In 1954 the United States Supreme Court declared, in Brown v. Board of Education--Topeka, separate but equal as unconstitutional. This decision was rendered in keeping with legal jargon that the process of "integrating" schools would be carried out with all deliberate speed. As boards of education utilized the pupil placement model to test the then recent Supreme Court decision, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. declared that it would be at least the year 2054 before the first sizeable number of African American students had integrated European American establishments. By 1968 Dr. King proferred an important focus presented as an inherent thesis in the title of his book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community. He states:

Like life, racial understanding is not something that we find but something that we must create. What we find when we enter these mortal plains is existence; but existence is the raw material out of which all life must be created. A productive and happy life is not something that you find; it is something that you make. And so the ability of Negroes and whites to work together, to understand each other, will not be found ready made; it must be created by the fact of contact (King, 28).

From 1954-1970, amid various measures, the country deliberated how to go about paving the road toward "integration." Given that little was being accomplished, in 1970 the cry against "integration" subsided when desegragation was declared as official policy by the United States government. Study of the visual and performing arts can be utilized as media that chronicles aspects of social and political expression that surfaces in United States history. This module focuses on African American painters whose works serve as the fact of contact that documents a dichotomous period of hope and hopelessness in a variety of strokes that convey, among others, a common theme--the search for inclusion and equality--given demands among the populace for civil rights from 1954-1970.