Weekend Music: Nina Simone, Harlem, Black Woodstock, 1969

In the summer of 1969, there were two landmark music festivals in the great state of New York*. One of them was the Harlem Cultural Festival, 6 weeks of free concerts featuring the likes of B.B. King, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach, the Fifth Dimension, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, the Staples Singers, Hugh Masekhela, Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamaria and others. The concert was held at Mt. Morris Park (now called Marcus Garvey Park) in Harlem and was attended by over 300,000 concertgoers over the course of the series. NYPD refused to provide security so the event organizers engaged the Black Panthers.

A producer Hal Tulchin took over 50 hours of footage of the festival, but was unable to get it aired on the American TV networks of the day. Currently that footage lies languishing in vaults; apart from Nina Simone’s performance that is making the rounds of YouTube (see below), most of that footage has not seen the light of day. 1969 was a pivotal time in black culture, it was a tense period post-MLK’s assassination and the race riots of 1968, but before the more celebratory 70’s that were captured by Wattstax and by Soul Power.

Nina Simone: “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969

[via metafilter]

*The other festival (Woodstock) was in Bethel, NY and is now widely celebrated.