Bell, Questlove & the Lost Oscar Moment

Summer of Soul

It’s easy to see how you might confuse the two—W. Kamau Bell and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson. Both tower in stature and intellect. Both speak in measured rhythms, where each word is weighted with purpose. Both are late-night truth-tellers, Black voices granted rare permissions to address the soul of a fractured nation through the soft prism of CNN’s ambient glow. But make no mistake—though the ground they walk may be familiar, the path they take is uniquely their own.

Bell, the self-effacing sociopolitical tour guide of United Shades of America, made a career of sitting beside the uncomfortable and calling it family. His gift? The ability to land in any zip code across the U.S., pull up a chair at the local diner, and crack open conversations with militias, inmates, far-right evangelicals, and progressives alike—no shouting, no showboating. Just hard truths soaked in slow-cooked empathy. His United Shades ran its intended seven seasons, winning Emmys and sparking national reckonings, just completion.

After United Shades, Bell stepped into deeper waters—his 2022 Showtime docuseries We Need to Talk About Cosby was a seismic collision of art, accountability, and the cultural contradictions of Black America. The kind of work that earns Peabody Awards and nervous silence. By 2025, he was back in the public eye, not with controversy, but with trivia—Celebrity Jeopardy! Champion and a cool million redirected to classrooms via DonorsChoose. Still making good on that social contract.

He hit the Kennedy Center in early 2025—not as a statement but as a stake in the ground. Some Black artists might boycott. Bell shows up. That’s his form of protest—presence.

Questlove, meanwhile, took a different route. Where Bell wielded words, Questlove played rhythms. The encyclopedic bandleader of The Roots, that joyful sonic engine behind Jimmy Fallon, pivoted into a historian of funk, soul, and Black excellence. Always the crate digger, he unearthed the buried treasure that was the Harlem Cultural Festival—40 hours of long-forgotten footage that Summer of Soul stitched into a masterwork.

CNN’s My Happy Place, premiering in spring 2025, gave Questlove a chance to show his quieter side. His chosen sanctuary? Austin, Texas—not for its politics, but for its pulse. In Austin, the beat matches the one in his head. There, he reminisces about The Roots’ first gig at the old Catfish Station—a place, a feeling, a city that gave him breath.

Still, what will be remembered—etched in cultural stone—is not that quiet reflection, but the chaos of a different stage. The 94th Academy Awards. March 27, 2022.

There he sat—suited, composed, on the cusp of history.

Then: the slap heard 'round the world.

Chris Rock, mid-banter, mid-joke—targeting Jada Pinkett Smith. Will Smith is rising not as an actor, but as an avenger. The contact—a hand to cheek, the room stunned into inertia.

And amid the aftershock, Rock collects himself and pivots:
“And the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature goes to…”

Questlove walks to the stage. His moment—his masterpiece—was overshadowed by the eruption just seconds prior.

Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) wins. But no one remembers the speech. The glory. The restoration of Black joy, music, and memory. Only the violence.

It was not a stolen Oscar. But it was a robbed moment.

"Amir Questlove" Thompson did not walk into this as a filmmaker. He entered as a witness, a conduit, a man seized by a revelation that had been buried beneath layers of American neglect, race, and erasure—a brilliant truth entombed in the dusty basement of a man who dared to film Black joy in its full regalia during the fire-branded summer of 1969. That truth? The Harlem Cultural Festival. Six Sundays of transcendent music, revolutionary fashion, and a Black America in full self-determination mode, surrounded by decay yet determined to shine.

Thompson, the affable, deeply read percussionist behind The Tonight Show, frontman of The Roots, and walking archive of music history, understood from the moment he laid eyes on the footage: this was no side project. This was not “content.” This was restoration—a reclamation of memory. And in a nation that thrives on erasure, memory itself becomes an act of revolution.

Imagine this—300,000 gathered in Mount Morris Park under the thick heat of Harlem summer. Stevie Wonder, barely out of his teens, beating the truth out of a Clavinet and then taking to the drums like a preacher taking the pulpit. Mahalia Jackson, godmother of gospel, stepping aside for Mavis Staples to lead Dr. King's favourite hymn—Take My Hand, Precious Lord—and in that simple gesture, passing down the generational baton not in word but in sacred song.

