Berkeley researchers look to preserve Rainbow Sign's place in Bay Area Black history

BERKELEY, Calif. - In the annals of American Black History, it is often pantheons like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, or Rosa Parks who are rightfully recognized for their roles in the hard-fought battle for equality.

But Tessa Rissacher and Max Lopez are making sure this building – now occupied by the City of Berkeley – gets its due for its role in Bay Area Black history.

"Places like this were designed to bring Black art, Black Achievement to everyone," said Rissacher who was part of a research project into the facility while a student at U.C. Berkeley.

Located at the corner of what is now Martin Luther King Boulevard and Debry Street, The Rainbow Sign was a place where Black art, literature, and politics converged.

"It made that incredible richness of Black culture, and innovation available for everyone to learn about and to celebrate," Rissacher told us.

Before the interior of the building was redeveloped a few years ago, inside the building were grand, hand-painted wooden ceilings, hanging chandeliers and an organ loft were found Mary Ann Pollard orchestrated jazz and soul programs.

But to truly understand its impact, is to know the throngs of Black elites that graced its halls.

"So this ability to mingle and be around these incredibly inspiring people was one of the things that made it so particular vital and vibrant," Rissacher recounts. "James Baldwin is here all the time. Nina Simone, the folk singer, Odetta, people that you could just go in and you'd be having your sandwich in there at the next table and you can talk to them."  

There was also Poet Maya Angelou, the county’s first-ever Black female best-selling author, who appeared here one year after the release of her autobiographical novel, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."

Angelou was even married at Rainbow Sign.

It was at Rainbow Sign where Baldwin, a writer, would argue here that the deeper meaning behind politics is to focus on love and accountability, a view that's less traditional to what we’re experiencing today.

"Counter to that in the Rainbow Sign, it was about bringing people together to debate and to disagree. But it's still with the understanding that we're here building something together," said Max Lopez, who was part of the research team at U.C. Berkeley.

Described in Lopez and Rissacher’s research, the facility was "somewhere between a Black Nationalist headquarters and middle-class social club that hosted a wide spectrum of individuals."

It was also a gathering place for Black arts. A now-famous painting, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima by Betye Sarr, was created especially for a Rainbow Sign exhibition in 1972.

Founded by Mary Ann Pollard and a group of Black women, Rainbow Sign is some ways can be traced back to the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and '60s.

It was formed in 1971, one year after the U.S. Established Black History Month.

"What was actually happening in the Rainbow Sign was that people were getting together and they were fostering intellectual development," Lopez said.

Guests like Vice President Kamala Harris visited regularly as a child and wrote about it in her memoir, The Truths We Hold, describing it as an influence on her life.

But six years after Rainbow Sign opened to the community, it closed its doors.

"They just couldn't hang on to this. And it's harder and harder, like the spaces where. People can encounter each other across differences, like I was saying are under assault and have been for a long time. I think it's one of those casualties," Lopez recalled from his research.

The hope now for Rissacher and Lopez is that the research they were a part of will not lead to creator knowledge about Rainbow Sign’s place in Bay Area Black History and preservation of the ideas so that perhaps Rainbow Sign’s history of unity can pierce the hardened outer shell of division that grips the country today.

Rissacher is now trying to have the former site of the Rainbow Sign a landmark status designation to make sure it is protected and remembered in the future.