Imitation of Life (1959)

 

Douglas Sirk with Lana Turner

Sirk and Turner with producer Ross Hunter

IMITATION OF LIFE         A                                                                                                         USA  (125 mi)  1959  d: Douglas Sirk

It’s a sin to be ashamed of what you are.  And it is even worse to pretend, to lie.  Sarah Jane has to learn that the Lord must have had his reasons for making some of us white and some of us black.        —Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore)

The price of ruthless ambition, where self-centeredness becomes the American Dream, returning to themes from Magnificent Obsession (1954), accentuating the materialistic mindset of the 50’s, highlighting the tragedy of false ideals, but seen through a prism of racial exclusion, with America turning a blind eye to racism during the 50’s, and just about every other decade, with tragic consequences.  A plush and glamorized remake of John Stahl’s 1934 film Imitation of Life bears only a passing resemblance to its source, the best-selling 1933 novel by Fannie Hurst, which was originally serialized in 1932 in the magazine Pictorial Review under the title Sugar House.  Sirk’s film achieved far greater commercial success, becoming one of Universal Studio’s highest grossing films in history, though some of that might have been attributable to a very public, behind-the-scenes scandal involving actress Lana Turner’s 14-year old daughter Cheryl Crane, who fatally stabbed Turner’s boyfriend Johnny Stompanato, part of Mickey Cohen’s infamous gang, who had been threatening and physically abusing Turner, with the court ruling justifiable homicide.  The film proved to be a comeback vehicle for Turner, the 40’s femme fatale focal point in Tay Garnett’s classic film noir The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and a Hollywood glamor queen whose personal and professional life were in crisis.  This also proved to be Sirk’s final American film, recalling years later, “I had outgrown this kind of picture-making which…was typical of Hollywood in the fifties and of American society, too, which tolerated only the play that pleases, not the thing that disturbs the mind,” where his critical reputation rests heavily on four 1950’s melodramas, All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written On the Wind (1956), The Tarnished Angels (1957), my own personal favorite, and this film, known for taking pedestrian sentimentality to a subversive extreme.  The role of the film’s under-acknowledged producer, Ross Hunter, becomes significant in Sirk’s films, especially the part he played in casting actors who were passing for straight, most notably, Rock Hudson, so the theme that you can’t escape what you are is paramount.  In this film the casting is equally important, however its status as a woman’s picture, featuring the dual lives of two single working mothers, one white and one black, makes it ripe for both a racial critique and a feminist investigation.  Its unique story structure is a rarity, even within the context of the woman’s film, as it explicitly develops a parallel between its two female protagonists, becoming not only a discourse on race, with whites remaining completely oblivious, but the complications of working mothers.  By juxtaposing Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), a resolute white actress who finds her salvation in the theater, with Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), her black maid, humble and self-effacing, never raising her voice (nonetheless she’s just as determined as her white counterpart), whose job literally is domesticity, sharing a home and parenting one another’s children, and by interweaving the two women’s relationships with their daughters, whose dissatisfaction follows in their mother’s footsteps, it veers into an over-stylized hysteria of artifice and melodramatic exaggeration, where men are merely a backdrop for these women, as the film offers an opportunity to observe an unusual and revealing intersection of the issues of race, class, and gender, while also offering a scathing critique of the rich and spoiled.  Turner has the showier and more glamorous role, where her own life draws parallels, discovered in Hollywood at the age of 15, having multiple lovers including Artie Shaw and Tyrone Power, who she considered the love of her life, married eight times with seven different men, where her career constantly took her away from her daughter, who was raised by a series of nannies, growing ever more resentful of her mother’s success, but it’s Moore toiling in the shadows who brings the heartfelt authenticity the picture needs, simultaneously wrenching and restrained, “How do you explain to your child she was born to be hurt?”  Nominated for an Academy Award in a Best Supporting role, she had few career offers afterwards, as significant roles were simply not written for black women. Turner grew rich from the film, reportedly given the most luxurious trailer in Universal’s history, Imitation of Life Official Trailer #1 - Lana Turner Movie (1959) HD YouTube (2:20), having forfeited much of her salary for the part, but more than made up for it as she received a percentage of the profits, turning out to be her biggest payday.  

