Summer of Soul | National Geographic

less than 1m read

·Nov 10, 2024

(Fast-paced drumming music)

[Man] What time is it?

♪ This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius ♪

"Summer of Soul" is about the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969. With so many greats of music in the day, Tony Lawrence and Hal Tulchin came up with an idea that we need to throw a beautiful soul festival to use music to heal a community that's hurting.

♪ Let the sun shine ♪

And when it came time to distributing, they couldn't find any takers. In fact, a counterpart festival that happened about 10 days later called Woodstock pretty much got to define an entire generation. We wanted progress. We're black people and we should be proud of this.

The day that we got nominated for an Academy Award, I was just flabbergasted because I did not go into this project thinking that I was going to make something that would affect people emotionally like this. Getting nominated really isn't about me, it's about documenting a moment in time and the world's gonna see it. When you see films about the Civil Rights era, there's one slight area that always gets overlooked, Black joy.

Black joy humanizes us. And "Summer of Soul" is just an awesome look at beautiful people having fun in a way that you've never seen anyone from this era look.

♪ Gonna let my hair down in Harlem ♪

♪ 125th Street, now here I come ♪

Talking Investing, Business and YouTube with @NateOBrien

7 Ways to Maximize Misery 😞

View All

Why do planets orbit? (With Dan Burns)

The explanation for gravity is that matter bends space. And so, you put mass in a place in space; it warps SpaceTime. Objects are not feeling a force of gravity; they’re just following the natural curvature. Um, and so you put matter and it warps SpaceT…

PUT YOUR MONEY TO WORK | Meet Kevin PT II

You know, there’s a reason that after seven years, fifty percent of unions, uh, fall apart. It has nothing to do with infidelity; most marriages can survive that. But it has a lot to do with financial pressure. When we, when they bought a house, it was fo…

How to Run a User Interview with Emmett Shear (How to Start a Startup 2014: Lecture 16)

Today’s guest speaker is Emmett Scheer. Emmett is the CEO of Twitch, which was acquired by Amazon, where he now works. Emmett is going to do a new format of class today and talk about how to do great user interviews. So this is the talking to users part o…

Still Human | Nobel Peace Prize Shorts