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 become powerful

Unlocking the Eyes | Explorer

View All

Olga Vidisheva Speaks at Female Founders Conference 2015

Hi everyone! I’m so excited to be here today to share the story of Chopsticks and my journey here. For those of you guys who don’t know, Chopsticks lets you shop the world’s most unique boutiques around the world. It used to be that if you lived in Dallas…

The Best Ways The Rich Build a Recession-Proof Investment Portfolio

You know, Alexir, the rich come out almost unscathed during recessions. In fact, many come out in better shape than when the recession started. The world can shout about bailouts as loud as they want, but if you look deeper into it, you’ll see their growt…

Compelling Models for Conservation | Explorers Fest

Loved it! I don’t— I didn’t really think about where it came from. Probably in the same way that you didn’t really think about where your food came from when you were a kid too. I don’t remember exactly when I decided to stop eating sharks in soup or when…

Reflecting points across horizontal and vertical lines

We’re asked to plot the image of point A under a reflection across the line L. So we have our line L here, and we want to plot the image of point A under reflection across line L. Well, one way to think about it is: point A is exactly one, two, three, fou…

How YC Was Created With Jessica Livingston

That first batch, which was kind of magical in terms of the group of people and the outcomes, what did it feel like? It was like one of the most fun times in my life ‘cause everyone really wanted to be there and really wanted to start a startup. That’s wh…

We’re told that triangle DF and triangle DKL are similar right triangles. Complete the proportion to show that the slope of DF, so that’s this segment right over here DF, equals the slope of DL. So pause this video and see if you can complete it. They sta…

Summer of Soul | National Geographic

More Articles