The New Ark represents one of the few examples of Black women’s engagement with documentary film and television as part of a larger effort to employ these mediums in the United States in the 1960s. Reflecting the decade’s monumental socio-political struggles, documentary film became an arena in which fights for Black dignity and liberation took place; creating what can be defined as a Black documentary renaissance. Prior and parallel to the women of The New Ark, countless other women engaged with documentary film and television for that radical purpose, fighting for themselves and their communities. Doing so required these women to believe in other women and the subversive power of art and culture. Black nationalist women, who themselves had their internal disagreements, were thus part of a larger diverse and multifaceted collectiveness in which Black women radically defined and expressed their womanhood on- and off-screen. Above all, Black women’s on and off-screen expressions of radical womanhood exemplify the process of finding oneself, not autonomously, but as reflected in the radical lives of others and, primarily, other Black women.
In a 1970 episode titled “The Black Woman” aired on Black Journal—a program on the educational broadcast network National Educational Television (NET) dedicated to covering issues relevant to Black communities—several Black women gather around the table to discuss the questions facing them. Among the women were the journalist and “Positively Black” hostess Joan Harris, the culinary anthropologist Vertamae Grosvenor, the NAACP lawyer Jean Fairfax, the community organizer Martha Davis, the television producer Marion Etoile Watson, and Amina Baraka. All these women had different stories, backgrounds, ages, and experiences. They came from various organizations and communities—some were Black nationalists, others were not, some called themselves feminists, others did not. Yet, each in their own way, represented the spirit of radical womanhood’s “shadowboxing.” The women, aware of the shadowing and silencing imposed on their womanhood, were “fighters who battle as outsiders,” fighting publicly and privately against their vilification, marginalization, confinement, and structures of inequality. (82) The Black Journal Executive Producer, Toni Brown, opens the episode by stressing that this “group was brought together with as many differences as likenesses but held together by the common thread of the black experience,” that they “speak about survival if you are born a woman and black in this society […] as a unique institution the black woman remains.” The group’s segment encapsulates the broader diversity within unity of Black radical womanhood and the importance of self-definition.