The film recounts a decade in the life of Lora Meredith, beginning in the late 40’s when she’s a young widow struggling raise her child, Susie, holding a variety of odd jobs, but a short stint as a model leads to a break as an actress, then jumping ahead a decade later after she has achieved fame as a Broadway star.  Her success is made possible by her association with Annie Johnson, a black single mother she encounters early in the film on a crowded Coney Island beach, with Annie moving into her apartment as a nanny and housekeeper with her daughter Sarah Jane, who is about the same age as Susie, immediately becoming best of friends.  Lora also becomes attached to a young amateur photographer she meets on that same Coney Island beach, Steve Archer (John Gavin), who immediately takes a liking to the two kids, who he randomly photographed that day, where the picture eventually leads to an advertising job.  The thrust of the drama is that Steve wants her to marry and settle down, which was the prevailing view in the postwar 50’s, but a life of domesticity doesn’t take into account her own personal ambitions, which becomes the central drama of the film, cutting it short with Steve, as success often takes her away from her daughter and her home.  During their years together, both women endure parental conflicts, as Susie (Sandra Dee, pert, pretty, and blond, the highest paid teenage model in New York and one of the most sought after young actresses in Hollywood) feels Annie is more of a mother than her own, who is always absent, while Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner, daughter of Lupita Tovar, a Mexican-born actress who had a career in Hollywood, and Paul Kohner, a Jewish film producer from Bohemia who was best friends with director William Wyler), the undutiful daughter, attempts to pass for white, even as a young girl in school, where her anger and ultimate rejection of her mother speaks to her generation’s rejection of domestic work, which causes Annie no end of grief, eventually dying of heartbreak.  Susie eventually falls in love with Steve, who steadfastly remains a loyal friend.  Though Lora initially rejects Steve in favor of her career, where her hard work eventually pays off, purchasing a lovely home, decorated in a plush décor, reflecting the pinnacle of her success, yet her emotional world feels vacant and empty.  By the end of the drama, she wonders if she’s been living an “imitation of life.”  That title says it all, as it suggests a shadow world, a morbidly depressed underside to all that middle class success, a subject addressed in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and her new feminist activist group, the National Organization for Women, a prelude to the women’s movement of the 60’s, where radical feminism would emerge by the end of the decade, raising questions about what a woman really wants, striving for something more than husband, children, and home, suggesting women had been sacrificing their own opportunities in order to fit the model of a stay-at-home mom in the suburbs, where economic stability had not brought happiness, often feeling adrift and alone, as if vanquished in a desert of monotony where the daily routine becomes a grind.  The role of women in American society is awash with contradictions, cautioned in the 40’s about the hazards of working women, while urged today to pursue professional careers.  Yet this film adds additional layers of subtlety that figure prominently, the psychic price rebels pay for being different, parental suffocation, the comfort of religious faith (the compensation for such low wages and lower status), and society’s repressions, where it’s no accident that gays, whose closeted denial mirrors the mentality of Sarah Jane, and black women, who perhaps finally recognized themselves onscreen, have always been drawn to this picture.  At the time it was made, the film was a Hollywood milestone debunking the myths of a safe, white middle-class America in their pursuit of stability and happiness.  Underneath is an undeniable rage.  The scene of Troy Donahue, discovering Sarah Jane’s mother is black, is particularly vicious, brutally beating her and leaving her in the gutter, accompanied by the chaotic sounds of jazz music, sending the message that Sarah Jane was born to be hurt, destined to a lifetime of racism and prejudice, no matter how many times she tries to reinvent herself.  More than half a century later, that’s still hard to watch.  More importantly, is being different any easier now?       

