Nicholas Gaffney
The Neighborhood Arts Center, Cultural Pride, and Community Self-Awareness: Black Power and Black Arts in Atlanta
On Saturday afternoon, July 23rd, 1977 twenty jazz musicians drove onto the grounds of John Hope Homes, a housing project located in the heart of southwest
Atlanta’s black working class and working poor community. They unloaded their equipment and instruments from their cars and carved out an impromptu performance space in the housing complex’s courtyard. Just after two o’clock they raised their horns and began to blow. The soundscape of the housing project, ordinarily filled with the cacophonous noise that crept in from the not too distant interchange of Atlanta’s three major interstate highways, was instantly overwhelmed with jazz. An audience quickly assembled as John Hope Homes tenants streamed into the courtyard to see and hear the group of jazzmen at work. The sound of the music was soon accented by the sound of children clapping and grooving along.
The twenty musicians, collectively known as the Neighborhood Arts Ensemble, were artist-in-residence members of the Neighborhood Arts Center. Formally organized in 1975 the Neighborhood Arts Center (NAC) was a Black Power/ Black Arts Movement era arts collective designed to empower Atlanta’s black working class community by showing them how to wield artistic expression as a powerful tool for collective self- definition and determination and the regeneration of black cultural pride. The NAC’s
“Jazzmobile” program, responsible for bringing the Neighborhood Arts Ensemble to John
Hope Homes, represented one of the strongest reflections of the NAC’s mission. The headline of an Atlanta Daily World article on the NAC’s musical outreach activist
1 perhaps summed the primary objective of the Jazzmobile program best, announcing that,
“‘Jazzmobile’ Here to Aid Poor Blacks, Missing Out on ‘Cultural Heritage.1’”
This paper serves to explore the cultural activism of the Neighborhood Arts
Center and its talented cadre of artists-in-residence within the context of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements. Specifically, this paper offers an introductory profile of the
NAC and highlights its origins, goals and philosophies, organizational structure, and gives insight into is most successful outreach program, the Jazzmobile. In doing so, it seeks to make contributions to what historian Peniel Joseph described as “Black Power
Studies,” a new area of black political history that examines the interconnections between the Civil Rights and Black Power activism of Cold War era. Specifically the NAC’s example lends support to the Black Power Studies’ expansion of the chronology of the
“Long Black Power Movement.” The notion that the NAC was just beginning its first full year of operation in 1975 demonstrates that Black Power and Black Arts activism was still very much blossoming in the mid-1970s as opposed to entering a state of decline. The NAC’s example also enhances the field of Black Power Studies by drawing our attention to a new socio-political organization driven by the efforts of grassroots activists. Not only does the NAC case demonstrate how Atlanta’s community of black artists mobilized their craft within the philosophical framework of Black Power, it more importantly reveals the political agency of the city’s black working class and working poor communities. In many ways their voices gave the NAC its strategic focus.2
1 “‘Jazzmobile’ to Aid Poor Blacks, Missing Out on ‘Cultural Heritage,’” Atlanta Daily World, 7 August 1977, 10. 2 Peniel E. Joseph, “Introduction,” The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era. Ed. Peniel Joseph (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1-25.
2 The creation of the Neighborhood Arts Center had its origins in the community development vision of Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first African American mayor.
Jackson’s election to the city’s top office was a product of Black Power activism in the realm of electoral politics. Jackson’s victory in the 1973 mayoral election was made possible by a significant expansion of the side and proportion of the city’s black electorate. African Americans represented nearly 50% of the city’s registered voters in
1973. The strength of the black vote was a consequence of the reverse migration to the south in the aftermath of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting
Rights Act of 1965. Between 1960 and 1973 the black community had grown from 38% to 54% of Atlanta’s total population. The consolidation of the black vote behind Jackson, coupled with support among white voters, ensured a decisive victory for the city’s first black mayor.3
Providing an outlet for community recreation in southwest Atlanta’s black working class and working poor neighborhoods was an early priority of Jackson’s mayoral administration. Jackson’s focus on creating space for leisure stemmed from an assessment report he commissioned during his first months in office. The assessment was designed to both document the challenges facing the city’s urban poor and offer remedies to the challenges identified. The lack of recreational outlets for the city’s
African American youth was labeled one of “the most pressing problems” facing southwest Atlanta’s black communities in addition to issues related to deteriorating housing, lack of educational opportunity, and stalled economic development. The study
3 Maurice J. Hobson, The Dawning of the Black New South: A Geopolitical, Social, and Cultural History of Black Atlanta, Georgia, 1966-1996 (PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2009), 96-111.
