When columnist Stanley Crouch came to Dallas to speak at the Black Academy of Arts & Letters, he was skeptical.
I did not expect much from an institution called the Black Academy of Arts and Letters, which I assumed was given to pretentious discussions of how “endangered” black people were. It proved to be far more than that – though, to be fair, my suspicions were well grounded in the experience of all who dare to decline membership in any cause other than as much truth as possible.
Crouch writes that the problem with many such institutions is that they are usual the mouthpieces of ideological opportunities, run, as he writes “hustlers, ideologues and opportunists who transcend all possible distinctions.”
But that doesn’t describe the Black Academy’s Curis King, writes Crouch.
At his organization – which is in its 34th season of providing the Dallas area with high culture in all forms – there is no submission to the ruthless materialism of a pop culture in which bad boys are celebrated, no matter how they make their money, while young women are duped into dehumanizing themselves by getting as close as they can to looking like prostitutes. He has drawn a line between his old-school academy and propaganda claiming that money can never, ever, be wrong.
