Endowing Equity

Endowing Equity tells the remarkable story of the U.S. federal government's first and only sustained foray into affirmative action in national arts funding. Between 1971 and 1995, three charismatic Black leaders spearheaded a bold program within the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), granting over $170 million (more than $500 million today) to minority artists, broadly defined. Called "Expansion Arts," the program was an unprecedented effort that counterbalanced the agency's widespread exclusion of Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native, and rural white artists. As their core strategy, the directors built a galvanizing, coalition-based community arts field that extended minority status beyond race and ethnicity. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews with former NEA staff and grantees, Endowing Equity chronicles Expansion Arts's struggles and obstacles, as well as its pioneering equity-based initiatives and successes in celebrating cultural diversity. At its heart, Endowing Equity shares the power of solidarity and alliance-building, showing how the arts can bring forth a more inclusive America. This book is one of timely importance, addressing present-day concerns of national arts funding elimination and DEI policy attacks. From the dream of racial liberalism to multiculturalism's unfulfilled promises, Expansion Arts navigated America's fraught celebration of diversity—for the ways pluralism enriched rather than diminished the American experience—while resisting those determined to uphold the elitism and Western European supremacy of the status quo. In Director Patrice Walker Powell's words, the program was a "grand experiment" that fought for broader definitions of artistic quality and merit. Its supporters and champions took up the gauntlet for cultural and racial equity in U.S. arts funding.