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PROPOSAL FOR PREPARING A DIRECTORY
OF CULTURAL ACTIVITY IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY

The Hi-Fi-Recordings section of the Sunday edition of The New York Times on March 7, 1971, featured a front-page article on black composers which enunciated the very purpose of this proposal. One of the composers is quoted as saying: "Imagine my shock when I went to Atlanta and met eight other black composers! This was a major event."

Indeed it was, for this is a common problem among black artists and scholars: awareness of the existence of others at work in their field of interest. The nationwide communications network, as well as the national societies and associations in arts and letters, are de facto predominantly white-owned, white-run, and concerned with white people. Although inattention may be natural under the prevailing circumstances, exclusion of blacks in many instances is deliberate.

the causes, the reality is the occasional attempts to find blacks engaged in the arts and in scholarship is difficult for even well-organized institutions. The inability to identify skilled writers, artists and scholars serve as an excuse for the perpetuation of all-white research teams, art exhibits, orchestras, opera and dance companies. For black people, the lack of knowledge about their cultural activities prevents collaboration, cooperation, mutual support, and cultural growth; it frequently leads to the overlapping of programs and projects. It is by accident, mainly, that some blacks in Cleveland know of The Studio Museum in Harlem, or The Museum of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Boston. Within cities, the problem is just as real: while many New York residents have heard of The New Lafayette Theatre and The