This film takes place during the dawn of the civil rights movement, as the nation’s schools were recently integrated from a 1954 Supreme Court decision, the 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks and the subsequent bus boycott led to the integration of buses in Alabama, while in 1957 the U.S. Congress passed the first Civil Rights legislation since Reconstruction in 1875, forming a Civil Rights section of the Justice Department, empowering prosecutors to target interference with the right to vote.  Sirk significantly altered the context of the novel, where a maid’s pancake recipe leads to her employer’s success in the restaurant business, yet the two women’s relationship is largely the same, where racial and class differences are minimized.  Lora’s ambitions are largely determined by her deceased husband, who was a theatrical director, so she was simply following in his footsteps, yet the singleminded purpose she brings to her career is stunning, the equal of any man, especially the way she dresses down her would-be agent, Allen Loomis (Robert Alda),  who openly acknowledges, “Me, I’m a man of very few principles and they’re all open to revision,” whose sexual advances she cuts short, not willing to cross that line, yet she’s extremely fortunate to find a young playwright, David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy) in search of an actress, as they are able to build something together.  She breaks from him as well, in need of dramatic roles instead of sticking to comedies, where her career is an astounding success.  But that’s never the central focus of the film, with Sirk more interested in the consequences of her success, as trouble continues brewing at home, with Susie resenting her mother’s narcissistic ambition and instead turns to Steve for friendly advice and companionship, becoming infatuated with the idea of love.  But the real focus is on Sarah Jane, continually passing for white, getting mixed up with a relationship that goes terribly wrong, before finding herself dancing as a chorus girl in tawdry night clubs under an assumed name, where she refuses to recognize her own mother, pretending she’s just some stranger, as she doesn’t want to lose a job that is available only to whites.  In her rejection, however, she finds herself just as lost as all the other women, having turned her back on her mother’s influence and affection.  Sarah Jane’s anger still resonates today, seemingly a misfit among blacks, disillusioned with the artificial paradise of white America, having no world she can call her own, as Kohner’s angry defiance also led to a Best Supporting Actress nomination.  Audiences may have been drawn to the glitz and glamor of Lana Turner, as the studio paid more on her garish wardrobe ($23,645) than they did on Juanita Moore’s salary ($5,550), dressed in prominently featured jewelry that was worth over a million dollars, but ended up being emotionally gutted by the performances of both Moore and Susan Kohner, who end up stealing the picture, perhaps the ultimate irony, as bigger stars Turner and Dee are not at all sympathetic.  For Turner, all her life is tied up with this elusive black woman, but knows next to nothing about her, so when she dies, Turner is left completely clueless and empty.  Passionate, cynical, and laced with irony, these lurid melodramatic overtones accentuate what this film is about, exposing the mediocrity and sheer indifference of the American Dream, as two heroines who are both disillusioned workers and failed parents question the choices they’ve made.  Ironically, in the end it’s Steve who makes the compromises, initially championing artistic integrity before selling out as an advertising executive selecting photographs to sell beer, where he’s forced to sacrifice his own ambitions as a successful photographer.  By the time each realizes the price they’ve paid for success, and the void that exists in their own lives, getting back together again feels like the right thing to do, as they’ve never stopped thinking about one another, much to the horror of Susie whose romantic inclinations have been stymied by her own mother.   

