March 12, 2026
NEA Defunding: America’s History of Economic Injustice Towards Musicians of Color.
By John Myers
By Dejennay Dehaney
In March of 2025, the Trump administration began cutting three million dollars from the National Endowment for the Arts as a part of its 2026 budget proposal. Although these cuts affect musicians and artists across the United States, they have a disproportionate impact on musicians of color who rely more on said programs.
According to arts.gov, “A significant percentage of grants go to those who have fewer opportunities to participate in the arts. 40% of NEA-supported activities take place in high-poverty neighborhoods. 33% of NEA grants serve low-income audiences.” As a saxophonist who attends a music school in an underprivileged community, Celia Cruz Bronx High School of Music, I see firsthand how access to programs that provide opportunities like private lessons are crucial to the development of a musician. Without this, a musician trying to advance in such a competitive industry will be at a disadvantage.
The Celia Cruz Jazz Band program consists of three bands: Full Swing Ahead, an all-girls jazz band; Standard Jazz Band; and The Celia Cruz Big Band. In 2025, Big Band made it into Essentially Ellington, a global high school competition in which the finest youth jazz bands in the world come together, not only to compete but also to connect over their shared love of the art. To prepare for Essentially Ellington, Celia Cruz Big Band members put in a lot of time and effort in perfecting their craft, attending workshops and private lessons. Among those lessons were those of Jazzmobile, the first arts and cultural nonprofit organization formed in the United States solely for jazz. Jazzmobile partnered with the Celia Cruz Bronx High School of Music to provide private lessons to the school’s jazz musicians and vocalists.
The lessons, as noted by Celia Cruz Big Band director Penelopy Smetter Jacono, were crucial for Big Band members as they prepared to audition and compete in Essentially Ellington. In late 2025, my peers and I were made aware that the program was at risk due to defunding. This news was devastating, as a majority of Celia Cruz’s student body don’t have the thousands of dollars needed to acquire private lessons without the aid of grants and programs like Jazzmobile. Thankfully, Jazzmobile was able to recover its funding and continue for its spring semester. Similarly, the Classical Theatre of Harlem (CTH) also saw critical funding pulled for its upcoming summer production. For the CTH, the rescinding of funding placed the jobs of artists of color at risk. The CTH was able to continue its summer production using other funds, but for smaller programs this loss in funding would be devastating.
The retraction of NEA funds highlights a historic pattern of economic inequality that Black musicians have faced. The pattern is specifically reflective of the New Deal welfare program, the Federal Music Project (FMP), created in 1935 to provide relief to musicians who needed funding to continue pursuing their careers during the Great Depression. Though the FMP provided crucial employment for artists of color, its effects on aiding the overall reform of economic challenges that artists of color faced in the industry were negligible. Alongside a majority of the other welfare programs created as a part of the New Deal, the selection process for the FMP was heavily impacted by segregation, and artists of color were often “last hired, first fired,” as noted by the article “The WPA and the Slave Writers Collection.” This racial prejudice left artists of color with few options and led to many of them joining Race Records, record labels that exploited them with unfair contracts and low wages.
Take the experience of Black musicians like Muddy Waters, for example. Muddy Waters is a legendary blues musician whose fame peaked in the 1950s. Waters was a part of Chess Records, where he, like many Black musicians at the time, was exploited for his talent at a record label owned by a white man, Leonard Chess, while having no official contract. According to Andrew Thomas, in his journal of the oral history of Chicago blues, Chess never paid Waters what he earned for his work. Furthermore, Thomas noted that “if Waters demanded his royalties, he would have been dropped from the Chess Records roster.”
The NEA defunding is a part of a recurring pattern of economic inequality that has affected musicians of color in America for decades. Whether it is 2026 with the rescinding of critical funding or the 1920s with selective aid based on racial prejudice, the economic disadvantages of musicians of color go overlooked. Thus, more coverage of economic inequality among musicians of color is needed to highlight the significance of the funding from the NEA and similar programs so that funding for the arts will cease to be treated as dismissable and become more reliable for those who rely on it. Though increased coverage does not address economic inequality among musicians of color, it is one of many steps needed to address the issue at large.
