New York: New York Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, 1951. Three items stapled together at top left corner, together with a separate leaflet, totaling seven pages. Minor edge wear, one item with a short closed tear. Overall very good. Item #12896

A group of four printed items pertaining to an effort by New York arts professionals to encourage equality for African American arts professionals in midcentury United States, where the lower half of the country was still mired in Jim Crow laws. The most notable of these items is a four-panel program detailing the conference, with introductory text describing the ways in which racism limits the opportunities of Black artists and scientists, and the failure to put recent anti-racist court decisions into actual practice. The program for the conference lists such themes as the effects of Jim Crow policy on the arts and representation of Black subjects, the deleterious effects of racism on health and welfare, and how cultural standards are lowered and violence encouraged by discrimination. According to the speakers list on the fourth page of the program, participants in the conference included Oliver Harrington, Jacob Lawrence, Julian Mayfield, Paul Robeson, and other artists, educators, scientists and musicians.

Attached to this program are two handbills; one is an invitation to an opening night event featuring new works of ballet, chorus, calypso, and drama, the night before the conference. This performance took place at the Pythian on November 9, 1951. The other handbill announces the program for the Annual Convention of the New York Council, which appears to have been a more general event on the day after the conference on equal rights. The text on this handbill notes the suppression of free speech under McCarthyism. The last item is an 8.5-x-14-inch handbill, probably a press release of sorts announcing the conference, also titled "A Call to a Conference on Equal Rights for Negroes in the Arts, Sciences and Professions." The language of this handbill is the same as the second page of the four-page brochure, but is dated a month before the conference, in October 1951.

Some of the language in the program introduction and handbill merit quoting here: "In the sciences and professions, the majority of Negroes are deprived of equal educational opportunities by segregation and quota systems, denied employment in the professions, restricted to the most menial occupations, confined to ghetto areas for their private practice, and thus prevented from making a full contribution to the welfare of the nation.... Blacklisting, character assassination, political inquisitions and other forms of censorship against white artists, scientists and professionals cannot be ended - so long as discrimination against Negroes and other minority group members is maintained, For those who violate the Constitution and foster a policy of discrimination against Negroes are the very same persons who are responsible for censorship, blacklisting and the debasement of our science and culture. It is they who tolerate and promote the campaigns of violence and brutality against the Negro people, as exhibited in Cicero, in the bombing of the home of a world-renowned Negro chemist, in the refusal of platforms to the most outstanding American Negro artists, in the ‘legal lynchings’ of many young men guilty of nothing more than being Negroes. American culture Cannot live in the face of such terror against a large segment of our people. Standards of truth and humanism cannot be maintained in our cultural media so long as the truth of the Negro people's lives is denied expression. Nor can there be decent standards for white professionals in many fields so long as a reservoir of Negro unemployed is used to depress salaries and rates."

Surprisingly, OCLC is silent on any material from the conference, though we doubt this group of ephemera is a unique survival.

Price: $850