According to Sirk, “You can’t escape what you are…. I tried to make it into a picture of social consciousness — not only of a white social consciousness, but of a Negro one, too.  Both white and black are leading imitated lives… There is a wonderful expression: seeing through a glass darkly.  Everything, even life, is inevitably removed from you.  You can’t reach, or touch, the real.  You just see reflections.  If you try to grasp happiness itself your fingers only meet glass.  It’s hopeless.”  It’s that underlying element of hopelessness that is the key to understanding this picture, as no one really believes the happy ending, which is a mirage.  A tearjerker with a message, there’s even a theme song that opens the film sung by Earl Grant, perhaps best known for his instrumental version of the song Ebb Tide, "Imitation of Life" (Douglas Sirk, 1959) -- The Opening Credits YouTube (2:06), while the rousing finale is an unforgettable depiction of that perfectly scripted, grand-opera gospel road to glory, with all that pomp she never received during her lifetime, as four white horses pull a black carriage loaded with a mountain of white roses, where it’s hard not to choke up in tears, especially when Sarah Jane shows up, featuring none other than the incomparable Mahalia Jackson singing Trouble of the World, Imitation of Life (1959 Douglas Sirk) YouTube (5:42).  When the film was released, contemporary critics found Sirk’s films to be artificial and melodramatic, overreliant on manipulating the audience emotions, having little to do with the concerns of the real world.  In the 70’s and 80’s however, critics and scholars have a near universal praise for Sirk’s films, directly counteracting the dismissals of the earlier critics, where his critical reputation has almost completely reversed. His first well-known American film was Sleep, My Love (1948), but nearly all his films depict families in which a house, car, and affluence are present, while sexual and emotional fulfillment are nowhere to be found.  Russell Metty’s cinematography often frames the characters through doorways, against windows, or in front of mirrors, keeping the camera at a distance, continually emphasizing both the spaciousness and confinement of the décor, accentuating the lavishly artificial and visually stylized aspects of the melodrama, where characters lose sight of and become disconnected from their lives.  The word expressionist is frequently used to describe Sirk’s technique, an indication not only of the style of his work in the United States, but also his background in films within the framework of German expressionism in the 1920’s and early 1930’s, where his excesses are viewed as a form of Brechtian distancing.  If there is “distance” in Sirk’s style, it’s something he shares with fellow émigrés Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Max Ophüls, Fritz Lang, and Robert Siodmak, having fled the horrors of the Nazis, observing the naïveté of American society with a bemused concern, with Sirk making a series of films about middle-class America, with its losses and disillusionments.  This film moves from initially showing what it means to be a woman living in a male-dominated society, while in the second half it addresses the perspective of how women of color are affected by racism.  Along those lines, German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder offered his own critical analysis, “It is not because white is a prettier color than black that Sarah Jane wants to pass for white, but because life is better when you’re white.  Lana Turner doesn’t want to be an actress because she enjoys it, but because if you’re successful you get a better deal in this world.  And Annie doesn’t want a spectacular funeral because she’d get anything out of it, she’s dead by then, but because she wants to give herself value in the eyes of the world retrospectively, which she was denied during her lifetime.  None of the protagonists come to see that everything, thoughts, desires, dreams arise directly from social reality or are manipulated by it.”

Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

Mahalia Jackson with Mayor John Lindsay

Mayor John Lindsay

Lindsay escorted by Black Panther security

Chambers Brothers

Abbey Lincoln

 

Rev. Jesse Jackson

5th Dimension

Billy Davis and Marilyn McCoo

Gladys Knight and the Pips

Stevie Wonder

B.B. King

Rev. Jesse Jackson

Mavis Staples (left) with Sister Mahalia Jackson

Hugh Masekela

Sly and the Family Stone

Nina Simone

Amir “Questlove” Thompson

Hal Tulchin, 1969

SUMMER OF SOUL (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)        B+                   USA  (118 mi)  2021  d:  Amir-Khalib “Questlove” Thompson

