From the Preface to our biography of Diana Sands:
“Are you white?” the late Roger Robinson joked over the phone with Steve in 2016, soon after we began working on this project. “Are you sure?” he asked again. Since then, Trump and Trumpism has, of course, virulently enflamed racial polarization in the U.S. As we now finish this book, we feel as though we are constructing a biography planted directly on the racial divide. We reject the “Own Voices” dogma that insists that only people of color can write about subjects or individuals pertaining to people of color.
Diana pursued her career fiercely, pursuing opportunities and maximizing every opportunity she was given. The late Kurt Baker, to whom she was engaged when she died, recalled that given “a trivial TV part she would attack it like it was Lady Macbeth.”
Diana’s activism was equally fierce and outspoken, and her racial solidarity extended to her own profession. “She was supportive of all Black people trying to work in this business,” Melvin van Peebles told Ebony Magazine shortly after her death in 1973.
“She was an icon for us,” Hector Elizondo explained. Which “us,” we wanted to know–young actors of color? “Yes, certainly, but as well actors in general.” She was bigger than one constituency—and by design, we might say, since Diana wanted both to speak to her demographic, but command the largest audience possible.
Amid the separatist sentiments of the late1960s, Diana herself now entertained an ambivalence about whether it was better to assert racial identity at the price of integration. Certainly, her determination to deal outside the white establishment led to her founding the producing organization Third World Cinema in 1971. Her co-founders were a nexus of prominent Black entertainers–as well as a white entertainment attorney.
Diana’s life and career are a tribute to dialogue, communication, and collaboration. It is in that spirit—in her spirit—that we have written this book.”
