As the ETA Creative Arts Foundation is in the middle of our 25th Anniversary Year, I find myself being extremely reflective. If one comes to understand that a life has a destiny, and if one becomes conscious of her own experiences, then one can move through life and make a contribution as an African American which may be unique and distinctive. In this sense, I feel very blessed. It's amazing that African Americans don't have many cultural institutions in the United States, nor do we have many in the world. How could this have happened? When I look back at the history of the Cultural Arts Movement, I'm reminded that, back in 1920, W. E. B. Du Bois told us the Negro Arts Movement should be by the Negro People, for the Negro People, about the Negro People, and near the Negro People. And I think, in the evolution of our cultural paradigms, most of us have taken this to heart, but we failed historically really to internalize it, to incorporate and institutionalize our cultural forms so that African Americans, as we are now called, could really benefit from the awakening and the mere image of ourselves. Our institution came into being out of the Civil Rights Movement, and out of the travel that some of us made to the African continent. It soon became clear that what we, in concert with other people in the Movement, needed to do was to create institutions to transmit our own values, our traditions, our lifestyles, the things that are important to us. And some of us knew that culture is the vehicle which drives all people across the planet. Once we are very clear about our own identity, our values, our traditions, our world-class history as a People, then we have certain fundamental answers not only about who we are, but about what we should be doing, what we have as a People that other people in the world need, and particularly and most especially about how we should educate our children. How do we incorporate in ourselves the spirit of our ancestors? How do we build a future while we're on the planet? And how do we move beyond that to leave something for the next generation? Ultimately, I secured a master's degree from the University of Chicago in Administration and Management, Community Organization, and more recently an honorary Ph.D. from Chicago State University. I'm saying all this because I started out as a dancer, then became an actress, quite by accident, and through an opportunity which presented itself moved into stage management, company management and at the same time having parallel experiences and parallel professional lives. At the time that the opportunity and the inclination and the wisdom and the emphasis and the impulse came together to develop a cultural institution, I was particularly prepared to do so. I went back to some familiar cultural paradigms. I went back to Langston Hughes, who wrote, in Note on Commercial Theater, You've taken my blues and gone. I went back to the history of our experience in the arts to discover, to my chagrin and surprise, that indeed integration into American cultural arts was as much a fallacy as it had been in every other sphere of our lives, meaning that the most talented among us, the most competent among us fled our communities to desegregate Broadway, to be discovered in the films. I'm not complaining about that, but if we are to survive this holocaust that we've experienced as Black people and come into our own as a world-class People, then those who are the most talented--as W. E. B. Du Bois talked about, the Talented Tenth--really have to align ourselves within the context of our communities. We need to bring our skills, our talents. As Amiri Baraka said during the '60s, maybe we use too much of our energy for other people's light bulbs. So we began very consciously to develop professional training in the arts, because I'm also one of that generation where the children took artistic lessons of some kind, not because our folks thought we would be professionals in the field, but because they thought the lessons would develop our character. …