater in Manhattan.⁵³ She became a celebrity overnight—publicity flyers featuring her portrait were posted all over the city—changing her career and Black feminist artmaking more broadly. for colored girls, a “choreopoem,” combines poetry, dance, music, song, and a kaleidoscopic array of brightly colored costumes—for the Lady in Red, the Lady in Yellow—putting painting as well as poetry in motion. This aesthetic innovation served to portray the inner lives of Black women, and that came with a politics. Especially when the play moved to Broadway and began to tour nationally in fall 1976, it set off heated debates about the value of Black feminist art.⁵⁴ But at the Sojourner Truth Festival earlier that year, Shange was not yet famous in that way. And according to the festival program, in addition to the variety of artforms within for colored girls, Shange was also interested in moving images.

Indeed, the festival proceedings echoed the social networks that fostered for colored girls. Shange’s play began as a series of poems, which she first performed in the Bay Area, before she moved to New York City in 1974. She soon began reading in small clubs around the city, including the Nuyorican Poets Café, which was frequented by an informal network of Black women artists—in Wallace’s words, “the usual suspects.”⁵⁵ Jefferson emphasized the importance of these small clubs: “That was how you spoke to your constituency, that was how you got heard, and that was how you solidified these bonds of intimacy.”⁵⁶ The Sojourner Truth Festival was an attempt to recreate that multi-genre arts scene and strengthen those “bonds of intimacy.” As part of a Mother’s Day poetry panel, Shange might well have read excerpts of her play, né poems, and Wallace reports in Dark Designs and Visual Culture that Shange “performed something from For Colored Girls” at some point during the festival.⁵⁷

Unlike the festival’s other literary luminaries, Shange was also, it seems, an exhibiting video artist. The festival apparently opened with a screening of her video work alongside that of Elaine Baly, a pioneering video artist, as well as Baly’s student Sybil Washington and the photographer Pat Phipps. The festival program does not indicate what Shange screened, nor has video-work by Shange surfaced. But a press release for the festival prepared by Howard Atlee, which Freeman recently found in her files, advertises “video tapes, one of which is Ntozake Shange’s ‘For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Was enuf.’”⁵⁸ Whether or not Shange made the video is unclear, as is its potential content—was it a rehearsal, a performance, or something else? No one I spoke with could recall seeing anything of the sort. Oz Scott does remember shooting a publicity commercial to accompany for colored girls when the play moved to Broadway, but that was not until the fall of 1976.⁵⁹ Most likely, according to Jefferson, Shange planned to make a video, but never did.⁶⁰ At the least, though, the program evidences Shange’s interest in media production, an interest that later led her to incorporate both video and photographic projections into her theatrical work.⁶¹

Shange’s engagement with the moving image embodies a larger phenomenon in the period, as Black women writers turned increasingly to film. The Sojourner Truth Festival encouraged that cross-arts sensibility. Two members of a panel on poetry, for example, Charlotte Carter and Joanne Braxton, were deeply interested in both literature and film. Carter, best known as a novelist, told me by email that she has “been caught up with movies all [her] life,” and she explained, “When I got out of school, I was hoping to become a film critic, or to have some relationship, however peripheral, to the world of film. That didn’t happen. But I went on being interested in foreign films and the darker American ones. I would not have predicted that I’d write mysteries of my own, but in the 90’s and early 2000’s, I did.”⁶² Film noir has functioned as both a stylistic inspiration and a thematic motif within Carter’s fiction.

Braxton, best known today as a literary critic, had similarly wanted to be a screenwriter since she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence in the early 1970s.⁶³ Her enthusiasm for film was likely influenced by June Jordan, who was one of her professors. Jordan had worked with Frederick Wiseman as a production assistant on Shirley Clark’s The Cool World (1964), a film about Black youths in Harlem, and as Jordan explained in her 1981 memoir Civil Wars, she gravitated to film as a way “to combine poetry and architecture,” which were then her primary passions, “in a medium accessible to most people.”⁶⁴ While working on The Cool World, Jordan met Madeline Anderson, interviewing her for an essay Jordan was writing about the making of the movie in which she hoped “to construct something like a complete frame for the reality of The Cool World.”⁶⁵ Jordan herself was not on the Sojourner Truth Festival’s program, but she did attend the festival and was probably taking notes.⁶⁶ In light of such connections, although no recording or transcript exists for the poetry panel with Carter and Braxton, their mutual interest in film suggests the kinds of cross-arts inspirations the festival may have sparked.

