“Summer of Soul” Is a Counter to the GOP Season of Hate

by David Corn        July 7, 2021

Sly Stone tears it up at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969. Searchlight Pictures/20th Century Studios

With the Biden administration beating back (for now) the COVID-19 pandemic, engineering (possibly) a bipartisan infrastructure deal, and presiding over an economy that has experienced a surge in hiring and wages, Republicans have little to rally around. Except, it seems, for hate and racism. In recent months, GOPers and conservatives have mounted an anti-anti-racism campaign that has included decrying the discontinuation of a handful of Dr. Seuss titles (that contained racist stereotypes), demonizing and misrepresenting Critical Race Theory and proposing absurd laws to ban its teaching, denouncing a book that examined the role of slavery in the Battle of the Alamo, and assailing NPR for noting the Declaration of Independence contains “flaws and deeply ingrained hypocrisies” (and the “foundation for this country’s collective aspirations”). Last week, 120 House Republicans voted against removing the statues of Confederate leaders from the US Capitol. These efforts to oppose actions redressing racism—couched as challenges to “cancel culture”—are just the latest iteration of the Republicans’ decades-old Southern Strategy, which was designed to encourage and exploit racism for electoral gain. And Republicans, even as they dismiss or downplay the January 6 attack in which pro-Trump domestic terrorists assaulted police officers and injured over 150 of them, are gearing up to make “law and order” a central them for the 2022 midterm elections. That’s a mantra that has long been regarded as a coded racist message.

 

In short, in the months since Trump was sent packing from the White House, Republican demagoguery—in sync with a creeping (or perhaps galloping) authoritarianism—keeps becoming uglier. But there’s a counter to this onslaught: the new documentary Summer of Soul (Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). Directed by Questlove, joint frontman for the Roots, which has been Jimmy Fallon’s house band, the movie on its most fundamental level is a concert film highlighting performances from the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969, a series of shows over six weekends that summer that featured top acts from the overlapping worlds of soul, funk, jazz, pop, blues, and gospel. But the documentary does more, chronicling a supercharged moment in Black cultural history, and through its very existence Summer of Soul illuminates the systemic racism the GOP’s race-card players are now trying mightily to deny.

 

That summer, this weekly music festival brought tens of thousands of Harlem residents (and other Black Americans) each day to the rocky hillsides of Mount Morris Park to experience the music of Stevie Wonder, B.B. King, Pops Staples and the Staple Singers, Sly and the Family Stone, Max Roach, Nina Simone, Mahalia Jackson, David Ruffin (of the Temptations), the Fifth Dimension, Hugh Masekela, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and many other popular and influential Black artists. Total attendance was about 300,000. The star turns captured by the film are stunning. Wonder kills it on the drums. Stone and his clan rip it up—apparently surprising some audience members as an integrated band. (The drummer and sax player were white.) Nina Simone sings in a forceful tone that the Reverend Al Sharpton describes in an interview for the film as “between hope and mourning.” Jackson joins Mavis Staples on “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s favorite gospel song.

 

This was, as one commentator put it, the Black Woodstock. But it was not covered by the media as such. The festival did not become the cultural touchstone that the messy get-together at Max Yasgur’s farm—which happened about 100 miles away that same summer—immediately became. (The Woodstock documentary—edited in part by a young Martin Scorsese—was rushed into theaters by early 1970.) Granted, there was no chaos, nudity, historic traffic jam, and mud at the Harlem event. It went off smoothly. Still, it didn’t seem to make a dent in American culture. Though a local television station at the time did broadcast specials compiling the best performances, after that the stunning footage shot at the shows sat untouched for half a century. No media company or network had any desire to work with this material. It gathered dust. And this Black happening slipped into a memory hole.

 

As the film shows, the festival marked a flashpoint for Black culture and for Harlem, which had been devastated the previous year by the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Black Power was increasingly in vogue—in politics, fashion, music—and this event was shot full of civil rights messaging, as well as Black resistance and pride. (The Black Panthers helped provide security at the festival.) As one attendee notes in the documentary, he had never seen so many Black people together at once. That was practically revolutionary.

 

A poignant instance occurs in the film when it turns to reactions to the Apollo 11 moon landing, which happened that summer. First, the documentary shows man-and-woman-on-the-street interviews in which people hail this feat and declare it could unite a divided world. All these interviewees are white. Then there is a series of interviews with people at the festival who say they don’t give a damn about Neil Armstrong’s steps on the lunar surface. It means nothing to them. Why isn’t this money being spent on alleviating poverty in Harlem and elsewhere? They are each Black. The juxtaposition is heartbreaking.