You do not fabricate a moment like that. You film it. You preserve it. And you do not leave it in a basement for half a century.

Yet that is precisely what happened. America could stomach the mud-drenched guitars of Woodstock but flinched at the power of a Black woman in full voice or a Black man strumming a guitar with pride and defiance. That was not the narrative corporate America was writing in 1969. Nor is it the story they fund today, which is why this footage, captured with five professional cameras and pristine two-inch tape by Hal Tulchin, sat unseen. His plea to sell what he dubbed the “Black Woodstock” was met with the shrug of indifference. “Nobody cared about Harlem,” Tulchin said. A phrase that echoes like a gunshot through the legacy of this nation.

It took the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many unnamed others to resensitize the nation’s palette to Black grief and rage. But Thompson wasn’t interested in peddling trauma. He was interested in joy. Unfiltered, unsanitized, joy.

And here lies the essential paradox: on the plantations, enslaved Africans were silenced. Laughter forbidden. So they hid it. Ducked their heads inside barrels to laugh—out of view, out of earshot. But they sang. Sang to be heard. Sang to be counted. Sang to announce their presence. And gospel, as Thompson rightly notes, is born not in the cathedral but in defiance. You could whip a body, but you could not silence a spirit raised in song.

Summer of Soul is not merely a concert film. It is a political act. A time capsule cracked open at precisely the moment the world needed it most. It is Harlem at its cultural and spiritual apex—Afrobeat rubbing shoulders with soul, gospel testifying alongside psychedelic funk. Nina Simone declares, “To be young, gifted and Black,” as if casting a spell across the centuries. The Fifth Dimension dazzles in mustard-yellow jumpsuits, flipping the script on the racial assumptions of the radio era. David Ruffin sings like a man who’s just learned to breathe. Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln declare revolution with each cymbal crash.

There is no pretense here—only presence.

And then, there’s the question: what if this had been allowed a seat at the table? What if a young Amir Thompson had seen this on television instead of the sanitized, segregated programming of the 1970s? He does not ask it for pity. He asks it because it matters. Representation is not a buzzword—it is a map. And this map was hidden.

Behind the festival was Tony Lawrence, a Harlem nightclub singer and promotional dynamo who convinced the New York City Parks Department and even Republican Mayor John Lindsay to support six free concerts. Maxwell House Coffee funded it. And Hal Tulchin—known for slick variety specials—was given creative license to capture the movement in motion.

It is not lost on Thompson that this festival was designed as both a celebration and a pressure valve. Harlem was burning—emotionally, politically, spiritually—in the wake of Dr. King's assassination. Music became a balm, a protest, a sermon, and a shield.

Thompson studied the predecessors: Wattstax, Soul to Soul, When We Were Kings, and Amazing Grace. He saw the frame but not the faces. He asked, who was in the crowd? Not just the stars but the boys with pick combs, the girls with barrettes, the elders in lawn chairs. He searched for their grown-up selves—those now in their fifties and seventies—and recorded their stories, their tears. He built a narrative from memory, not metaphor.

In the editing suite, he let the music breathe. Let the crowd be the fourth wall. Let the footage speak. There was no need to force a modern parallel. We could see it for ourselves.

And in the end, we are left with more than a film. We are left with a sacred document. A mirror. A reckoning.

Stevie Wonder is pounding the drums like a man possessed. B.B. King is dragging Lucille through a mournful Why I Sing the Blues. Herbie Mann offered pop-jazz cool, while Mongo Santamaria and Ray Barretto served up Latin heat. Hugh Masekela declares the rhythms of a continent. Gladys Knight singing Heard it Through the Grapevine with the urgency of a woman bearing witness.

The film closes with Nina Simone—piercing, unbowed. And yes, a four-hour cut remains in the vaults, where once the reels lay forgotten. Moms Mabley, Pigmeat Markham, the comedy—the necessary levity—waiting for their reemergence.

And Questlove? He is no longer just a drummer or bandleader. He is an archivist. A griot. A guardian.

Next stop? Maybe Sly Stone. Maybe something else.

But for now, Summer of Soul is here. And the table, at long last, has another seat.