The Harlem Cultural Festival (also known as Black Woodstock) took place in New York's Mount Morris Park over the course of six weekends during the summer of 1969 from June 29 to Aug. 24. The concert series, which was organised by a promoter named Tony Lawrence, was a celebration of Black music, culture, and politics.
The festival had over 300,000 attendees, including New York's mayor at the time, John V. Lindsay, and civil rights leaders Jesse Jackson and Marcus Garvey Jr. "The festival was a way to offset the pain we all felt after MLK," Jackson told Rolling Stone, referring to Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in April 1968. "The artists tried to express the tensions of the time, a fierce pain and a fierce joy."