“Summer of Soul”: A Harlem Cultural Festival Attendee Laments a Missed Opportunity

The following review appeared on Amazon today, but without the links. Please visit it and give it a “helpful” nod if you’re so inclined. Thanks so much!

From over 40 hours of precious historical footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival (HCF), archived for a half-century for lack of corporate interest, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson had the daunting task of selecting only two. He cannot be faulted for his choice of performances for Summer of Soul. He couldn’t please everyone.

But there was other, post-festival material available to him, and in his decisions here, I detect a narrative at work.

As I watched the documentary, I noticed that the sea of black and brown in Mount Morris Park was flecked with white. (Four years later, the venue was renamed to honor America’s self-proclaimed leader of the world’s “first fascists.”*) The fact that those few “not-of-color” folks traveled safely to and from Harlem to enjoy music is worth noting, given that they did so not many months after the post-MLK assassination riots. (They were luckier than Diana Ross’s fans whom “bands of roving youths” beat and robbed after leaving her ’83 Central Park concert [New York Times, July 24, 1983]).

HCF’s white attendees, though few, represented millions who in the preceding decade had voted with their pocketbooks to help these artists achieve a level of success that their Black fan base alone could not support.

Now, white folks didn’t deserve a medal for supporting the music they liked, whether it was Swing, Bebop, and Hard Bop, and “crossover” artists like (to name a few) Chuck Berry, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Nat King Cole and, later, Soul Music of the Motown persuasion. This phenomenon did, however, mark a notable change in American culture. After all, if racism is America’s salient issue, cultural “crossover” is relevant to the evaluation of the Summer of Soul in which the topic of racism looms so large. With few exceptions, however, like the “liberal,” nominally Republican New York Mayor John V. Lindsay, whites don’t figure in Thompson’s narrative—except as specimens of social pathology.

Affluent “of color” race hustlers and poverty pimps, however, offer their fond recollections; the genuinely insurrectionist Black Panther Party (BPP) is lionized; Jesse Jackson implores the crowd to “free political prisoners” (the ancestor of “bail reform”); Nina Simone wonders aloud if her audience is ready to destroy “white things” and “burn buildings.” Fast forward fifty years, and the BPP’s ideological heir apparent, Black Lives Matter (led by millionaire “trained Marxists”) chants, not about burning buildings, but frying cops in bacon, like “pigs in a blanket.” That didn’t stop reviewers of the documentary from gushing over it.

Mine was not the only recorded “Festival Attendee” interview that didn’t make the final cut: footage winds up on the proverbial cutting room floor for all sorts of reasons. Sure, I wish the finished product had memorialized what I said—if only so I could see exactly what I did say! Ego aside, however, I think it would be of interest to the audience to hear from a 16-year-old white boy who traveled from the Bronx to Harlem “on the 6” subway (J.Lo was born that summer) pursuant to an ad on the No. 27 city bus. But acknowledging my story would disturb the “revolutionary” narrative Thompson chose to promote.

The not-so-subtle subtitle of Summer of Soul is “(…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised).” It alludes to Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 spoken word The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, which answers The Last Poets’ spoken word When the Revolution Comes, which includes the line, “When the revolution comes some of us will probably catch it on TV.”

Two Black female attendees recollect on camera fibs they told their parents about their destination (e.g., shopping, seeing friends). By contrast, it didn’t occur to me to lie to Mom, who raised us on Jazz. I told her where I was heading off to that Sunday, and she was okay with it.

At least the closing credits list me as a “participant.” On HCF’s 40th anniversary in 2009, I blogged about my experience. Did anyone else? On its 50th, I updated the post on this eponymous site. In 2017 the earlier version caught the eye of Bryan Greene, then H.U.D. General Deputy Assistant Secretary and fellow soul music fan. By email he asked to interview me. We arranged it, and his excellent article, “Parks and Recreation,” appeared in the April-June 2017 issue of the newsletter, Poverty & Race. Bryan put me in touch with the people who were working on the documentary; in early 2020, I (and other attendees) was invited to be interviewed.

Several of HCF’s contemporaries expressed their low opinion of Neil Armstrong’s Moon Landing, which occurred the evening of July 20^th, a few hours after I left the park for home. It was money that would have been better spent on the poor, they said. Fifty years later, I don’t see why the trillions that were allocated to the never-ending “War on Poverty” in its various theaters were any less wasted than those earmarked for NASA. Better those dollars had never been mulcted from their owners in the first place.**

Maybe a future edition of Summer of Soul won’t “white out” my small contribution to the oral history of the times. But I’m not counting on it.

* “We were the first fascists.” The quote is from a 1937 interview of Marcus Garvey reported by Joel A. Rogers in Negroes of New York, New York Writers Program, 1939, Schomburg Center. This remark was dropped from later editions of the book. The full study of this phenomenon is Mark Christian Thompson’s 2007 Black Fascisms: African American Literature and Culture between the Wars.

** As I put it in that earlier post on this site, “I’m against governmental boondoggles on principle, but at least the $24 billion mulcted from taxpayers led to a Moon landing; $15 trillion later, U.S. poverty rates are about what they were when President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty.”