1967
In 1967, Raymond Saunders published a pamphlet, Black Is a Color, in response to a piece by the poet, novelist, and essayist Ishmael Reed on the current state of Black American art. Art historian Darby English described the text as “a passionate appeal for the cognizance of the distinctive kind of space that art not merely is but affords American blacks, who cannot be thought apart from the manifold inconveniences of their situation.” English continues, “A full half-century since its appearance, Saunders’s intervention has lost none of its pertinence:1
“Pessimism is fatal to artistic development. Perpetual anger deprives it of movement. An artist who is always harping upon resistance, discrimination, opposition, besides being a drag, eventually plays right into the hands of the politicians he claims to despise—and is held there, unwittingly (and witlessly) reviving slavery in another form. For the artist this is aesthetic atrophy.
“[The artist] has to set his mind, his emotions, his eyes ranging across the whole field of vision open to him, probing out its boundaries to find where he can push them further and further out.
“The creative imagination is his channel, but it has to be dug… It is high time that the black artist make his own rejection of misguided, inadequate—if not out-and-out dishonest—interpreters of his conditions. Can’t we get clear of these degrading limitations, and recognize the wider reality of art, where color is the means and not the end?”
—Raymond Saunders, Black Is a Color, 1967
1 Darby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016): 97-98.