By Jonathan Bernstein, Rolling Stone | (This eventually became one of my favorite “concert” movies when it was released as “The Summer of Soul” in 2020) | In October 1969, the writer Raymond Robinson took to the pages of the New York Amsterdam News, the city’s leading black newspaper, to pose a question. That previous summer, Harlem’s Mount Morris Park had hosted a series of free Sunday afternoon concerts, known collectively as the Harlem Cultural Festival, which featured a startling roster of artists, including Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, B.B. King, the Staple Singers, the 5th Dimension, and Gladys Knight and the Pips.
“The 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival was, indeed, a meaningful entity,” Robinson wrote, “but was it fully appreciated?”
The series had been an unprecedented success, with combined attendance numbers (roughly 300,000) that nearly rivaled those of that summer’s other unexpected musical phenomenon, Woodstock, which took place 100 miles north. As was the case with Woodstock, a filmmaker — Hal Tulchin — had captured the entirety of that year’s Harlem Cultural Festival, confident that the combination of the music (Nina and Stevie) and the setting (a post-’68 Harlem reeling from the assassination of MLK) would add up to a feature-length film that could cement the series of uptown Manhattan concerts as generation-defining events.
Robinson couldn’t have predicted that the summer concert series would cease to exist after the summer of 1969, and that, unlike the upstate New York rock festival, the legend of the Harlem Cultural Festival — sometimes referred to in later years, at Tulchin’s urging, as “Black Woodstock” — would become a largely forgotten historical footnote. The next summer, the fest was announced but never happened, with the founder later claiming that the event had been subject to millions of dollars of fraud by his white investors and that the mafia had been hired to kill him.
But in October of ’69, Robinson was already hinting at the inevitable: The world would lionize Woodstock, and forget about Harlem. “The only time the white press concerns itself with the black community is during a riot or major disturbance,” he wrote of the shows, which had taken place during an eight-week period without a single report of violence. “Hopefully,” he wrote of the festival’s then-uncertain future, “[it] will continue to grow.”
The Harlem Cultural Festival began in 1967, when a 30-something local entertainer named Tony Lawrence was hired by the city’s Parks Department to organize summertime programming in the neighborhood. During the next three summers, it grew into a vital crossroads of black music, culture, and politics. White politicians with national aspirations (RFK, New York mayor John Lindsay) and black community organizers and civil rights leaders (Jesse Jackson, Marcus Garvey Jr.) all felt compelled to appear at the festival.
It was a space where the era’s hitmakers, like the teenaged Stevie Wonder and the pop group the 5th Dimension, would perform the most popular songs in the country; it was also a space that bore witness to torch-passing moments in American music, such as when gospel legend Mahalia Jackson beckoned her mentee Mavis Staples to help her sing MLK’s favorite song, the iconic “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” less than three years before her death.
“The festival was a way to offset the pain we all felt after MLK,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who spoke at the festival in 1969, recalls to Rolling Stone. “The artists tried to express the tensions of the time, a fierce pain and a fierce joy.”
Fifty years after the Harlem Cultural Festival’s 1969 apex, its legacy, and the story of its unlikely origins, its momentous success, and, finally, its strange, devastating demise, has finally begun to resurface. In 2019, the city of New York revisited its own history with a week of panel discussions on the festival, culminating in a 50th-anniversary concert in Harlem on August 17th featuring Sly and the Family Stone guitarist/co-founder Freddie Stone, Talib Kweli, and Igmar Thomas. In 2018, British journalist Stuart Cosgrove published Harlem 69, a history of the neighborhood’s transformational year that includes the most comprehensive account of the festival to date. And a long-awaited documentary featuring Tulchin’s never-before-seen musical footage is finally slated to be released in 2020, after years of failed deals and broken-down negotiations.
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Read this lengthy, but VERY INFORMATIVE, article here:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/this-1969-music-fest-has-been-called-black-woodstock-why-doesn-t-anyone-remember
This post originally appeared on Rolling Stone and was published August 9, 2019.
Photo: The Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969. Photo from the NYC Parks Photo Archive.
This 1969 Music Fest Has Been Called ‘Black Woodstock.’ Why Doesn’t Anyone Remember?
