William Greaves

William Garfield Greaves was born on the eighth of October 1926 at New York, the son of Garfield Greaves — a Jamaican-American Methodist minister — and Emily Muir Greaves. He was raised in the Black middle-class community of Harlem and the Brooklyn West Indian community of the late 1920s and 1930s.

He completed his secondary education at the Stuyvesant High School at Manhattan in 1944 — and enrolled at the City College of New York in 1944 in the principal engineering programme. He left City College in 1946 to pursue an acting career.

He joined the American Negro Theatre at Harlem in 1944 — and was cast in the principal Off-Broadway productions of Anna Lucasta in 1944 and Lost in the Stars in 1949. He was admitted to the Actors Studio at New York in 1948 — the first Black-American actor admitted to the principal Actors Studio.

He relocated to Toronto in 1952 — at the principal post-1950 American McCarthy-era Black-American expatriate community — and was hired at the National Film Board of Canada at Ottawa as junior film editor and director from 1952 to 1963.

He directed approximately twenty documentary films for the National Film Board of Canada across the 1950s and early 1960s — and returned to the United States in 1963 at the principal post-1963 American civil-rights documentary commissioning expansion period.

He directed Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One in 1968 — a seventy-five-minute experimental meta-documentary in which the documentary crew filming a scene of marital discord at Central Park in turn becomes the subject of the documentary. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One was selected in 1991 for the National Film Registry of the United States Library of Congress and was followed by Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2½ in 2005.

He was hired in 1968 as executive producer of the National Educational Television Black Journal series at New York — the principal Black-American public-television news-and-documentary series of the late 1960s. He held the principal Black Journal executive-producer position from 1968 to 1970 and won the Emmy Award for the Black Journal series in 1969.

He directed Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey in 2001 — a one-hundred-and-fifty-minute documentary biography of the Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning American diplomat Ralph Bunche — and Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice in 1989, a fifty-eight-minute documentary biography of the anti-lynching journalist Ida B. Wells.

He was the principal documentary filmmaker of the American Black-American civil-rights-and-cultural movements across the 1960s through the 2000s — producing approximately two hundred documentary films across his career.

He died at New York on the twenty-fifth of August 2014 of complications of heart failure, at eighty-seven.

He is honored here as the director of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.