Sitting on the shelf for 50-years, this documents the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, a series of six consecutive summer Sunday afternoons from June 29 through August 24, featuring some of the best black musical talent for free, but overlooked as it took place the same time as Michael Wadleigh’s epic documentary of a watershed, countercultural music festival, WOODSTOCK (1970), which took place 100-miles away in upstate New York.  Wadleigh’s mostly white film received all the media attention, winner of Best Documentary at the 1971 Academy Awards, though some months later the West coast wanted their own version of “Woodstock West,” holding a free concert at the Altamont Speedway 60-miles East of San Francisco, which turned into an unmitigated disaster when the Hell’s Angels, supposedly paid to provide security, murdered a young black man just 20-feet in front of the stage as the Rolling Stones were playing, captured in Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin’s Gimme Shelter (1970).  While those films drew attention, this film shot in Harlem floundered, as footage was never edited, and was eventually forgotten, shot by TV producer Hal Tulchin using 5 cameras at what was then Mount Morris Park (later renamed Marcus Garvey Park), drawing over 300,000 people, designating the film “Black Woodstock” in order to garner attention, but no distributors at the time would finance a film, so 50-hours of unedited film sat unused until the project was turned over to Ahmir (Questlove) Thompson, a drummer, deejay, record producer, and founder of the Roots, best known as the house band for Jimmy Fallon, who edited the film, adding several current voices along with a healthy mix of concert footage, creating a musical stream-of-conscious montage on the developing black identity, assembling historical footage that provided the backdrop, helping modern day viewers digest just exactly what transpired that summer.  Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for a Documentary and the Audience Award at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, this film joins the 1972 found footage of Aretha Franklin singing gospel in church, as documented in Sydney Pollack and Alan Eliot’s 2019 Top Ten List #5 Amazing Grace, another film that sat on the shelf for more than four decades.  These revival films, for lack of a better term, take us back to a different era, providing commentary on the state of the nation at that time.  In the summer of 1969, blacks were still called Negroes by mainstream media, reeling from the assassinations of President Kennedy, his brother Robert during his Presidential campaign, the Reverend Martin Luther King, and black Muslim minister and human rights activist Malcolm X, each one of which took something out of the spirit of the 60’s, where social movements promised to deliver a more just society, yet this never happened, instead replaced by the law and order rhetoric that carried Richard Nixon into the White House in 1968, with Republicans adopting the Southern strategy of exacerbating black and white racial tension in the South, taking advantage of white resentment over the Civil Rights and Voting Rights gains made by blacks, creating a polarizing effect still felt in the region more than five decades later.  A Presidential Party intentionally excluding racial progress may help explain why the 1969 Harlem Cultural festival was minimized to such an extent and so completely overlooked, as there were simply no positive stories about blacks at the time, a community that was largely disillusioned, as instead stories permeated around the killing of Black Panthers, lost lives in Vietnam where a majority of the returning dead were blacks sent to the front lines, massive arrests and incarceration of black people, where even on television blacks were continually associated with the criminal element, typecast as petty thieves, junkies, prostitutes, or drug pushers.  This may account for such radically differing views heard at the festival towards the heralded moon landing that summer, as whites were completely enthralled while blacks seemed more blasé, believing the money could be better spent feeding poor people in America.      

The film sat in Tulchin’s basement all those years until he died in 2017, at which point producer Robert Fyvolent found out about it and bought the rights, hiring Questlove to assemble a film from the massive footage, tracking down several people who attended the festival, adding a few commentators, including several of the performers themselves, giving the film a more personalized glimpse at the historical implications.  It’s not really a concert film, as performances are continually interrupted, which is the film’s biggest flaw, becoming instead a cinematic essay of historical context, drawing parallels to the summer of 2020 following the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter social protest movements around the world that arose from that event.  So the opening moments are a bit jagged with talk as it takes its time finding a musical rhythm, peppered with archival material about the social injustice of the times, but unless you lived through it, most people will have little understanding of what the 60’s were like, as women and minorities were routinely overlooked, still relegated to the margins of political rhetoric and speeches, not yet obtaining their rightful place at the table of American democracy, where sexism and racism were still the norm.  So this black music festival, an oasis of harmony and tranquility, went largely underreported, flying under the radar, as few whites participated, so it was never part of any mainstream media which still largely appealed only to whites.  Little coming out of Harlem was ever mentioned on American airwaves, so this film revives all that was initially missed, providing a modern era perspective that glorifies the pride and beauty of being black, celebrating black heritage through the power of music.  As blacks took to the streets after the assassination of Martin Luther King, creating a succession of infamous burnings in more than 100 cities across America, much of what was destroyed has still not been rebuilt some 50 years later, with many New York politicians fearing a recurrence of more uprisings on the anniversary of King’s death one year later, so there was a train of thought that these musical offerings in Harlem were specifically designed to prevent blacks from taking to the streets.  The contrast between the violent lootings and destruction of property with the overall peace and harmony of this summer music festival couldn’t be more pronounced, as there isn’t a hint of animosity or discord, instead this is one of the earliest expressions of black unity and love, a kind of model for what can exist in the future.  Because an open animosity existed between the black community and the mostly white police force, the Black Panthers provided the security, an East coast version of the Hell’s Angels providing security at Altamont, though a small police presence eventually made its way to the festival.  While sponsored by Maxwell House and the New York City government, without money for lights, the entire festival took place during the day, where the stage faced the natural light of the sun, always keeping the performers in the light.  That left the audience out in the sun as well, with many quickly finding shady spots, but most were left exposed to the sun, where the relaxed nature of the event was like an outdoor barbeque with family and friends.  The emcee for the event is Caribbean lounge singer and concert promoter Tony Lawrence, originally from St. Kitts, an employee of the parks and recreation department of New York City and a man described as “a hustler, in the best sense,” introducing New York Mayor John Lindsay, a liberal Republican, who showed up in the right places, and Stevie Wonder, just age 19 at the time, before he broke from Motown and became a megastar on his own, singing The Isley Brother’s “It’s Your Thing,” before breaking into a drum solo, appearing later singing “Shoo-Bee-Doo-Bee-Doo-Da Day,” where he ended up furiously playing lower register bass notes on the keyboards until someone came and re-centered his position back to the middle,  The Chambers Brothers follow singing “Uptown,” also B.B. King playing the blues, Gladys Knight and the Pips singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” David Ruffin, a soloist breaking away from The Temptations, sings “My Girl,” with the 5th Dimension singing the medley “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In” from the extraordinarily popular Broadway musical Hair, while the married couple Billy Davis and Marilyn McCoo are seen watching a video of themselves, marveling at how young they were, but also happy they were finally gaining acceptance by blacks, as hearing them on the radio many thought they were white.  The music is more in the background as Rev. Al Sharpton and others remind us of the fractious times, with the black community split between following the non-violence of Dr. King and the more militant Black Power branch of Stokely Carmichael that wanted a black revolution.