3 expressed that “there is a need for neighborhood-wide programs to engage young people in year-round activities through the full utilization of present and proposed facilities.”4
In the wake of the study’s findings and recommendations the newly elected mayor committed to using the power and resources of his administration to promote the cultural life of the city of Atlanta through an aggressive support for the arts. During his first year in office Jackson organized an Ad Hoc Committee on the Arts, a seventeen member group assembled from representatives from the city’s network of black artists, the schools of the Atlanta University Center, and administrators from city government. The committee was charged with the task of planning Jackson’s “Mayor’s Day for the Arts.”
The day long festival, held in May 1975, mobilized the city’s pre-existing arts community to celebrate and showcase the range of Atlanta’s citizen’s creative capabilities. The festival was staged in Central City Park located in the heart of downtown Atlanta. The high visibility venue choice signaled the committee’s and mayor’s belief in the value the arts held for the city’s cultural identity.5
Jackson’s “Mayor’s Day for the Arts” offered Atlantans more than just the opportunity to view the works of the city’s creative population. The event was designed to offer and encourage interested members of the festival’s audience to contribute to the process of making art. A planning memo from committee coordinator and future mayor of Atlanta Shirley Franklin asserted that,
The audience is composed of people who work in the downtown area, people who pass through the area, and people who come for the celebration. They have a variety of interests and talents too. The celebration must address the different interests as well as the common interests of the
4 “Intersection,” Bureau of Planning, City of Atlanta, November 12, 1974, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library. 5 Memo from Shirley Franklin to Steering Committee, 2/10/1975, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library.
4 audience. The idea is to let people—both artist and audience—make art happen in Atlanta on May 9th.6
The committee envisioned that the festival’s audiences would not simply be passive observers, but more meaningfully, they desired that the audiences become active participants in the effort to use art as a medium of expression. The committee imagined that Atlantans passing through Central City Park would work collaboratively with the city’s artists to unleash a new source of creative energy.
The Jackson administration’s interest in stimulating the city’s artistic output did not end with the conclusion of Mayor’s Day for the Arts. With Jackson’s support
Franklin’s Committee on the Arts continued to meet into the summer and fall of 1975 as they worked to organize a more permanent community arts organization in the city. The
Neighborhood Arts Center was the fruit of their labor. Indeed, the NAC was an outgrowth of Jackson’s Mayor’s Day. The committee took the audience/artist collaborative arts model embodied in the Mayor’s Day celebration and built a built a sustaining community arts institution around it.
The connection between the Jackson Administration and the creation of the NAC should not be glanced over. The link between the two demonstrates the ways in which variations of Black Power activism gave rise to other variations. Again, it was the consolidation of the black vote in Atlanta that placed Jackson in office. Atlanta’s black citizens’ political nationalism gave Jackson the ability to use the power and authority of the mayoral office to create a collaborative arts organization that promoted cultural nationalism through performance and arts education. The example of the NAC reminds us how Black Power electoral activism produced Black Power cultural activism in the
6 Memo from Shirley Franklin to Steering Committee, 2/20/1975, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library.
5 city. While the cultural nationalist philosophies embodied by the NAC’s artists-in- residence would have existed had the black vote in Atlanta not been consolidated to elect
Jackson, the institutional infrastructure and resources allowing them to transform those philosophies into action may not have.
While the Jackson administration provided the impetus, operational model, and organizational resources for the NAC, the voice and needs of southwest Atlanta’s black working class and working poor communities guided the NAC’s perspective on which audiences its collaborative arts model should work to immediately serve. Southwest
Atlanta’s black community quickly saw the newly created arts collective as a partial solution to the life challenges they faced as residents of low-income urban housing developments. This was especially true for the tenants of the Mechanicsville neighborhood’s McDaniel-Glenn housing project. Not only did they have to grapple with a lack of quality housing and vanishing economic opportunity but their neighborhood had been physically splintered apart as a consequence of the 1964 groundbreaking of Atlanta
Stadium. The sense of community and neighborhood identity that had exited in the neighborhoods of southwest Atlanta had been sacrificed to bring major league baseball—
The Milwaukee Braves—to the city. A 1976 Atlanta newspaper article discussing NAC activities in the community made reference to the lasting ramifications of the neighborhood’s severing, noting that, “The neighborhood had yet to recover its sense of itself as a neighborhood.”7
As Jackson’s Ad Hoc Committee for the Arts was in the process of formally organizing the NAC the tenants of the McDaniel-Glenn housing project were growing
