When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised: Revisiting The 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival

The Harlem Cultural Festival was a series of concerts that took place in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood during the summer of 1969. The festival ran for six weeks, from June 29 to August 24, and featured performances by some of the most prominent Black musicians of the time.

The Harlem Cultural Festival overlapped Woodstock, the historic three-day music festival held miles away in Upstate New York. Due to that connection, the Harlem Cultural Festival has been hailed as the “Black Woodstock,” having recently been reexamined for its historical significance in a documentary film directed by The Roots drummer Questlove.

The feature film, Summer of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised), helped bring attention to the concert series and place them in proper historical context. Released in 2021, the movie highlighted the importance of the festival and its impact on Black music history in America, bringing attention to the performances within the cultural context of the era. Summer Of Soul won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Grammy Award for Best Music Film.

Other than a short clip airing on local television, footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival recorded by documentary filmmaker Hal Tulchin was shelved for nearly half a century. Questlove explained the process of bringing the film, and the concerts themselves, to the attention of a wider audience:

While the 1969 “Black Woodstock” edition of the Harlem Cultural Festival was the primary focus of Questlove’s movie and was the most historically significant, the first installment was held in 1967. Local lounge singer and concert promoter Tony Lawrence was the primary person responsible for the Harlem Cultural Festival, which was held again the following year, weeks after the April 1968 riots in the neighborhood in response to the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Lawrence worked closely with former New York City Mayor John Lindsay and the city’s Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Affairs Division to provide the Harlem community with the concert series. An excess of 300,000 people are estimated to have attended the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) which was held over six consecutive Sunday afternoons.

The weekly free events featured a diverse range of talented performers from various genres of music including soul, jazz, R&B, gospel, and blues, as well as dance and spoken word performances.

Many of the most popular Black musicians performed at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, including Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, B.B. King, The 5th Dimension, Mahalia Jackson, Gladys Knight & the Pips, The Edwin Hawkins Singers and The Staple Singers, among many others. Integrated groups also performed, such as Sly and the Family Stone, The Chambers Brothers, Herbie Mann’s band featuring Roy Ayers and more. Latin music was also represented by the likes of Ray Barretto and Mongo Santamaría.

“I was nervous, we were so excited about being there,” Gladys Knight said in Summer Of Soul. “When I stepped onstage I was totally, totally, taken aback, because I didn’t expect a crowd like that. But I knew something very, very important was happening in Harlem that day. It wasn’t just about the music. We wanted progress. We’re Black people and we should be proud of this, and we want our people – our people – lifting us up.”

Summer Of Soul is available on Hulu, Disney+ and elsewhere. Whether new or previously screened, the film is an essential capsule of Black music in America during a turbulent and important period in the Civil Rights Movement.

“The fact that 40 hours of footage was kept from the public is living proof that revisionist history exists,” Questlove told NPR. “It was incredibly important for me to get that history right.”

Watch clips of Gladys Knight & The Pips and Nina Simone at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival and listen to performances featured in the Summer Of Soul documentary below: