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 the Rich get Richer

Philosophies on Failure & Learning

View All

Examples thinking about multiplying even and odd numbers

We are told Liam multiplies two numbers and gets an even product. What could be true about the numbers Liam multiplied? It says choose two answers, so pause this video and see if you can figure out which two of these could be true. All right, now let’s d…

Business Lessons From Ancient Japan

Did you know that the five oldest companies still operating today in the world were all founded in Japan more than one thousand years ago? There’s even a Japanese term for businesses that have survived more than a century, kept ownership within the same f…

My Meditation Regimen

And usually, do you have a 20 minutes a day, twice a day? What is your regimen? Yeah, I try to do it twice a day for 20 minutes each time. Usually before breakfast and before dinner. Um, but I’m not perfect. You know, I would say probably a third of the …

Misconceptions About Falling Objects