On March 31, 1972, the Black cultural center
Rainbow Sign welcomed local press for Berkeley’s official proclamation of
“Nina Simone Day.” At this staged convergence of Black artistic and political power, the mood was formal and celebratory at once. Multicolored curtains sparkled behind black balloons. Simone listened attentively in a gold lamé dress and sky-blue headscarf as Warren Widener, Berkeley’s first Black mayor and a frequent guest of Rainbow Sign, read from a decree that exalted her artistry, her every song “an anthem to Black people, for Black people, and about Black people.” The director of the Bay Area Urban League announced an official campaign to make Simone’s song
“To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” “the new Black anthem.” Simone, acknowledging the impact of the song, said that she was “pleased to be an instrument, to give it to my people. It does not belong to me.”
One of the children who had received the song was the young Kamala Harris, whose Indian-born mother regularly played “Young, Gifted, and Black” (Aretha Franklin’s version, admittedly) on the record player in their living room. Harris, 7 at the time of Nina Simone Day, frequented Rainbow Sign for several years with her mother and sister and absorbed there a sense of political responsibility—that to be “young, gifted, and Black” meant lifting up her community. “It was a citizen’s upbringing,” she writes in
The Truths We Hold of her time at Rainbow Sign, “the only kind I knew, and one I assumed everyone else was experiencing, too.” (They weren’t.) Rainbow Sign was where she first “learned that artistic expression, ambition, and intelligence were cool.” It was also where she glimpsed a vision of Black empowerment, orchestrated by middle-class Black women with working-class roots—women who had broken professional barriers and were now trying to mentor a new generation of young Black people to find a vocation for themselves and transform the institutions they joined...
In her memoir, Harris’ time at Rainbow Sign was part of her mother Shyamala’s quest to “make sure we [Harris and her sister, Maya,] would grow into confident, black women.” Although the young Kamala grew up in the West Berkeley flatlands—a formerly redlined area that Harris describes as “a close-knit neighborhood of working families”—she participated (famously now) in the early years of Berkeley’s busing program and spent her school days at a North Berkeley elementary school whose demographics were closer to the city’s at large (68 percent white). So Shyamala drew her daughters into a set of Black-centered circles—first, the after-school program, run by Kamala’s beloved neighbors the Sheltons, with its posters of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman decorating its walls; and next, Oakland’s 23rd Avenue Church of God, where Kamala and Maya sung in the children’s choir and took in the Social Gospel vision of a Black church that “defend the rights of the poor and the needy.” But at the heart of her childhood stood Rainbow Sign. It was there that she and other children were exposed to the “extraordinary” people—Harris names Shirley Chisholm, Alice Walker, Nina Simone, and Maya Angelou—“who showed us what we could become.”
Rainbow Sign was the East Bay’s Black mecca. Housed in a former funeral parlor designed in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, Rainbow Sign had innate grandeur—chandeliers and arched leaded windows, vaulted ceilings with hand-painted floral designs, an organ loft suspended above what became the main stage. The center thrummed with life: Its bustling bar-restaurant served up soul food seven days a week, and the walls of its program hall were always hung with new art exhibitions. Rentable conference rooms in the back were put to use by all manner of community groups, and any night of the week there was some cultural event to take advantage of—a Bobby Hutcherson concert, a screening of a film smuggled out of South Africa, a trailblazing work of choreo-theater, a book party with Rosa Guy or Maya Angelou. It was a space for learning, one that boasted a library stocked with the latest Black Arts journals and a studio that held workshops on art, music, and dance. And it was a space for festivity. On some occasions—for instance, to host a jazz festival’s after-party or a record-breaking, six-day-long poetry reading—Rainbow Sign was even open through the night and into the morning.
The center had been brainstormed into existence by Mary Ann Pollar, a Bay Area concert promoter and good friend of luminaries like Nina Simone, Odetta, Maya Angelou, and James Baldwin. Pollar had taken the center’s name from the same verse of the spiritual that Baldwin had drawn upon for the title of his 1963 indictment of white supremacy,
The Fire Next Time (“God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water the fire next time!”). Pollar put her emphasis on the rainbow sign’s promise of rebirth—of wracked communities made whole again. In that spirit of Black resilience, Rainbow Sign sought to educate, uplift, and entertain. As it advertised in its brochure, it “set a Black table at which all are welcome to eat” and made membership “open to all who are sympathetic to our Black orientation, cognizant of our vast diversity and dedicated to quality achievement.”
you just buried yaself... stop protecting this fraudulent ass bytch... bytch lived in INDIA too... enough already!!!
she's a fraud... She visited india so she never LIVED there at all is that what your fukking saying???
she doesnt even call herself indian she says ASIAN... 
fukk this bytch, fukk you caping for her... we know what she is... lets move the fuk on...
