Fifty years ago, the National Endowment for the Arts was created to address just such inequity. On September 29, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Endowment for the Arts into existence, along with a suite of other ambitious social programs, all under the rubric of the Great Society. Johnson imagined these programs as ways to serve “not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.”

Half a century later, the ethos upon which the NEA was founded—inclusion and community—has been eroded by consistent political attack. As the NEA’s budget has been slashed, private donors and foundations have jumped in to fill the gap, but the institutions they support, and that receive the bulk of arts funding in this country, aren’t reaching the people the NEA was founded to help serve. The arts aren’t dead, but the system by which they are funded is increasingly becoming as unequal as America itself.

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Despite early—and not inaccurate—accusations of elitism, the NEA has been a huge success. It leveled the playing field for countless arts organizations, particularly in African American and rural communities, which were often considered “too grassroots” to be funded by private or corporate philanthropy. By providing crucial financial support and cultural capital to such organizations as Philadelphia’s Philadanco and the Dallas Black Dance Theatre, the NEA counteracted a kind of philanthropic redlining. As a result, these smaller groups enjoyed a reputation boost, and eventually drew the attention of local agencies and private foundations that had previously ignored them. As The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott has written, “If you want to understand Johnson’s cultural agenda, you have to see it not as an appendage but integrally related to the War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

For almost two decades, public arts funding was stable. But after the 1980 presidential election the NEA found itself under attack. As Ronald Reagan radically reworked the tax code to favor the wealthy and set precedents for union busting and deregulation across multiple sectors, he also went after the NEA. One of the first proposals by Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, was to slash the NEA’s budget in half. The arts served as a canary in the coalmine for the devastation of federal funding for social services that began with Reagan and continues to this day.

In other words: Attacking the arts was a stealth strategy for Stockman and his ilk to articulate conservative antipathy towards the federal government specifically, and the public sector generally. Stockman’s goal was finally realized in 1995—under the Clinton administration—when the NEA’s budget and staff were cut by 50 percent, disproportionately affecting minority and disadvantaged communities that couldn’t turn to individual mega-donors or corporate foundations to fill the gap. As a result, arts funding became more dependent on private dollars than ever before—in line with Stockman’s vision.