Late Sixties music fest the Harlem Cultural Festival featured everyone from Stevie Wonder to Nina Simone and has been called 'Black Woodstock.' Why doesn't anyone remember?
, B.B. King, the Staple Singers, the 5th Dimension, and Gladys Knight and the Pips.
The Harlem Cultural Festival began in 1967, when a 30-something local entertainer named Tony Lawrence was hired by the city’s Parks Department to organize summertime programming in the neighborhood. During the next three summers, it grew into a vital crossroads of black music, culture, and politics. White politicians with national aspirations and black community organizers and civil rights leaders all felt compelled to appear at the festival.
“This is a part of American history that deserves its own spotlight, and it’s crazy it hasn’t happened before.” says Angela Gil, a concert producer who’s helping put together the 50th-anniversary event. As film director Jessica Edwards once told the writer Bryan Greene, the Harlem Cultural Festival likely holds the distinction of “the most popular music festival you’ve never heard of.”Born in St.
In 1967, Lawrence’s civic-minded work in Harlem led him to his most important job yet: working for New York’s Parks Department. That May, Lawrence and Parks Commissioner August Heckscher announced their plans for a new summer event series called the Harlem Cultural Festival.The Harlem Cultural Festival came just 16 months after the arrival of the city’s new mayor, John Lindsay, a progressive Republican who took a measured, hands-on approach to the city’s mounting racial tensions.
In its first two summers, the Harlem Cultural Festival immediately became a formidable local event, attracting artists like Count Basie, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Tito Puente, and Mahalia Jackson despite its tiny operating budget. By ‘68, many of the summer festival’s Sunday evening shows, such as the “Gospel Festival” and the “Soul Festival,” were drawing 25,000 fans per night.
It was “hotter than hell” at Sly and the Family Stone’s July performance, according to the band’s saxophonist Jerry Martini, who can still vividly recall specifics of that afternoon: The band’s drummer, Greg Errico, performed with the flu, and the Harlem crowd did not immediately take to the band’s funk-rock fusion. “They were a tough audience,” says Martini. “We didn’t go over real well in the beginning. People weren’t real familiar with our style in 1969.
The concerts often served as a space to vocalize the growing tensions and differing sentiments of late Sixties Harlem. When the July 20th, 1969, soul-themed show featuring Stevie Wonder and Gladys Knight was interrupted to announce that the United States had landed on the moon, the crowd erupted into an overwhelming chorus of boos.
Lawrence also alleged several instances of the use of the n-word amongst the corporate entities and white business partners involved with the festival. And while Lawrence’s account provided an explanation of what had become of the festival, his story ultimately could not be corroborated, leaving the, the only publication to print the allegations, to conclude that “attempts to substantiate Lawrence’s charges against the parties mentioned … proved inconclusive.
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