7 Newspaper Article, source undetermined, 1976, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library.
6 increasingly discontented with their experience living within the planned community. In
June 1975 the Mechanicsville Land-Use Committee drafted a letter of complaint to Lester
Persells, Director of Atlanta’s Housing Authority, on behalf of the residents of McDaniel-
Glenn. The letter expressed the tenants’ grievances with the housing project and the way its manager ran the development. The letter complained that the housing development’s manager, Mrs. Hannah, was often inaccessible to community residents. The letter likewise charged that Mrs. Hannah allowed the development to fall into disrepair.
Tenants’ maintenance requests regarding in-unit issues, poor lighting in common areas, and the unkempt and overgrown landscape were all but ignored. The letter explained that the relationship between Hannah and McDaniel-Glenn residents had been further strained by the “fear of the manager to walk through the project grounds during the daylight hours…”8
The letter also voiced residents’ frustrations regarding the housing development’s community center. Tenants were disillusioned by Hannah’s active discouragement of their use of the facility, a facility designed for the specific purpose of organizing community-wide activities for residents. Hannah had loaned their community center to
Atlanta’s Police Athletic League. The desire to reclaim that space was a top priority for
McDaniel-Glenn community members. Concerns related to the use of the community center were the first two grievances listed in the letter. Indeed, the residents of the housing project envisioned a significantly different purpose for the center beyond its unauthorized use by outside organizations. The tenants of McDaniel-Glenn drafted and forwarded a proposal spelling out their vision for the center along with the
8 “Letter from Mechanicsville Land-Use Committee to Lester Persells,” June 1975, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library.
7 Mechanicsville Land-Use Committee’s letter to Persells. Community residents desired to use their center as the staging ground for a “planned program of activities.” They wanted their community center to provide them access to arts education courses in music and dance as well as workshops in cooking and sewing. They also desired tutoring services in writing and math the for the community’s school-age youth. They expressed that a center with an organized schedule of diverse activities had the power to cultivate a stronger sense of community identity and cohesion. The proposal stated that, “More important we believe that a planned program would create a greater sense of community…”. The center and its planned program of arts education would offer residents the opportunity to discover a collective awareness of them selves by introducing them to new mediums of expression.
Moreover, the residents declared their desire to play an active role in facilitating the community center’s activities. Their proposal, in specifically articulating their understanding of a “planned program,” stated that, “we mean activities and uses of the facility that we can work on ourselves to see happen.” The tenants wanted to be actively involved in charting the centers’ use. The ability to contribute and build a successful platform of community programs offered them access to an important source of pride. It endowed them with a new sense of control over their lives. The McDaniel-Glenn
Community Center was more than just a building in the minds of the project’s tenants.
The center was a vehicle for self-determination and self-help. The center was a resource they could use to improve their lives and address their needs.9
9 “Proposal for the McDaniel-Glenn Center,” McDaniel-Glenn Tenant’s Association, May 1975, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library.
8 The community’s residents understood that they could not realize their vision of community empowerment alone. Their proposal expressed that, “resources and people that [were] sensitive to [their] needs and concerns” were essential components to the effort to transform the imagined potential of the center into a reality.10 The projects’ tenants identified the new Neighborhood Arts Center as the last ingredient in their recipe for collective self-determination. The NAC’s artists-in-residence understood the tenants of McDaniel-Glenn’s needs. NAC director John Riddle, speaking with a journalist profiling the NAC’s outreach activities in southwest Atlanta during the collective’s first year of operation, stated that,
People around here need and want contact with the arts as much as people do anywhere…especially as a means of recovering a cultural tradition they are in danger of losing completely. The Neighborhood Arts Center can become an important mechanism of focusing the whole community’s awareness of itself as a community…when members of the staff were once asked to define their jobs, they decided unanimously to call themselves ‘cultural workers.’11
Riddle and the NAC understood the residents of McDaniel-Glenn’s desire for exposure to the arts. Both the NAC and the McDaniel-Glenn community viewed the arts as pathway towards the accomplishment more urgent pursuits including community empowerment and self-determination. Riddle and the NAC were aware of how arts education programs could equip the McDaniel Glenn community with the ability to recreate the sense of neighborhood that had been bulldozed a decade before. Indeed, as Riddle communicated, the NAC’s artists-in-residence saw them selves as “cultural workers.” They were not simply creating art for art’s sake, they were using art as a tool to build a more lasting
10 “Proposal for the McDaniel-Glenn Center,” McDaniel-Glenn Tenant’s Association, May 1975, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library. 11 Newspaper Article, source undetermined, 1976, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta- Fulton Public Library System-Research Library.
