On Thursday night, a filmmaker and two professors screened a new documentary about Soul! — the pioneering PBS show focusing on Black culture that ran from 1968 to 1973 — and found, in its celebration of Black artists and message of revolutionary uplift, serious parallels with our current moment. The screening and discussion were sponsored by the Schwarzman Center and the Afro-American Cultural Center at Yale.
The documentary, called Mr. Soul! (available through PBS’s Independent Lens) tells the story of the show Soul! by focusing on its producer and host, Ellis Haizlip. Haizlip, who before producing the show had embedded himself in New York City’s Black Arts scene, wanted to create a platform and direct outlet for Black culture, for Black people. He accomplished much more than that. In the show’s five-year run, he gave a stage to Al Green, Patti LaBelle, Earth, Wind and Fire, Muhammad Ali, Sidney Poitier, Cicely Tyson, James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni, Gladys Knight, Stevie Wonder, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Billy Preston, Bill Withers, Sonia Sanchez, Wilson Pickett, Kool & the Gang, Toni Morrison, and Roberta Flack. He also had on Amiri Baraka, the Last Poets, Kathleen Cleaver, Betty Shabazz, and Louis Farrakhan, at a time when White culture considered them dangerous. Controversial and unflinching, in hindsight Soul! is an in-depth portrait of Black culture at a time when it was host to an incredible number of artists doing potent work that asserted their voices as individual human beings while responding to the chaos of the time.
The documentary Mr. Soul, directed by Meliisa Haizlip (who is Ellis’s niece), intersperses clips from the show with insightful thoughts from a range of commenters who highlight the role Ellis Haizlip played in creating such an astonishing television program. The clips are treasures in themselves. We see the Last Poets and Amiri Baraka in excoriating performances. A young Al Green charms his audience. Stevie Wonder blows the roof off. Nikki Giovanni interviews James Baldwin in a two-hour, deep conversation.
But under Haizlip’s sharp, careful direction — earlier this week, she won an NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Writing in a Documentary for her work on Mr. Soul! — the documentary is also able to give us a portrait of Ellis Haizlip while he was producing the show. What emerges is a man of ferocious intellect, sly wit, and uncompromising vision. As an openly gay man at a time when it was very difficult to be so, he also had a particular experience of racism, and a particular place in Black culture, that gave him the ability to see clearly what many could not. He was a seriously forward-thinking person keen on doing more than simply running a television show. He wanted to create Black-run institutions that would, in the short run, make it easier for the community around him to have a greater voice in the arts and in politics, and in the long run, make it easier for the generations after him to realize their own ambitions and address the wrenching problems of social justice and oppression that formed the day-to-day context of his life.
The discussion that followed the film featured Melissa Haizlip and Yale professors Thomas Allen Harris and Daphne A. Brooks; Harris appeared in Mr. Soul as a commentator.
Brooks began by asking Haizlip about her connections to New Haven, where she grew up. “It was an interesting opportunity to go to Yale after having been a townie,” Haizlip said. “My family has a really long history” in the area. Her maternal grandfather was the Rev. Julian A. Taylor, who founded the Baptist church in Ansonia; today there’s a scholarship for high school students to attend college established in his honor. He lived at 670 Prospect St. in New Haven. Haizlip lived in that house as a child, then moved to 459 Prospect, next to Yale Divinity School.
“I was very much part of the New Haven community,” Haizlip said. She went to Wilbur Cross and took classes in Yale as a junior and senior in high school. “It was really eye-opening for me,” she said. She applied to Yale and got in, and found that her life revolved around Yale’s African-American Cultural Center. “It really did shape me,” she said.
Haizlip and Harris met years ago through Ellis Haizlip himself, who died in 1991. Ellis was doing programming at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and “I was documenting all of that,” Harris said. Echoing a sentiment expressed several times in Mr. Soul!, Harris added, “Ellis was a nurturer.”
Brooks asked how Mr. Soul! was put together. A few episodes of Soul! are up on YouTube and the first season is available on Shout Factory TV, on the internet, but otherwise, the 130 episodes of Soul! are currently unavailable to the public, despite is ever-deepening cultural resonance.