While there are a host of attendees and commentators offering their own perspective of the festival, where their voices are mixed into heavily edited footage, the stream of music doesn’t really get rolling until the gospel section, starting with the Edwin Hawkins Singers with “Oh Happy Day,” featuring Shirley Miller as the soloist, a moving and extremely uplifting hit that crossed over into mainstream radio, shooting to number one in the San Francisco Bay area, where it played regularly, eventually touring with secular artists, drawing the ire of religious groups that condemned them, yet they were extremely devout, preaching the gospel through music and spreading the spirit, finding a new generation of followers.  But the true star is none other than Chicago’s own Mavis Staples, a soulful force who becomes the emotional core of the film, first appearing with her sisters Cleotha and Cynthia along with the strumming electric guitar of Pops Staples and the Staple Singers, singing the lead in a rousing version of “Help Me Jesus,” clapping their hands, rocking the house, using the call and response style which simply wakes up the audience and fills them with a joyful spirit, with Mavis providing the commentary, taken aback by the size of the crowd, all having a good time, so she felt like celebrating with them.  As a popular group, they were invited to Folk, Jazz, and Blues Festivals, where every kind of music is heard in their songs.  Pops was born in Mississippi where picking cotton was part of his black heritage, where the songs they played is what he heard with his family growing up in the Mississippi Delta.  A group of gospel singers follow, where spirit possession is part of the black religious experience, differing somewhat from white Christianity (with the possible exception of the Holy Rollers), as it comes from Africa, with the body erupting with the Holy Spirit seeking catharsis and a peaceful release.  According to Rev. Al Sharpton, “Gospel was more than religious.  Gospel was the therapy for the stress and pressure of being black in America.”  Psychiatry never made much of a presence in black communities, but they did have Mahalia Jackson, the most influential gospel singer in history, selling more than 22 million records during her lifetime.  According to journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, one of the first blacks admitted to the University of Georgia, “Gospel’s part of our DNA.  It’s deep in the recesses of our consciousness…During the Civil Rights Movement, the church provided sustenance for us, helped us march on, helped generations of people confront some of the most vicious, violent acts.”  She’s speaking from experience, as she recalls being harassed by white students at the University of Georgia, making noise and stomping on the floor directly above her, but she drew strength and comfort from listening to Nina Simone records.  The highlight of the film is the incredibly moving sequence of Mahalia Jackson singing Dr. King’s favorite gospel song “Precious Lord” along with Mavis Staples, who idolized Mahalia Jackson, where the opportunity to sing with her is filled with reverence and supreme admiration, perhaps the only unedited song heard to its completion in the entire film, with the musical backing of Ben Branch and the Operation Breadbasket Orchestra and Choir, where Rev. Jesse Jackson sets the stage, describing the exact moment in Memphis when Dr. King was shot, claiming he referenced the song in his final words, creating a pall of silence, with Mavis Staples filling the void, instantly taking command of the song with that soulful and earthy voice before Mahalia Jackson takes over for the next verse, setting a moral tone of power and conviction, eventually releasing it back to Mavis, who describes this as the biggest honor of her entire life, Mahalia Jackson in 1969 Summer of Soul - Take My Hand Precious Lord ft. Mavis Staples YouTube (1:45).  A conglomerate of musical styles are heard, artists that crossed genres, like Cuban percussionist Mongo Santamaría performing “Watermelon Man,” Puerto Rican percussionist Ray Barretto performing “Abidjan” and “Together,” the innovative jazz of Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach, or Hugh Masekela singing an adaptation of a traditional African folk song built around almost Brazilian percussion before launching into “Grazing in the Grass.”  This is the prelude to the incomparable Nina Simone, the High Priestess of Soul, who immediately sets the standard by acknowledging “How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?”  Channeling black anger into a defiant song of protest, she opens with “Backlash Blues,” a scathing protest poem by Langston Hughes that Simone set to music, ferociously pounding on the keyboard, unleashing the indignation and fury of being treated like a second class citizen, before singing what became a black anthem, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” finally reading a fiery musical recitation of an inspirational poem of black unity by David Nelson of the Last Poets.  The Bay area’s Sly and the Family Stone literally blew some minds, with his brother Freddie on guitar and sister Rose on piano in her white mini-dress and white wig dancing and singing backup, a predecessor to the multiracial and genre-bending Prince, as they had a white drummer and white saxophonist, something many had never seen before, with a knockout female trumpet player, Cynthia Robinson, performing the fist-in-the-air song “I Want to Take you Higher,” exactly as it would be done at Woodstock weeks later, unleashing a frenzied energy of unabashed freedom, literally dancing up a storm onstage, instantly elevating the excitement level to a fever pitch, while earlier they performed “Everyday People,” generating the largely ignored plea for peace and equality between differing races and social groups, including the global refrain, “We got to live together.”  Largely forgotten but deeply humanizing, the experience speaks for itself, as the event lays the groundwork for the formation of a new black identity.           

