St. Clair Bourne

St. Clair Cecil Bourne Jr. was born on the sixteenth of February 1943 at Long Island, New York, the son of St. Clair Bourne Sr. — a Caribbean-American journalist and editor of the People's Voice newspaper of Harlem — and Sue Bourne. He was raised in the Black middle-class community of post-war Bedford-Stuyvesant and Long Island.

He completed the bachelor's degree in political science at Georgetown University at Washington, D.C. in 1964 — and worked across the mid-1960s as a Peace Corps volunteer in Lima, Peru from 1964 to 1966.

He enrolled at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism at New York in 1968 — and was suspended in April 1968 for his participation in the Columbia student strike against the proposed university gymnasium at Morningside Park. He completed the master's degree in journalism at Columbia in 1969.

He was hired in 1968 by the National Educational Television Black Journal series at New York as a junior associate producer — and worked across the late 1960s and early 1970s as an associate producer and field producer of approximately twenty Black Journal episodes under the executive producer William Greaves (placed in this archive).

He directed his first documentary, Let the Church Say Amen!, in 1973 — a fifty-six-minute observational documentary of a Black Pentecostal congregation at Houston commissioned by the National Educational Television cooperative.

He founded the Chamba Mediaworks production company at New York in 1976 — and produced and directed across the next three decades approximately forty documentaries on Black Arts Movement figures and institutions.

He directed In Motion: Amiri Baraka in 1982 — a fifty-eight-minute portrait of the poet and Black Arts Movement founder Amiri Baraka — Paul Robeson: Here I Stand in 1999, a one-hundred-and-twenty-minute portrait of the actor, singer, and political activist Paul Robeson (placed in this archive) — and John Henrik Clarke: A Great and Mighty Walk in 1996, a one-hundred-and-eight-minute portrait of the Pan-Africanist historian John Henrik Clarke.

He was the principal documentary filmmaker of the Black Arts Movement across the 1970s through the 2000s — producing portraits of Romare Bearden, Langston Hughes, Henry Dumas (placed in this archive), Gordon Parks, and the principal post-1965 Black-Arts-Movement cohort.

He died at Brooklyn, New York on the fifteenth of December 2007 of complications of brain cancer, at sixty-four.

He is honored here as the principal documentary filmmaker of the Black Arts Movement.