The Black Arts Movement, Another RBG Tutorial Joint

Historical Overviews of The Black Arts Movement, Kaluma ya Salaam

The Black Arts Movement, Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s

By James Edward Smethurst

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27:58

The Black Arts Movement in the Broader Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement: Carolyn

Rodgers Talk

The aim of the symposium was to bring together writers and activists from that era to talk about

the influential alignments, cross-currents among ...

28:46

The Black Arts Movement in the Broader Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement: Sterling

Plumpp Talk



47:31

The Black Arts Movement in the Broader Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement: Angela Jackson

Talk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nNPAUysWpw



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGbnalh-fGs



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMEsy7JLemk





21:07

The Black Arts Movement in the Broader Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement: Question and

Answer Portion of Symposium



33:04

The Black Arts Movement in the Broader Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement: Sala Udin Talk



26:06

Lunch Poems: Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka is recognized as the founder of the Black Arts Movement, a literary period that

began in Harlem in the 1960s and forever changed ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVrRRE245zc



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BQN1SE8tcw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BQN1SE8tcw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqiPIdLOGEA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqiPIdLOGEA

41:49

A Conversation Between Amiri Baraka and Sala Udin

activist, to discuss his involvement in the Black Arts Movement, his poetry, and where Black

Arts are headed today. ... coapgh ... poetry interview ...

41:49

A Conversation with Amiri Baraka

activist, to discuss his involvement in the Black Arts Movement, his poetry, and where Black

Arts are headed today. ... coapgh ... poetry interview ...

56:38

Lunch Poems - Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka is recognized as the founder of the Black Arts Movement, a literary period that

began in Harlem in the 1960s and forever changed ...

1:26:50

The Holloway Series in Poetry - Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka is a well-known political activist, founder of the Black Arts Movement, and

winner of the American Book Award, Amiri Baraka's work is ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OvVev3Z1JY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OvVev3Z1JY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laG_fo6_Grg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laG_fo6_Grg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ojq_WDqIkI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ojq_WDqIkI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ9GKQ9Q0Ng

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ9GKQ9Q0Ng

37:33

An interview with Amiri Baraka

X and world revolutionary movements, Baraka is renowned as the founder of the Black Arts

Movement in Harlem in the 1960s that became, though short ...

36:57

Amiri Baraka at RIT III

, Rochester, NY Amiri Baraka, the noted poet, playwright and co-founder of the Black Arts

Movement of the 1960's, will headline two special ...

30:48

Amiri Baraka at RIT II

, Rochester, NY Amiri Baraka, the noted poet, playwright and co-founder of the Black Arts

Movement of the 1960's, will headline two special ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM5kNLprZac

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM5kNLprZac

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV2IO8J2O5g

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV2IO8J2O5g

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN-vXlgSWQ0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN-vXlgSWQ0

| 1 F o r m A n t h o l o g y o f M o d e r n A m e r i c a n P o e t r y ( O x f o r d )

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

The Black Arts

Movement

| Historical Overviews of the Black Arts

Movement | African American Poetry--An

Overview, by Joanne V. Gabbin | Documents

from the Movement |

Compiled and Prepared by Cary Nelson

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/blackarts/historical.htm

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/blackarts/historical.htm

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/blackarts/gabbin.htm

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/blackarts/gabbin.htm

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/blackarts/documents.htm

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/blackarts/documents.htm

http://www.english.illinois.edu/_vti_bin/shtml.dll/maps/blackarts/blackarts.htm/map

http://www.english.illinois.edu/_vti_bin/shtml.dll/maps/blackarts/blackarts.htm/map



Historical Overviews of The Black Arts Movement

Kaluma ya Salaam

Both inherently and overtly political in content, the Black Arts movement was the only

American literary movement to advance "social engagement" as a sine qua non of its aesthetic.

The movement broke from the immediate past of protest and petition (civil rights) literature and

dashed forward toward an alternative that initially seemed unthinkable and unobtainable: Black

Power.

