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6 Toward a Black Arts Infrastructure ONE DEFINING ELEMENT of the Black Arts movement was its desire to create the institutional infrastructure necessary to inspire and sustain black creative autonomy. Only through black control of an intellectual infrastructure could the Black Aesthetic become a hegemonic tendency in black intellectual and artistic circles. Throughout the twentieth century, Afro-American intellectuals and artists recognized the need for institutions that could support , nurture, and disseminate their work (e.g., theaters, journals, and book publishers). But the inability of the black intelligentsia and black Americans in general to create elaborate and diversified intellectual and artistic infrastructures has been both a result and a cause of the devalued status of traditional black artists and intellectuals in the eyes of most Afro-Americans. In the absence of such infrastructures, an economic, creative, and political burden of phenomenal proportions was placed on each succeeding generation of ambitious black artists. In my introduction,I noted that one of the fundamental problems for the black intelligentsia during the twentieth century was its tenuous social location . I referred to this unique status as social marginality. Social marginality arises from the limited access of black intellectuals and artists to the material resources that would allow them to nurture their craft, disseminate their ideas, and create in their artistic and intellectual arenas. The racist exclusion of black artists and intellectuals from various levels of national institutional support that historically have supported white American artists and intellectuals (e.g., foundation grants, fellowships, intellectual journals, and faculty positions at research-friendly universities) created black intellectual and artistic communities that were forced to depend on resources in the black community. Such support was usually not forthcoming. Black Americans simply did not have the financial resources necessary to compensate for black artists’ lack of access to white-controlled public and private funding. With easy access to communities that did not have the necessary resources to sustain traditional intellectual and fine arts activities but no access to communities that did have these material resources, traditional black intellectuals and artists were often caught in a betwixt-between situation. Despite romanti210 cizations of the poverty-stricken artist willing to neglect meals in order to purchase paint brushes and canvases, far too many twentieth-century black artists involuntarily experienced the torture of poverty and the resulting debilitation of their creativity. The absence of a rich intellectual and artistic infrastructure in twentieth -century black America was understandable. In pre-1960s America, the disposable wealth of black America was relatively paltry.Perhaps the relatively larger contingent of post-1960s black Americans with money did not view the patronage of black intellectuals and artists as vital. However, to keep matters in perspective, we should remember that during the twentieth century, the stable black working class and the black middle and upper-middle classes were not able to support a diverse political infrastructure, even though such a network of organizations would have benefited their own economic and social mobility. The problems confronting black America throughout the twentieth century relegated the financial neediness of black intellectuals and artists to a secondary status and perhaps justifiably so.1 But although the general condition of black intellectual and artistic infrastructures has been weak, they have not been nonexistent. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, black intellectuals were given access to mainstream American resources. As I write today, black winners of Guggenheim Fellowships or grants from the National Endowment for the Arts are no longer novelties. Black poets have signi ficantly greater access to various writers’ colonies and large publishing houses than they had only thirty years ago. Numerous blacks now teach at elite private colleges and major public and private research universities. The contemporary black intelligentsia has been the beneficiary of new opportunities spurned by the civil rights and Black Power movements. Before the 1960s, blacks were only occasionally part of broader American intellectual infrastructures.One such occasion was the Harlem Renaissance.Regardless of one’s assessment of the quality of the art produced by blacks during the Harlem Renaissance, this movement should be seen as a major cultural and political breakthrough. Black writers associated with that movement entered a broader transracial intellectual infrastructure. White patrons,2 individual blacks, and black organizations were crucial to the development of this infrastructure . In his study of the Harlem Renaissance, historian David Levering Lewis notes that the black racketeer Casper Holstein, as well as Alain Locke, Charles S. Johnson, and A’Lelia Walker (daughter...

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