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 ♪

Photographing the Devastating Impact of Breast Cancer in Uganda

Homeroom with Sal & Rehema Ellis - Tuesday, December 15

View All

Does Manifestation Work?

Have you ever heard someone say something along the lines of, “If you want something in life, all you have to do is think about it, visualize it, believe you can have it, and you will?” This is called manifestation or the law of attraction. It’s the idea …

Feedback

So now I want to talk a little bit about the concept of feedback. This is a really important concept. It was developed in the 1920s, the idea of using feedback, and it was done at Bell Labs, Bell Telephone Laboratories. Remember we talked about this on th…

Baker v. Carr | National Constitution Center | Khan Academy

[Kim] Hi, this is Kim from Kahn Academy. Today we’re learning more about Baker versus Carr, a landmark Supreme Court case decided in 1962. Baker versus Carr grappled with an incredibly important issue: whether one person’s vote is equal to another person’…

Lasting Lessons from Charlie Munger.