9 sense of cultural pride and community-self awareness. Both attributes were in high demand within the McDaniel-Glenn community.
The NAC hosted the 1976 grand reopening of the McDaniel-Glenn community center. The hand written NAC flyer printed on orange construction paper, reflective of the organization’s grass-roots activism, advertised that the NAC’s cultural workers would provide free workshops in creative writing, silkscreen printing, and music on an ongoing basis. In doing so they offered McDaniel-Glenn tenants the chance to use the arts as a tool to recast their sense of community identity, an important step in the quest for self- determination. The Georgia Council for the Humanities provided the funding for the operation of the actual classes. The McDaniel-Glenn Community Center became one of the NAC’s major outreach centers.12
The working relationship that the Neighborhood Arts Center established with the residents of McDaniel-Glenn reflected the arts collective’s broader philosophy and goals.
When Jackson’s Ad Hoc Committee for the Arts began brainstorming to create the NAC their primary goal was to establish a permanent and self-sustaining arts collective that was designed to ultimately provide Atlanta, and the residents of the city’s southwest neighborhoods in particular, with a vehicle for both individual and community self- expression. The NAC was initially conceived as a tool for the building and articulation of identity. More specifically, NAC artists hoped to, “demonstrate the usefulness of the
Arts to the total community: the arts as a way of tapping into the self, of informing the self: sharpening the ability to see, listen, handle space; as a way of organizing thoughts and organizing people; as a way of informing others through shared insights; as a way of
12 “Grand Opening Day,” 1976, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library.
10 imposing style/taste on one’s environment; as a way of integrating one’s life.”13 The
NAC’s philosophy dictated that individuals and communities could use the arts as a way to seize more control over their lives and their surroundings. The arts furnished an expressive forum in which fundamental questions about the nature of society could be raised by the citizen-artists and engaged by the larger community. The NAC and its members believed that the art was an agent of social change.
The collaborative artists/audience ethos that structured the NAC’s artists-in- residences’ interactions with southwest Atlanta’s black working class and working poor communities was guided by the believe that everyone possessed to ability to use the arts as a medium of expression. The ability to create and consume art was not limited to society’s privileged elite. The creative energy behind the creation of art, from their perspective, was the same creative energy found in everyday life choices tied to clothing and home decorating that all people make. As a result of that logic all people inherently possessed the capacity for artistic expression. Artistic creativity was simply an extension of the human condition. Again, the NAC members viewed themselves as “cultural workers,” creative laborers they described as “people of the community who inform, share, encourage and enable other people of the community to develop in themselves what is already there—a creative urge of limitless potential.” Their primary purpose was to empower the community by showing them how to use the arts. NAC artists felt that they had a “moral responsibility” to “liberate the community from corrupting, corrosive constraints.” The artist was a catalyst helping the community to develop a collective
13 “Goals and Philosophy,” 1975, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library.
11 sense of self and realize the calls towards self-determination and self-reliance heard during the Black Power era.
Structurally, The NAC was organized as a not-for-profit corporation. The arts collective’s non-profit status opened the way for the Jackson administration to funnel the city of Atlanta’s resources and money into the organization. The collective was officially incorporated as the Neighborhood Arts Center, Inc. The center’s first official base of operation was the old Peter James Bryant Elementary School, located at 252 Georgia
Avenue, SW, in Atlanta’s Summer Hill neighborhood. The NAC’s non-profit status allowed the city to lease the space to the arts collective for one dollar per year. As an official non-profit organization, the NAC was ultimately governed by a formal board of director, the majority of who were members of the Ad Hoc arts committee that created the organization. The NAC had a great deal of institutional support as a consequence of this overlap. The NAC’s official statement of purpose in its formal by-laws, a necessary component of the organization’s application for non-profit status, reflected its philosophy and goals. The by-laws declared that the NAC served “To provide for the community access to artists and arts and to provide opportunities for the people to participate in various visual and performing arts.” The by-laws also stated that the NAC served to provide employment opportunities for artists working to develop collaborative community arts programming.14 The NAC importantly provided its artists-in-residence a means of economic empowerment in addition to what it offered the community at large.
