Reclaim History
Fifty Years Restored
An unforgettable lyric from Hamilton “who lives, who dies, who tells your story” resonated as I watched the “Summer of Soul: (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).” 300,00 BIPOC folks enjoyed six weekends of over-the-top music in a park in Harlem—yes, Mount Morris Park, Harlem, New York.
Who tells the story: Director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson. He begins by reminding us that the 1969 festival was held 100 miles from Woodstock in Bethel New York and yet, it had been forgotten. Even though the crowd size was similar and the star power —Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight & Pips and many more—was on par the filmed recording of the event languished in stacks of canisters in a basement for 50 years. Unopened.
Why the difference? Go back to the lyrics: Who tells the story?
Questlove has the rare distinction of being the descendant-- three times great-grandparents removed-- of the last 110 slaves smuggled on the last slave ship: The Clotilda. We know Questlove as the musical director/drummer of the in-house band – the Roots bantering with Jimmy Fallon. But he is his own man: Black through and through, with his trademark afro comb stuck in his hair like a crown he brings hip hop, genre crossing versatility. Not surprising, Questlove produced the cast album for the musical Hamilton.
We restore our cultural context when we watch the Mayor of NYC John Lindsay walking the streets of Harlem. Lindsay played key role in crafting the narrative in Kerner Report [1968] —warning that the country was moving toward two unequal and separate societies, one black the other white. LBJ ignored the findings. However, in the movie we see Mayor Lindsay – the blue eye soul brother—on stage warmly greeting the 300,000 festival attendees. Lindsay was no stranger to Harlem; he walked the streets talking to people on their stoops and he was there to console the community after Martin Luther King was murdered. Lindsay was a Republican—not todays’ kind – he served in the tradition of Nelson Rockefeller and Ed Brooke. It makes a difference – who tells the story.
A cultural upheaval formed the subtext for the Summer of Soul: Vietnam, Nixon, Soviets, Cuba, Hippies, Black Power and much more. A cultural revolution – a racial reckoning—was underway: Assigned to the urban desk, journalist Charlayne Hunter Gault, included the word “black’ in her byline only to have it replaced by the term negro. She persisted and for the first time the term we choose for ourselves appears in the New York Times. It would take the second racial reckoning in 2020 before the news media agreed to capitalize the B in “Black”.
During that hot summer Nina Simone sang to us: “We must begin to tell our young, … There’s a great truth that you should know. … When you are young, gifted and black your soul’s intact.” The Harlem Festival, the Summer of SOUL, was a missing piece of our history now it is restored and reclaimed.