Pearl Bowser
Pearl Bowser (born 1931) is an author, television director, film director, producer, and film archivist. She is the author of a book on the first ten years of the career of Oscar Micheaux, an African-American who directed 40 "race pictures" between 1918 and 1940. She is thus credited for having helped rediscover some of Oscar Micheaux's rare surviving films. She is the founder of "African Diaspora Images", a collection of visual and oral histories that documents the history of African-American filmmaking. Part of her journey includes teaching young people film in the 1960s and 1970s . Though Bowser initially set out to research the role of Black women in early African-American filmmaking, she eventually studied both genders because too few Black women were among the earliest African-American filmmakers. In 2012, Bowser gifted her library of films to the Smithsonian Institution's Center for African American Media Arts. These are maintained by Earl W. and Amanda Stafford and can be found at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Early life. In 1931, Pearl Bowser was born in Harlem as the youngest of seven children. She frequented the movie theaters of Harlem along  125th street watching "Hollywood Westerns, B-movies and whatever black films were out at the time." Bowser discovered and joined an interracial club that gathered in the Bronx park, Tibbetts Brook, called the Paul Robeson Club. She was able to find a sense a of identity and pride from Robeson's club where he would share information about culture, art, and film. Career. Bowser stumbled upon her career in film when a friend, documentary filmmaker Ricky Leacock, asked her to work in his office where she helped out with billing and ordering equipment. Bowser started teaching seminars and workshops on  African-American and African film at universities, libraries and museums in 1971. She was the director of the Theater Project at Third World Newsreel, the largest distributor of independent film by people of color in the United States, from 1978 to 1987.