HARLEM CULTURAL FESTIVAL, series of free summertime events, mainly concerts, that took place between 1967 and 1969 in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. The 1969 festival, spread out over six Sundays from June to August, was especially notable, featuring performances by Nina Simone, Max Roach, Mavis Staples, Sly and the Family Stone, Mahalia Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Hugh Masekela, the Fifth Dimension, Gladys Knight, B. B. King, and many others. It drew over three hundred thousand people and would become known as “Black Woodstock.”
The 1969 festival played out against a tense urban backdrop. That spring twenty-one members of the Black Panther Party had been indicted on charges of conspiracy to bomb New York City Police Department stations, and that summer the Young Lords, Puerto Rican gang members turned community organizers, instigated the so-called Garbage Offensive, during which members obstructed major intersections in East Harlem with garbage to protest inadequate sanitation services in the neighborhood.
Standout performances at the 1969 festival included Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples’ rendition of Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite gospel song, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” with a prayer and memorial speech delivered by Reverend Jesse Jackson; Nina Simone’s “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” which was unreleased at the time; Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man”; Max Roach’s “It’s Time”; and Hugh Masekela’s “Grazing in the Grass.”
Though both the 1968 and 1969 festivals were filmed by director Hal Tulchin, the major television networks showed little interest, and the 1969 festival was overshadowed by the phenomenon of Woodstock, which took place only a few hours north of Harlem in mid-August. It was not until 2021, when the musician Questlove released Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), a documentary about the 1969 festival, that the media finally gave the cultural significance of the festival its due. The film would go on to win an Oscar and a Grammy.