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 ♪

Why Being Busy is Ruining Your Life

Elon Musk Just Abandoned his Twitter Deal... What Next?

View All

15 Things You Should Spend Money On

Let’s imagine for a moment that you just got your first paycheck. It’s pretty exciting, isn’t it? Now you’ve got enough money to do whatever you want. But hold on a minute, that’s a dangerous mentality to live by. In fact, it’s even more concerning if you…

The Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment | World History | Khan Academy

As we get into the 1500s, the Renaissance has been going on for roughly 200 years. Especially, Europe has been rediscovering the knowledge from the Greeks and from the Romans. As they enter into the 16th century, they start to go beyond the knowledge of t…

Interactions within and among species | High school biology | Khan Academy

So let’s imagine that we are in the ocean, and we’re going to think a little bit about fish. We know that organisms usually are not just by themselves; there are other organisms around. There might be other members of their species around, and there are v…

The Last Light Before Eternal Darkness – White Dwarfs & Black Dwarfs