My favorite night of the week was Thursday. On Thursdays, you could always find us in an

unassuming beige building on the corner of what was then Grove Street and Derby.

For six years in the early 1970s, that beige building in Berkeley, California was the

center of the universe, or at least a section of it occupied by a constellation of black

luminaries like Maya Angelou and James Baldwin and the little black and Indian girl who

would one day become a star of American politics. Back then, that little building was home

to the rainbow sign, a cultural center that sat at the intersection of the black arts

and black power movements. It was a social club, a concert space, the kind of joint where

you could find the first black mayor of Berkeley rubbing shoulders with black panthers

over a plate of fried chicken and collagreens while listening to Nina Simone pour her heart

out. It was that kind of black.

Rainbow sign is a unique club in Berkeley, which is geared to the role of the black and American

cultural society. A who's who of art, culture and activism found their way to the rainbow

sign, as one tumultuous decade in America was ending and another just beginning.

Is black art really any different than any other kind of art?

Yes, because it relates directly to the black experience, whatever it is here in America

or anywhere else in the world.

Here's Rainbow sign art consultant, E.J. Montgomery, talking to a reporter from a local CBS TV

station in 1972.

And as a black person in the world today, they have their own unique experiences and that

we feel they are trying to relate in their art in some way.

The rainbow sign was the vision of Mary Ann Poller, a legendary Bay Area concert promoter

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