The Neighborhood Arts Center was initially comprised of a director, ten artists in residence, a secretary, and a janitor.
14 “By-Laws of the Neighborhood Arts Center, Inc,” 1975, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library.
12 Monies stemming from the federal Comprehensive Employment and Training Act
(CETA) were used to pay the salaries for the fulltime NAC artist and staff positions.
CETA represented federal government’s effort to funnel federal funds directly into the hands of municipalities, skipping the bureaucracy of the state. CETA gave Mayor
Jackson and the city of Atlanta access to approximately 20 million dollars spread across four different grant programs. The NAC staff of ten resident artists was specifically funded through Title II of Atlanta’s 20 million dollar pool of CETA funds. Title II earmarked approximately three million dollars of federal funds for Public Service
Employment, jobs that would provide “useful community services for all Atlantans.”15
The NAC’s cultural workers fit perfectly within Title II’s criteria. Between 1976, the
NAC’s first full year of operation, and 1979 approximately $440,000 dollars of Atlanta’s
CETA funds were funneled into the NAC budget.16
CETA was not the Neighborhood Arts Center’s only key source of funding. Like other arts collectives during the Black Power era, the NAC was the beneficiary of both federal and state funding specifically set aside for the promotion and preservation of the arts. Between 1976 and 1979 the NAC received just over $92,000 dollars from the
National Endowment for the Arts and just above $71,000 dollars from the Georgia
Council for the Arts. Over the course of that same period the city of Atlanta, through its
City Service Grant program allocated an additional $115, 000 to assist the NAC in their delivery of community focused programs. While the funds disseminated from state and federal sources played an important role in allowing the NAC’s cultural workers to
15 “Alive and vibrant!” (overview of Atlanta’s CETA Program), 1976, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library. 16 “Outline for a Successful Management of the Neighborhood Arts,” 1987, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library.
13 engage in arts centered black power activism, the financial resources provided by
Maynard Jackson’s administration comprised over 77% of the NAC’s $718,000 budget during its first four years of operation. The disproportionate amount of funding that the
NAC received from the city serves as another reminding of the relationship between political and cultural nationalism in Atlanta.
The NAC spent just over $255,000 dollars in its first year of operation. The salaries of the NAC staff, collectively set at $170,500 dollars, drove budget expenditures.
The combined costs associated with the NAC’s programming, $31,000 dollars, represented the organization’s second highest expense. The first NAC budget also evidenced a significant investment in community outreach efforts. True to the collective’s goals, the NAC spent the majority of its financial resources after payroll deduction—some $43,750 dollars—on community programming and outreach.17
In spring 1975 the Neighborhood Arts Center officially opened for business. The collective’s talented cadre of artists began offering classes at both the Georgia Avenue base of operations and a network of outreach centers located in the city’s southwest housing projects, schools, and senior centers in addition to the McDaniel-Glenn
Community Center. During its first months of operation the NAC conducted hands-on arts education workshops for children, teens, and adults in a range of artistic mediums.
During October and November 1975, for instance, 323 students were enrolled in music, arts and crafts, graphics, creative writing, painting, photography, and dance classes.18
The NAC relied partially on direct mail advertisement to circulate awareness of the
17 “Neighborhood Arts Center, Inc. Projected General Budget, January 1975 to January 1976,” Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library. 18 “Memo, Student Enrollment 10/15/1975 to 11/15/1975, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library.
14 programs they offered. The mailers reaching the mailboxes of the city’s black communities also importantly affirmed the NAC’s philosophy of community self- development. A 1975 NAC educational programming advertisement read, “The
Neighborhood Arts Center is dedicated to the belief that art is a tool for individual and group development; a way of organizing experiences and projecting that experience to others,” and that “art was an integral part of one’s life; and should raise fundamental questions about the human condition.”19 The mailer reminded the community that the arts represented a source of empowerment. It reminded the community that the arts could be mobilized as an important resource for self-determination. The arts offered the community the chance to define and express individual and collective identity on their own terms. The mailer suggested that by participating in a NAC workshop community members could become agents of change.