Indeed, in both form and content, the films Freeman selected for the festival implied that as an omnivorous artform, capable of integrating and depicting the other arts, film was uniquely suited to build bridges between the arts. Michael Schultz’s film Young, Gifted, and Black, for example, focused on Lorraine Hansberry, while Oakley Holmes, Jr.’s documentary Black Artists in America sought to provide a comprehensive account of visual artists. Similarly, Ayoka Chenzira’s film, Syvilla: They Dance to Her Drum, was an in-progress documentary about her dance instructor, Syvilla Fort, who also taught Barbara Ann Teer, as well as James Dean and Marlon Brando. Chenzira, who trained as a dancer and photographer, later explained that she turned to film because she “wanted moving stills, or stills dancing.”⁶⁷ After the festival, she took Syvilla on the road, accompanying each screening with a dance class on the Katherine Dunham technique and a slide show lecture on the history of Black women and dance.⁶⁸ Another festival participant, Jennifer Lawson, went to film school partly because she wanted to adapt African American novels like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, sharing such stories with a wider audience through film, especially in communities with low literacy rates.⁶⁹ For her part, Freeman presented her film about Valerie Maynard. The film begins with a quotation from Maynard—“If I walk down the street, nobody but nobody knows that I sculpt or that I paint, or that I anything. I am just a woman who passed by”—and then cuts to images of Maynard’s work, as the noises of chiseling, scraping, artmaking form the soundtrack. Throughout the film, Freeman features footage of Maynard working at the Studio Museum in Harlem, as the film interrogates what it means to be a Black woman and an artist and what kinds of spaces can enable Black women artists to thrive. It forms a fitting précis for the festival as a whole.

If we zoom out from the specific events at the Sojourner Truth Festival, we can also appreciate how the festival both reflected the need for and contributed to the development of the institutional changes that would be necessary to build and sustain a Black women’s film culture. That institutional theme would have been particularly evident during a roundtable on the penultimate night of the festival about “The Image of the Black Woman in Film.” Moderated by Freeman and held just after a screening of eight short films by Black women directors, the panel brought together Jeri Feagans, Lois Fortune, Jessie Maple, Elaine Baly, Jennifer Lawson, and Ayoka Chenzira. All were firmly ensconced in the independent film scene, and between them, they had crewed films, written scripts, produced television shows, scrounged money for their film projects, run a community media training program, and programmed film festivals. Explicitly framed around issues of representation and spectatorship, the panel was a rare chance for a group of Black women who often worked behind the scenes to discuss publicly how images of Black women were made and circulated, what those images looked like, and what challenges confronted Black women filmmakers. Of the four participants I have spoken with, only Freeman recalls the event, vaguely. But by reconstructing the wider film scene at the time, we can get a sense of what might have been said.

As the panelists were intimately aware, many of the films shown at the festival were the result of the emergence, in the late 1960s, of new media training programs at museums, public television studios, and, especially, film schools. Those spaces were more hospitable to Black women filmmakers than Hollywood, but in the mid-1970s, Black women were still a small cohort. No feature-length film had ever been directed by an African American woman—or at least none was known. The festival could only show feature films about, not by, Black women. And of the films directed by Black women that were screened just before the panel, the longest was barely over twenty minutes, while the shortest, Willette Coleman’s Respect, was under two minutes. Looking at the festival program today, Jefferson told me, “I had forgotten how many Black films already existed, but also how many still had to come.”⁷⁰ One of the panelists, Jessie Maple, would later be one of the first Black women to direct a feature film, Will (1981), but in 1976, she was likely more focused on changing the gender composition of film crews. A member of the editor’s union and the first African American woman admitted to the cinematographer’s union, Maple wrote about those experiences in How to Become a Union Camera Woman, which she self-published in 1976. She and the other panelists understood that unlike “New Hollywood Cinema,” a new Black women’s film culture could not be built by a few maverick directors; it would instead require substantial changes in film production, distribution, and critical discourse.