“We knew we had an important time period that hadn’t been unearthed,” Haizlip said. But in structuring her own film, she realized there were three stories to tell — first, of the show itself; second, of Ellis Haizlip; and third, of the world in which Soul! was made. The story of the show “was easy,” she said, more of a problem of an embarrassment of riches. For the story of her uncle, she said, “I wanted to just drop in on the five years of Soul!” and “see how his consciousness imprints on the show.” For the cultural context in which the show was made — the volatile political climate and tense race relations — “we cut an entire sequence, an hour and a half long,” Haizlip said.
To make it all into a feature-length film, the filmmaker and her team had to be “wise with our editorial choices,” Haizlip said. “Everything had to earn its way into the film.” In the end, they made the film by focusing on the material they had that served all three stories. All told, it took a decade, eight of which were spent gaining access to the show.
Part of the mission of the documentary was to seek to make the original TV show available to the public. It was, after all, intended for that. “One of Ellis’s legacies was to create this program on public broadcasting,” Haizlip said. Which brought Brooks to her next question: What was the meaning of such public-facing art?
“The thing about Soul! — when we see it now, we can recognize … it was highly controversial and unorthodox for its time,” Haizlip said. “You can appreciate how intentional Ellis Haizlip’s curation was.” The show “opened doors and raised awareness … about the plurality of Black identity” — and that there were many opinions and conflicts within the Black community, even as all faced oppression together. Soul! was “a space that revered everyone as a brother and a sister, in a cultural and intimate way.” It was for “the Black gaze,” and “on the heels of the civil rights movement,” it made the argument that “the Black current didn’t end, wouldn’t stop,” and “that brought together community across the diaspora.”
“So much of what Ellis was able to do comes out of the murders” — of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Hampton, to name a few, Harris said. “There was this moment that in many ways echoes the George Floyd moment.” Then and now, he said, “you have these doors that are opening, and a lot of African-Americans are getting into certain positions.” Ellis Haizlip “was able to pry that door open,” and as he did, he was “bringing in this community” and “synthesizing meaning as he was doing it.”
“That moment of renaissance was so powerful,” Harris said. But he emphasized that it was just a moment. Even as Soul! dug ever deeper into Black culture, “other forces were building,” culminating in a backlash against it under the Nixon administration, which eventually defunded it. Mr. Soul! includes an excerpt from one of Nixon’s taped meetings where it seems all too clear that Soul! was singled out for cancellation.
“We have moments to make certain changes, and then we have these other moments,” Harris said. “After Soul! It was difficult…. There was mourning, but also possibility for hope. Seeds were planted.”
“The film and the show modeled for us these radical forms of intimacy, communal intimacy,” Brooks said. “It could be possible to stage these intensely focused conversations about Blackness with each other, in a public space,” but still with a certain level of privacy.
Ellis Haizlip “understood the plurality and didn’t demand anyone choose a side,” Haizlip “He was inviting everyone together. It really was expansive. I loved that about Ellis, what an inclusionist he was, but also an Afrofuturist…. Just that generosity and forward thinking,” in the midst of societal “chaos.”
“Ellis Haizlip is a model for all of us to restore our own soul,” she continued, and “appreciate the expansiveness of our culture.”
“I hope that we continue through this film to think about his pathbreaking contribution as a public intellectual, as a creative, as a grassroots activist,” Brooks said, noting that Ellis Haizlip’s identity as a Black, queer television producer allowed him to “think about the margins from the center” and “to see our world differently and more beautifully and expansively.”
“Our next generation of revolutionaries have all these social media platforms that are crucial to collective conversations,” Brooks continued. She hoped that perhaps another institution would arise to hold “these national cultural intellectual conversations about the meaning and worth of Black art and politics.”
That echoed a question from one of the dozens of people who attended the screening and discussion: Should someone bring back a modern version of the program in 2021? What would it look like? Is it something we need?
“Absolutely,” Harris said, though he also noted that the cultural landscape had changed. In looking at the star-studded lineup Soul! had, “I think a lot of those people were available to Ellis” because there was no alternative, Harris said. That has changed; more Black artists have acccess to wider audiences than was possible in the early 1970s, for a variety of reasons, from cultural shifts to changes in technology. A modern-day Soul!, he suggested, “would be very different.”
On Soul!, “a lot of these people were very young and there was this innocence,” Harris said. “I don’t know that young people have this innocence.” But that was as much a reason for hope, to believe in opportunities. “Young people are creating these other ways,” he said, to deliver their messages.