The Neighborhood Arts Center’s education and outreach activities related to jazz were key sites of the collective’s community empowerment efforts. Zooming in on the
NAC’s jazz related cultural activism, for the remainder of this paper, is not meant to diminish the invaluable role that the other forms of art education and outreach offered by the NAC played within the community. Indeed, NAC workshops in dance, painting, creative writing, and arts and crafts actually had higher enrollments compared to the
NAC music workshops in basic music principles, piano, and individualized music programs, which collectively served forty-two adults, teens, and children.20 Jazz pianist
Odeja Penn’s music workshops, however, were comparatively much more expensive to
19 “Educational Program Outline Advertisement,” 1975, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library. 20 “Memo, Student Enrollment 10/15/1975 to 11/15/1975, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library.
15 operate. The music program needed $7,865 dollars for supplies and equipment to run its workshops, a figure over three time higher than the needed equipment investment in photography, which was the second most expensive NAC workshop to run. Specifically, the music program required a piano, drums, a tape recorder, sheet music, records, music stands, an amplifier, a stereo system with speakers, and more.21 The music workshops’ high cost of operation was likely a contributing factor to their comparatively lower enrollments. There simply may not have been enough equipment to accommodate additional students.
The NAC’s music based outreach programs, however, had the potential to reach significantly larger slice of Atlanta’s black working class and working poor communities.
Other NAC cultural workers were aware of this fact. During a discussion about how to best allocate NAC resources across the different areas of the arts during a 1977 planning meeting artist-in-residence Ashanti, who conducted painting workshops, held that,
“Music is universal, [it] draws people.”22 NAC musical outreach programs proved to be the most effective way to foster interaction between the NAC and the black working class community at large. No NAC program exemplified the NAC ability to reach out to the broader community than its “Jazzmobile” program did.
The NAC’s Jazzmobile program, which carried jazz to the housing projects located within Southwest Atlanta, was initiated during the NAC’s third summer of operation. The introduction of Jazzmobile into the umbrella of NAC outreach activities was a result of the efforts of jazz alto-saxophonist Joseph Jennings. Jennings led a
21 Materials Needed for Workshops, NAC,” Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library. 22 “Minutes,” NAC Planning Retreat (Penn Conference Center) 8/30/1977, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library.
16 popular Atlanta based jazz band called Life Force. In fall 1976 Jennings, with the help of
NAC director John Riddle drafted a proposal explaining the dynamics of the program to the NAC’s governing board of directors. Jennings and Riddle explained that their proposal music program, comprised of both the Jazzmobile project and new in house workshops would provide members of southwest Atlanta’s black community with classes focused on the history of black music and the elements of black musical performance.
NAC sponsored artists-in-residence would serve as instructors. The music program, according to the proposal, promised to place the black community in direct interaction with professional black musicians. Jennings and Riddle, Jr. also noted that the program would serve as a catalyst for the development of black music by placing gifted musicians in sustained contact with one another. The NAC building had the potential to become an incubator of black musical creativity.23
In advocating for the new program they highlighted its urgent need. Jennings and
Riddle suggested that, “A program of this nature is needed in Atlanta as well as in the
Southeastern area of the United States.” The also argued that, “In metropolitan Atlanta and the entire southeast, there seems to be no concentrated effort to confront the populace with the accomplishments of Black musicians. No effort had been exercised in the development of talented youths in music that stems as the results of the Black experience speaking more specifically, Jazz.”24 The program sought to fill a critical void. Ensuring that Atlanta blacks were familiar with the accomplishments of black composers and musicians—an area of American culture that privileged the aesthetic merit of black
23 “Proposal for a Music Program,” 1976, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library. 24 “Program for a Music Proposal,” 1976, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library.
17 creativity—was absolutely necessary if they were going to use the arts to offer them a renewed sense of cultural pride and collective identity.
Joseph Jennings officially joined the NAC as a CETA funded artist-in-residence in January 1977. Now a member of the collective Jennings worked closely with Riddle and Odeja Penn to organize the Neighborhood Arts Ensemble. True to the promises made in the program proposal the ensemble was comprised of musicians from Atlanta’s best know jazz bands including the Duke Pearson Big Band, the Billy Braynon Big Band,
Positive Energy, the Ojeda Penn Experience, and Jennings’ own Life Force.