All the panelists, and a vast majority of the festival filmmakers, hailed from New York City. And in comparison to the West Coast—at least the UCLA-based L.A. Rebellion group—New York’s Black independent film scene was diffuse, spread out across multiple universities and art institutions. Nevertheless, it could be tightknit: Cheryl Hill remembers 1970s New York as “a time when we knew every single Black filmmaker,” and not just as casual acquaintances, but “really knew each other,” were “very involved in each other’s lives.”⁷¹ Other Black women filmmakers, however, struggled to find community: Fronza Woods recalls how surprisingly difficult it was to connect with other Black women filmmakers.⁷² Louise Fleming, too, remembers feeling isolated in her predominantly white film program at NYU, and, conversely, how meaningful it was to meet the writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins and to visit Collins at City College, where she was a professor, and “just talk, just talk about cinema for two-and-a-half hours.”⁷³ Unfortunately, that was a one-time occurrence. In a period with too few established Black women filmmakers to serve as mentors, the Sojourner Truth Festival was a welcome, if brief, chance for emerging filmmakers to gather and share their work.

Fleming was not the only panelist who was frustrated with New York’s university-based film schools. Chenzira, Lawson, and Freeman all shared her frustration. An alternative space, though, was offered by the NET Training School, which was a common institutional home for many of the festival’s participants. The Training School was founded in 1968 in tandem with the groundbreaking public affairs television show Black Journal. Designed specifically for students of color and boasting a hands-on approach to filmmaking, the Training School was a pipeline for the industry. Many of the Black technicians working in New York City were either graduates, instructors, or otherwise affiliated with the school. Typically a year-long program, classes were held three nights a week, taught by a rotating cast of instructors including Madeline Anderson, Doug Harris, Tony Batten, and, at least in 1976, Kathleen Collins. The Training School’s hands-on approach was a big draw: Lawson recalls that during her first year of film school at Columbia, she took theoretically oriented university courses during the day and NET sessions at night.⁷⁴ Cheryl Hill, who attended from 1974 to 1976, remembers that she could get the best of both worlds in Collins’s NET classes, which blended technical know-how with narrative and film theory.⁷⁵ At the time, university film programs were still dominated by men, but Hill recalls that her NET class included many women.⁷⁶

When the Sojourner Truth Festival occurred in May 1976, however, the NET training program, which had struggled financially since its inception, was in trouble. Student protests had succeeded in keeping the school open, but that was only a stopgap. The fate of the school was almost certainly a topic of conversation at the festival, perhaps especially during the “Image of the Black Woman in Film” panel. Of the panelists, Lawson and Maple were both graduates, Feagans directed the program, and Fortune was a WNET producer. Whatever was said during the panel, Feagans wrote to Maple four days later to thank her for agreeing to give the commencement address at the NET graduation ceremony later that month.⁷⁷ Unfortunately, it was the school’s last graduation.

If new production opportunities like the NET program were crucial for creating a Black women’s film culture, so were the opportunities and institutional spaces to screen Black women’s film-work and build an audience for it. The Sojourner Truth Festival was itself one such space. The Women’s Interart Center (WIC) was, in some ways, an ideal location for the explicitly cross-arts festival. As its name suggests, the WIC sought to provide women with the resources, space, and training to experiment with different artforms. The center also regularly ran film and video workshops, which were inexpensive and open to any interested student, and it had been hosting a major video-art festival for several years.