Postscript  

In the months that followed, a series of setbacks occurred with the Black Power Movement in America, as that same summer Stokely Carmichael fled to Africa to escape harassment and potential arrest by the FBI.  Just prior to the festival, 21 New York Black Panthers had been arrested and charged with planning a bombing campaign across the city to coincide with the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death.  All were eventually acquitted.  Later in December, Chicago Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton and fellow Panther Mark Clark were assassinated by the FBI in cold blood in a pre-dawn raid, with no one from law enforcement ever held accountable.  A year later, Angela Davis was arrested on gun charges used in the murder of a judge, also acquitted after a lengthy trial, splintering the movement, as the Black Panther Party and other black liberation activists were constantly harassed and deeply infiltrated by FBI informants, leading to a barrage of arrests, while at the same time they were vilified by the mainstream press, losing public support, causing infighting and violence while running out of money, bogged down in legal fees from the multitude of arrests of its members, becoming ever more isolated, losing public relevance, as membership continued to dwindle over the next decade.  Less than a year after her appearance in Harlem, Nina Simone left the United States, going first to Barbados, and then to Liberia, returning only sporadically to perform over the next several decades, becoming more reclusive in the years that followed. Essentially, the revolution that so many anticipated, simply never happened, suppressed by a significantly increased police presence in America, killing or incarcerating the most outspoken radicals, causing the rest to flee the country or go underground, resurfacing decades later, typically making plea agreement deals with the government.  By 1983, America signed into law a national holiday honoring Rev. Martin Luther King, observed for the first time in 1986.