The Neighborhood Arts Ensemble, featured Joe Jennings, James Hudson, Dave Hudson,
Howard Nicholson, and Rod Smith in its woodwind section. The brass section included
Tommy Stewart, Charles Hines, Ishaq, Mason Johnson, Roy Mays, Robert Lewis, and
Morgan Cundiff. “Kole” John Eaton, Allen Murphy, Arthur Franklin, and William Gee comprised the ensemble’s rhythm section.
The Neighborhood Arts Ensemble began their first of four rehearsals on June 18th,
1977 at the NAC building on Georgia Avenue. Between July 16th and August 27th The
Neighborhood Arts Ensemble, performing as the “Jazzmobile Big Band” carried jazz music directly to the center of Atlanta black working class and working poor communities. Over the course of the summer of 1977 the Jazzmobile Big Band performed ten free concerts in the housing projects spread across the southwest and southeastern portions of the city, including Herndon Homes, University Homes, Capitol
Homes, Carver Homes, Bowden Homes, and McDaniel-Glenn. The Jazzmobile concert series had two primary community outreach objectives. First, the program provided
Atlanta’s working class and working poor black communities with a level of exposure to
18 the music that they likely would not have otherwise had, especially given the high price of attending live jazz concerts in the city’s commercial venues. The Jazzmobile eliminated the costs associated with listening to the music in person. Drummer Kole
Eaton told an Atlanta Magazine reporter covering the Jazzmobile program that, “A lot of black people can’t afford to see them [big name black musicians]. The Jazzmobile is taking jazz to the people.” Jennings likewise communicated to the same reporter that, “I feel sure that residents in Atlanta’s public housing projects will be equally appreciative of the chance to hear free in their own neighborhoods, what is perhaps America’s only truly original art form.”25
Jazzmobile also served to reconnect the residents of Atlanta’s public housing projects with their cultural heritage. Jennings expressed to an Atlanta Constitution reporter that “Jazz is the musical roots of black people…so it’s important for black children to be exposed to it.”26 The Neighborhood Arts Ensemble’s song choices during their performances at housing projects located those musical roots close to home. The ensemble showcased compositions and arrangements by jazz pianist Duke Pearson.
Pearson, perhaps best known as the artist and repertoire man for Blue Note records in its heyday and as the composer of popular tune “Cristo Redentor” on Donald Byrd’s A New
Perspective, was a native of the southwest Atlanta community in which the NAC performed its cultural work. Person represented a narrative of triumph over the same challenges facing the audiences that Jazzmobile targeted. Pearson and his music became
25 “People,” Atlanta Magazine, November 1977, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library. 26 “People,” Atlanta Magazine, November 1977, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library.
19 an important source community-wide cultural pride. The ensemble usually performed
Pearson’s arrangements of “New Girl,” “Nefertiti,” and “Rainey Day.”27
Jazzmobile and the new workshops that accompanied the program were expensive to operate. The budget submitted along with Jennings and Riddle, Jr.’s initial proposal requested $132,700 to cover costs associated with the both the projected Jazzmobile performances and the salaries of the musicians-in-residence who would teach the history and performance workshop for community residents. Beyond the funds needed for the salaries of additional musician artists-in-residence Jazzmobile required a large initial investment in performance equipment.28 While expensive, the formation of the
Jazzmobile program and the organization of the Neighborhood Arts Ensemble proved to be a lucrative investment. They greatly enhanced the NAC’s ability to reach out the community. The Jazzmobile concert series tripled the number of community members that the NAC could reach during the hot summer months. During the NAC’s first years of operation the arts collective estimated that it reached approximately 9,880 community members through its workshops. The Jazz Mobile initiative, however, placed the NAC in direct contact with approximately 18,000 people.29
The example of the Neighborhood Arts Center demonstrates that the Black Power and Black Arts movements thrived in Atlanta. The creation of the black arts collective was a ripple effect of the articulation black political nationalism within the city. The organization’s philosophy and goals were a direct reflection of the grassroots needs,
27 “Taking Jazz to the People,” Atlanta Inquirer, 20 August 1977, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library. 28 “Program for a Music Proposal,” 1976, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library. 29 “Attendance at the Neighborhood Arts Center, Inc.,” date unknown, Neighborhood Arts Center Program Files, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System-Research Library.
20 desires, and self-determination of southwest Atlanta’s black working class and working poor. Their voice guided the NAC’s approach toward cultural activism. The collective’s talented cadre of “cultural workers” successfully used the arts as a powerful tool to help empower Atlanta’s black community define who they were and foster a new sense of community self-awareness.
21