Love City Picture Show | ON THE SLY: IN SEARCH OF THE FAMILY STONE

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, the Museum of the African Diaspora presents a six-part film series exploring the influence of Black culture on the counter culture of the time. Conjure up sights and sounds from San Francisco’s legendary 1967 Summer of Love and invariably it will be of long-haired, pot-smoking young white people dancing to rock music in Golden Gate Park. They were “the hippies” who defined a youth culture and way of life that challenged and shocked the country’s established mores. However what is often unacknowledged is that Black musicians, writers and thinkers in California and beyond helped shape and enrich the cultural developments leading up to the Summer of Love as well as during and immediately afterwards.

On the Sly: In Search of the Family Stone (Michael Rubenstone)

Sly and the Family Stone’s music was a progressive fusion of soul, funk and rock music that still gets folks dancing and singing along. The racially integrated band was a rarity in the 1960s. Filmmaker Michael Rubenstone tries for over a decade to secure an interview with the legendarily elusive Sly Stone. Along the way he interviews two original band members Freddie Stone and Cynthia Robinson, an archivist and Stone biographer as well as the group’s former manager David Kapralik who shows Rubenstone two scrapbooks of Sly and the Family Stone memorabilia. The scrapbooks help to communicate how the band developed and grew and there is exciting footage of the band’s remarkable performance at Woodstock in 1969. Filmmaker Michael Rubenstone will introduce and lead a discussion of the film.

This project was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visit www.calhum.org