Nevertheless, the WIC was hardly an obvious selection for a festival about Black women’s art. The center was run by and generally catered to white feminist artists, and before 1976, there seems to have been only one other show, titled “11 in New York,” focused on Black art. Cheryl Hill, who attended WIC classes from 1974 to 1975, described the experience as “daunting.” She was the only woman of color in her classes, and she felt alienated by white feminist classmates who focused on questions of sexuality and gender, but not race.⁷⁸ Indeed, except for Ringgold, who traveled in some of the same feminist art circles as WIC members, the festival organizers rarely interacted with WIC administrators during the planning process.⁷⁹ Tellingly, of the festival’s many Black attendees, Hill was one of the few who had even been to the WIC building before—or who would return.⁸⁰ The festival thus symbolized both the potential for cross-racial alliances within the feminist art world of the 1970s but also the degree to which feminist art organizations failed Black women filmmakers.

Expanding the channels to distribute Black women’s filmmaking was another crucial part of building a film culture. Distribution was a focus of conversation at Madeline Anderson’s Flaherty seminar in 1975, and it was almost certainly a topic at the Sojourner Truth Festival, too. Distribution options included Third World Newsreel, Women Make Movies, and Chamba Productions, but that was hardly enough to keep pace with the growing body of Black films. It was not until Warrington Hudlin, George Cunningham, and Alric Nembhard formed the Black Filmmakers Foundation (BFF) in 1978 that many of the films on the Sojourner Truth Festival’s program were picked up for distribution and began to screen more widely, including at festivals abroad. Freeman, among others, has cited the BFF’s formation as a turning point, but it was not until Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) that a feature film directed by a Black woman gained widespread theatrical release.

Moreover, even if films were being screened, screenings had to be publicized in order to build an audience. The Sojourner Truth Festival’s absence from all but a few print records is itself evidence of a crucial gap within Black film criticism. In 1976, there was not a single publication devoted to Black film that could have gotten the word out. Chamba Notes, which had promoted Anderson’s Flaherty seminar, was on a brief hiatus, while Black Creation, which regularly reported on Black independent filmmakers, had folded in 1975. Journals that focused on Black culture, like Freedomways, did occasionally publish special issues on mass media, and feminist journals, like Heresies, sometimes covered media and sometimes included women of color. Left-leaning film journals like Jump Cut also sometimes featured Black film. But Black women’s filmmaking, which lay at the intersection of those various publications’ constituencies, often fell through the gaps.

With no consistent print outlet for news about Black independent film, let alone for Black feminist film criticism, it was difficult for the Sojourner Truth Festival to serve as a model for future events.⁸¹ And indeed, in subsequent years, there were only a handful of Black film festivals and film series devoted to women. Clyde Taylor did host a one-day, four-artist gathering in 1979, which was blurbed by Chamba Notes, and in the early 1980s, Beverly Smith, Barbara Smith’s twin sister, organized a series in Boston on Black women filmmakers and artists. In 1985, Cheryl Chisholm devoted a week of the Atlanta Third World Film Festival to women, and Black Film Review, which was founded in 1984, covered the event, while in 1987, Valerie Smith curated a high-profile series of Black women filmmakers at the Whitney Museum, which was covered in major newspapers. But as the participants at both the Sojourner Truth Festival and those later events likely recognized, changing the image of Black women in film would be a difficult, ongoing, and multifaceted process.

In 1996, on the Sojourner Truth Festival’s twentieth anniversary, Freeman helped organize two tribute programs, one in Miami and one in Atlanta. A flyer for the Atlanta event, which was sponsored by the Atlanta African Film Society, reflects at length on the original festival, explaining that a “loose collective of Black women filmmakers and artists” had gotten together “to produce a cultural event.” Their intent was not only to celebrate the “enormous power of the Black female aesthetic,” the flyer declares, but to “lead to the fundamental cultural empowerment of future generations of African descendent people.” As “the first film festival in history created to showcase the cinematic artistry of Black women,” the flyer concludes, the Sojourner Truth Festival “encourag[ed] Black women to take control over the production, exhibition and distribution of the imagining of themselves and their community,” and it “was an exuberant trail-blazer in Black cinema and media history.”⁸² The Atlanta and Miami anniversary programs in 1996 created one afterlife for the Sojourner Truth Festival.

