New Orleans hosted the 32nd Essence Festival of Culture over the Fourth of July weekend this year, with Cardi B, Patti LaBelle, Kehlani, Latto, and Brandy and Monica headlining a lineup that spanned five decades of Black music. A week later, Culture In Motion — a roadshow powered by Kwanza Jones’s SUPERCHARGED platform, built in partnership with the Apollo Theater — rolled through St. Louis, Indianapolis, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland, putting Black creativity, entrepreneurship, and civic leadership on stage in cities that don’t usually get the New Orleans or Atlanta treatment. Both are part of what’s shaping up to be one of the richest summers for Black cultural celebration in recent memory, with festivals returning bigger and more intentional in cities from Philadelphia to Winston-Salem.
I want to push past the “great lineup, great vibes” version of this story, because there’s a more interesting one underneath it. Essence Festival has existed for thirty-two years. What’s different about this moment isn’t that Black cultural festivals exist — it’s the deliberate expansion into the Midwest, into cities like Cleveland and Indianapolis that get treated as flyover territory by most national cultural programming, including, frankly, a lot of Black cultural programming that defaults to New York, Atlanta, and LA. Culture In Motion choosing a five-city Midwest run and explicitly framing its stops around “communities shaping Black cultural excellence” is a statement about where cultural investment has been missing, not just where it’s landing this year.
That matters to me writing from Wisconsin, because the Midwest’s Black cultural infrastructure has historically been the thing built by local churches, HBCU alumni chapters, and independent promoters with a fraction of the budget and none of the national press coverage that follows a New Orleans festival weekend. When a platform with real backing — SUPERCHARGED, the Apollo’s institutional weight — decides Detroit and Cleveland deserve the same production value as the coasts, that’s not charity. It’s a recognition that the audience, the artists, and the economic activity were already there; the investment just hadn’t caught up.
And the economic piece is worth sitting with directly instead of treating these festivals as pure entertainment. Essence Festival alone is estimated to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in economic impact for New Orleans across a single weekend — hotels, restaurants, local vendors, rideshare drivers, security staff, the whole ecosystem a festival of that size pulls into its orbit. That’s Black cultural production functioning as a legitimate economic engine, not a side effect of the music. The Culture In Motion model, built explicitly around entrepreneurship and civic leadership programming alongside the performances, is trying to make that economic function more direct — pairing the celebration with actual space for Black-owned businesses and civic organizations to be in front of the audience the festival draws, rather than just benefiting from the ambient foot traffic.
There’s a version of cultural commentary that treats Black festival season as apolitical, pure joy, nothing to analyze. I don’t buy that framing, and I don’t think it does these events justice. Choosing to build major cultural infrastructure in Cleveland and Indianapolis in 2026, in cities that have spent years watching investment and attention route past them toward Atlanta and the coasts, is itself a form of independent thinking — a bet that Black cultural excellence doesn’t need a coastal address to be worth backing at scale. That’s consistent with something I believe generally: the healthiest version of Black institution-building right now isn’t waiting for permission or a bigger platform’s invitation. It’s building the infrastructure directly, in the cities that need it most, and letting the culture prove the business case on its own terms.
None of that diminishes the actual point of a festival, which is joy, music, and being around your people without having to explain yourself. Patti LaBelle and Brandy and Monica on the same New Orleans stage thirty-two years into Essence’s run is worth celebrating on its own merits. But the Midwest expansion happening alongside it, in cities like Milwaukee’s regional neighbors Chicago and Detroit, is the part of this summer’s story that will still matter next July, long after the specific lineup is forgotten.