 

Woodstock yielded Woodstock Nation as a narrative (for good or bad), and the extensive media coverage signaled Hippiedom was here to stay. Life magazine, for instance, did a special issue on Woodstock. The Harlem Cultural Festival—and its celebration of Black America—produced no such reaction. The dominant media culture had no interest in it. The Harlem gathering was ignored. In Texas and elsewhere these days, Republicans are crusading to suppress Black history. But Questlove’s film—streaming on Hulu and showing in theaters—is a reminder that history can be lost but that with effort and fight it can be found, reclaimed, honored, and put to good use.

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The UFO Report: An Exchange—Should We Believe a Truth Is Out There?

Last week, I wrote about the report recently released by the US intelligence community on UFOs—or what the national security crowd now calls “unidentified aerial phenomena.” The report confirms that military pilots and other presumably reliable sources have spotted strange things in the sky. And though I recounted my own dramatic encounter decades ago with what appeared to be a UFO, I noted that this new report was not good news for UFO believers. After all, if the American military-and-intelligence industrial complex—with all its satellites and sensors—cannot gather evidence of spaceships zipping in and out of Earth’s atmosphere, then maybe we’re not being visited.

 

AJ Vicens, my colleague at Mother Jones, has for years been covering the push for UFO transparency, and he took issue with my conclusion that the report buttressed the case for skepticism. So I invited him to respond. AJ, take it away...

 

In the wake of the release of the US government’s highly anticipated UFO report, David Corn offered his own analysis—and an interesting and entertaining UFO sighting of his own—to his newsletter subscribers. He concluded that the report “does not offer much to bolster the case of those who still believe,” even if it is significant that the US government is publicly acknowledging “some rather unusual sightings from reliable sources.” The report, he wrote, doesn’t offer hard answers to what a diverse group of highly trained military pilots have seen, and for all the billions spent on the latest in cutting-edge technology, the US military can’t provide any hard data on what these things are: “That causes me to wonder whether there’s not that much there for the systems to see.” 

 

David and I have gone back and forth on this issue over the years, back to the days before the 2016 presidential election, and a brief time after, when I wrote a series of stories about Hillary Clinton, the key people around her, and their engagement with what was then still a taboo issue. Clinton’s interest in UFOs went back to the ’90s when her husband was president. If she were to win the 2016 election, she said at the time, she’d get to the bottom of it, knowing full well there was no upside in discussing this and that it could be used against her. She was one of the first major public officials to use the term “unexplained aerial phenomenon,” or “UAP,” for instance, which is the term the government prefers today.

 

As much as I agree with David that the report was somewhat disappointing, I think his omission of the context from which this report was born skews what’s happening and what people in a position to know are telling us. 

 

Let’s remember that it wasn’t until the New York Times published it’s front-page story about the secret government UFO program in late 2017 that this subject became respectable fare in major media. There have been major UFO stories for decades—David references two of them: the alleged Roswell UFO crash recovery and the 1961 Betty and Barney Hill abduction—but “respectable” media steered clear of serious reporting, choosing instead to mock and ridicule the subject and anyone who dared approach it.

 

But with the Times story as cover, over the last few years advocates for UFO transparency managed to engage key members of Congress, so much so that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence—a body with plenty of other vital work to do—required the intelligence community to produce a report on what it knew about the issue. 

 

Sen. Mark Warner, the Democratic chair of the committee, called the recently released public report “rather inconclusive,” but he said it only marked “the beginning of efforts to understand and illuminate what is causing these risks to aviation in many areas around the country and the world.” Sen. Marco Rubio, the committee’s Republican vice chair, who pushed for the report, noted that military personnel’s concerns about these incidents had been “often ignored and ridiculed” for years. Others who have seen the classified version of the report echoed the serious nature of the possible UAP threat. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson—a former US senator from Florida and onetime astronaut—made headlines when he said he doesn’t think we’re alone and that the sightings spotted by military pilots likely aren’t an earthly adversary playing games. 

 

Former CIA Director John Brennan said that some of what’s been seen could be “the result of something that we don’t yet understand...that could involve some type of activity that some might say constitutes a different form of life.” James Woolsey, another former CIA director, said he hadn’t given this topic much credence, but “I’m not as skeptical as I was a few years ago, to put it mildly.” John Ratcliffe, a Trump loyalist who spent a brief stint as the director of national intelligence, said whatever’s happening has been “picked up by satellite imagery that frankly engage in actions that are difficult to explain.” Former President Barack Obama also weighed in, saying that “we don’t know exactly what they are.” 

 

None of this is to say that senior US officials have confirmed the existence of extraterrestrial life or visitations from outer space. And there’s an obvious difference between life existing somewhere in the vast expanse of the universe and active engagement by extraterrestrial intelligence with us here below. But common sense tells us that this broad swath of ideologically diverse senior US government officials talking this way in public says a lot about what’s been communicated behind closed doors. One would imagine that they have connections sufficient to prevent them from sounding like fools on a world stage on a topic they could easily avoid.