The festival also left other, sometimes less-explicit legacies. In an essay about Daughters of the Dust, Toni Cade Bambara, whose writing had been an inspiration for Dash’s film in the first place, highlighted the cross-arts impulses in Black women’s filmmaking: “As Zeinabu Davis often points out, characteristic of African-American women filmmakers is tribute paid to womanish mentors and other women artists.”⁸³ Such inspiration across the arts suggests that we can trace the Sojourner Truth Festival’s ethos and influence over the subsequent decades of Black feminist artmaking. In particular, one might sense the festival’s afterlives in both subsequent collaborations between the participants and some of those participants’ eventual embrace of film.

In A Photograph: Lovers in Motion, for example, one of Shange’s first plays after for colored girls, Shange featured nearly a hundred photographs by Collis Davis, whose short film A Silent Rap screened at the festival. Shange may have met Davis earlier through his sister, Thulani, who was Shange’s close friend, or through Oz Scott, one of Davis’s NYU classmates and the cinematographer for A Silent Rap. But even if Shange and Davis’s collaboration was not contingent on meeting at the Sojourner Truth Festival, it shows how the festival united kindred spirits. Moreover, in 1979, Shange wrote and directed a performance piece for “Poets at the Public” entitled “The Spirit of Sojourner Truth,” which can be read as a distillation of the festival: Its published description exudes the “spirit” of the earlier festival, declaring, “Collaboration and our need to interact with a live audience represent values intrinsic to Black art. Working together: we are all trying to help each other into beauty, into strength.”⁸⁴ The pleasures of collaboration were likewise at the heart of Freeman’s next film, A Sense of Pride, which she made with an all-female crew, including festival participants Ayoka Chenzira and Elaine Baly. And Ringgold would pay homage to (possible) festival participant Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple with a story quilt entitled The Purple Quilt. Such creative inspiration can be read as a form of collaboration from afar.

After the festival, some of the literary and visual artists who participated also became involved with film. Carol Munday Lawrence, who screened her short film Umioji at the festival, commissioned Walker to write the screenplay for Nia: Finding the Green Stone, another short film in Lawrence’s Nguzu Sabo series, which dramatizes the seven principles of unity. Walker and Lawrence were both eager to work with another Black woman artist, but personality differences soured their relationship, and Walker dropped the project.⁸⁵ When Walker later selected Steven Spielberg to adapt The Color Purple, she thus did so with direct knowledge of Black independent filmmaking. Wallace, another writer at the festival, also got into independent media: after publishing her influential polemic Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman in 1979, she joined the cast of Personal Problems, a “Black soap opera” directed by Bill Gunn and conceived by Ishmael Reed. Wallace later wrote her doctoral dissertation on film history and has been writing Black feminist film criticism ever since. Festival organizer Patricia Spears Jones similarly had film in mind in the early 1980s when she published a prose poem on the actress Diana Sands in Barbara Smith’s iconic Black feminist anthology Homegirls. And in the 1980s, festival participant Camille Billops “crossed over,” in Freeman’s words, to making film.⁸⁶

Finally, as Jefferson was quick to note in our interview, many of the women who were involved in the festival would, less than a year later, start “The Sisterhood,” an informal group for Black women.⁸⁷ It was conceived by Walker and Jordan, while Shange, Jones, Wallace, and Jefferson were all members. Many women in the Sisterhood were writers, and in her forthcoming monograph, Courtney Thorsson shows how the group worked to change literary institutions, from publishing houses to the academy.⁸⁸ But those women writers’ participation in the Sojourner Truth Festival also demonstrates their interest in a wide range of other artforms—Valerie Maynard, for example, who was the subject of Freeman’s documentary film, was proposed as a potential member in one of the group’s early meetings.⁸⁹ The festival also demonstrates the profound resonances between the Sisterhood’s efforts to change literary institutions and the simultaneous work of Black women filmmakers to change the cinematic landscape. The Sojourner Truth Festival might not have directly inspired the Sisterhood, but it certainly showed many of the Sisterhood’s members the value of artistic community-building, and it put the more literary-minded among them in touch with the Black feminist film scene. Such intersections are what make the festival a key part of the film history of Black feminism, the evolution of Black feminist literature, and, of course, the history of Black women’s film.⁹⁰