Pearl Bowser

Pearl Bowser was born Pearl Johnson on June 25, 1931, in the Sugar Hill neighborhood of Harlem, New York — the youngest of seven children. She was named after her mother, Pearl Johnson, a domestic worker whose labor anchored the family. Coming of age in Harlem, she carried a lifelong conviction that the record of Black creative life deserved to be gathered, preserved, and honored.

Bowser became one of the foremost historians of African-American cinema. In 1970, with Mel Roman and Charles Hobson, she researched and curated "The Black Film" retrospective at the Jewish Museum, helping ignite public and scholarly interest in a nearly lost tradition. She founded Chamba Educational Film Services and, in the early 1980s, the collection that became African Diaspora Images — a living archive of visual and oral histories documenting Black filmmaking. Through it she rescued fragile prints, testimonies, and memory from erasure.

Her most enduring scholarship centered on Oscar Micheaux, the pioneering director of the silent race-film era. Her research, distilled in the book "Writing Himself into History," restored Micheaux and his contemporaries to their rightful place and reshaped how the early Black film movement is understood. She also directed the documentary "Midnight Ramble" (1994) and led institutions including Third World Newsreel's Theater Project and The Flaherty.

Affectionately called the "Godmother of Black Independent Cinema," Pearl Bowser died on September 14, 2023, in Brooklyn, at age 92. She gave a scattered heritage a home, and made certain the ancestors of Black film would never again be forgotten. May her keeping-work keep her name.