Status Updates From A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra ...

...he proposes setting up “a colony for black people here. See what they can do on a planet all their own, without any white people there.”

If something seems funny about a group of intellectuals and crack musicians from Chicago’s South Side womping up an alternative space program from the cultural detritus of the Space Age, it should.

As a response to a world preoccupied with the space race and oblivious to racial injustice, Sun Ra’s music announces not merely a demand for a better world but a program for building one.