Revelatory footage from the 1969 Harlem Cultural festival, crudely known for a while as the Black Woodstock, is brought to life in a spectacular new film
There’s a moment so striking and rich with power at the center of Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s Summer of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) that, while watching it, I actually forgot to breathe. It comes as Mavis Staples completes singing her section of the gospel song Take My Hand, Precious Lord. The audience is a packed Harlem park of almost exclusively African Americans who have just heard Dr Martin Luther King eulogized by a man who witnessed his assassination merely one year earlier, the electrifying Rev Jesse Jackson. And they know this was the slain leader’s favorite song.
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