 

It should also be noted that the report’s authors wrote that the data collected is hard to interpret and the government “may require additional scientific knowledge” to process what it is being seen. The US government, it also notes, has no data that indicate these UAPs are a foreign adversary. A key additional point: The Department of Defense announced shortly after the report’s release that would “formalize” the mission done by the ad hoc working group behind the report and improve and standardize data collection. An update on that effort is due to Congress in 90 days.

 

David is right that anyone hoping the US government would confirm the existence of space aliens was likely disappointed by the report and that many of the same basic and longstanding questions remain. It goes without saying that in an area like this a high degree of skepticism is necessary. But for those of us open to the idea that reliable witnesses are on target when they say they’ve witnessed technology that exceeds known human capability, the report offers a solid foundation. 

Garry Trudeau, American Dostoyevsky

For five decades, Garry Trudeau has been producing what is one of the most important—and entertaining—comic strips in American history: Doonesbury. He started the strip in October 1970 as a student at Yale. With its sharp-witted look at American politics and American life, it quickly became a phenomenon, eventually appearing in over 1,000 newspapers. He’s lampooned every president since then and has introduced us to scores of original and engaging characters. This includes a core group of college students and, eventually, their own kids, members of Congress, a Viet Cong fighter, an obnoxious TV reporter named Roland Hedley, a radical priest, an exiled authoritarian leader who ends up working as a strategist for Donald Trump, a VA counselor, a CIA operative named Havoc, and, of course, Uncle Duke, the never-say-die con man—and so many others. Trudeau became the first comic-strip artist to win a Pulitzer Prize. After the first Gulf War in 1991, he became an advocate for wounded vets. In 2014, he ceased the daily strip. But his Sunday cartoons keep on coming.

 

With Doonesbury, Trudeau has been an American Dostoyevsky, producing a never-ending novel now stretching over 50 years. To celebrate and commemorate a half-century of Doonesbury, he has put out a digital collection that has every strip. It’s called Dbury@50 and  comes with a flash drive that contains over 15,000 strips—and a user manual. It is easy—and delightful—to get lost within this full depiction of Trudeau’s reality-adjacent world.

 

In the latest Mother Jones Podcast, I speak with Trudeau about his career. He discusses his decades-long feud with Donald Trump, whom he started ridiculing in his panels in the late 1980s. To be fair, only Trump has seen it as a feud. Trudeau, who calls Trump a “right-out-of-the-box cartoon character,” has viewed Trump’s antagonism toward him with bemusement. In his self-effacing manner, Trudeau reflects on the role his strip has played in American culture and the impact of political satire on society. Essentially, he says, political humor doesn’t change minds, but it’s a tonic for those who cannot believe the crazy shit going down. If you’re a Doonesbury fan—or not—you ought to listen to this.

Coming Soon: The This Land Mailbag

That’s right. We got mail. And I’ll be sharing some of it with you in the coming issues. Please join the conversation by emailing me at thisland@motherjones.com.

MoxieCam™

The other day, a 5-year-old girl approached me while Moxie and I were on a walk. “That is quite a poodle,” she said to me. And she was right.

Read Previous Issues of This Land

July 3, 2021: Donald Rumsfeld, Christopher Hitchens, the Iraq War, and me; the perils of taking a home DNA test; Dumbass Comment of the Week; a Springsteen story; and more.

 

July 1, 2021: Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and perjury; Adam Serwer’s new book; Cézanne’s crime scene; and more.

 

June 29, 2021: How the new UFO report is bad news for UFO believers; my own UFO tale; HBO Max’s Hacks; an anti-racist anthem; and more.

 

June 26, 2021: Is Josh Hawley dumb or evil? (The answer is not both); Dumbassery that encourages mass “executions” in the United States; renowned guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson’s new tour and new book (and his claim regarding the best strings arrangement ever on a popular song); MoxieCam™ (before and after photos!), and more.

 

June 24, 2021: How an alleged 1/6 conspirator who called for executing Trump’s foes hooked up with a prominent Republican Party official; new Los Lobos; and more.

 

June 22, 2021: Why the GOP is pushing “political apartheid”; Ted Cruz wins Dumbass Comment of the Week; recommendations for an Apple TV+ series and a book on the curious origins of the universe; the first Clash tour of the United States (and being trapped in a van driven by a punk on acid); MoxieCam™; and more.

 

Got suggestions, comments, complaints, tips related to any of the above, or anything else? Email me at thisland@motherjones.com.