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 ♪

How to Get Rich

We’re All Equal in Our Infinite Ignorance

View All

What's in Hand Sanitizer? | Ingredients With George Zaidan (Episode 9)

What’s in here, what’s it do, and can I make it from scratch ingredients? Now, you might already know that the ingredient in here that kills germs is ethyl alcohol—or, as we purist chemists like to call it, ethanol—which is exactly the same molecule that…

Additive and multiplicative relationships

We are told that Miguel and a group of friends play soccer during recess each day. More students join them to play. The table below shows the relationship between the number of students joining Miguel and his friends and the total number of students playi…

FART SCIENCE

Hey, Vsauce Michael here, and today we are going to talk about farts. What are they, how do they define us, and how much weight do we lose every time we fart? Now, it’s easy to think that talking about farts is immature, but they are incredibly complicat…

Ice Cutting Experiment

All right, we’re ready to do this experiment. I have the two 1.5 kg masses separated by a copper wire, and my housemate and assistant, Colette, has the two 1.5 kg weights separated by some fishing line. They’re both the same thickness, so we’re going to p…

Welcome to the Gigafactory | Before the Flood

I mean that fossil fuel industry is the biggest industry in the world. They have more money and more influence than any other sector. So, I mean, do it; the more that they can be sort of popular uprising against that, the better. But I think the scientifi…

Summer of Soul | National Geographic

More Articles