In a 1968 essay, "The Black Arts Movement," Larry Neal proclaimed Black Arts the "aesthetic

and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept." As a political phrase, Black Power had earlier

been used by Richard Wright to describe the mid-1950s emergence of independent African

nations. The 1960s' use of the term originated in 1966 with Student Nonviolent Coordinating

Committee civil rights workers Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks. Quickly adopted in the

North, Black Power was associated with a militant advocacy of armed self-defense, separation

from "racist American domination," and pride in and assertion of the goodness and beauty of

Blackness.

Although often criticized as sexist, homophobic, and racially exclusive (i.e., reverse racist),

Black Arts was much broader than any of its limitations. Ishmael Reed, who is considered

neither a movement apologist nor advocate ("I wasn't invited to participate because I was

considered an integrationist"), notes in a 1995 interview,

I think what Black Arts did was inspire a whole lot of Black people to write. Moreover, there

would be no multiculturalism movement without Black Arts. Latinos, Asian Americans, and

others all say they began writing as a result of the example of the 1960s. Blacks gave the

example that you don't have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own

background, your own history, your own tradition and your own culture. I think the challenge is

for cultural sovereignty and Black Arts struck a blow for that.

History and Context. The Black Arts movement, usually referred to as a "sixties" movement,

coalesced in 1965 and broke apart around 1975/1976. In March 1965 following the 21 February

assassination of Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) moved from Manhattan's Lower East

Side (he had already moved away from Greenwich Village) uptown to Harlem, an exodus

considered the symbolic birth of the Black Arts movement. Jones was a highly visible publisher

(Yugen and Floating Bear magazines, Totem Press), a celebrated poet (Preface to a Twenty-

http://www.english.illinois.edu/_vti_bin/shtml.dll/maps/blackarts/historical.htm/map



Volume Suicide Note, 1961, and The Dead Lecturer, 1964), a major music critic (Blues People,

1963), and an Obie Award-winning playwright (Dutchman, 1964) who, up until that fateful split,

had functioned in an integrated world. Other than James Baldwin, who at that time had been

closely associated with the civil rights movement, Jones was the most respected and most widely

published Black writer of his generation.

While Jones's 1965 move uptown to found the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) is

the formal beginning (it was Jones who came up with the name "Black Arts"), Black Arts, as a

literary movement, had its roots in groups such as the Umbra Workshop. Umbra (1962) was a

collective of young Black writers based in Manhattan's Lower East Side; major members were

writers Steve Cannon, Tom Dent, Al Haynes, David Henderson, Calvin C. Hernton, Joe Johnson,

Norman Pritchard, Lenox Raphael, Ishmael Reed, Lorenzo Thomas, James Thompson, Askia M.

Touré (Roland Snellings; also a visual artist), Brenda Walcott, and musician-writer Archie

Shepp. Touré, a major shaper of "cultural nationalism," directly influenced Jones. Along with

Umbra writer Charles Patterson and Charles's brother, William Patterson, Touré joined Jones,

Steve Young, and others at BARTS.

Umbra, which produced Umbra Magazine, was the first post-civil rights Black literary group to

make an impact as radical in the sense of establishing their own voice distinct from, and

sometimes at odds with, the prevailing white literary establishment. The attempt to merge a

Black-oriented activist thrust with a primarily artistic orientation produced a classic split in

Umbra between those who wanted to be activists and those who thought of themselves as

primarily writers, though to some extent all members shared both views. Black writers have

always had to face the issue of whether their work was primarily political or aesthetic. Moreover,

Umbra itself had evolved out of similar circumstances: In 1960 a Black nationalist literary

organization, On Guard for Freedom, had been founded on the Lower East Side by Calvin Hicks.

Its members included Nannie and Walter Bowe, Harold Cruse (who was then working on Crisis

of the Negro Intellectual, 1967), Tom Dent, Rosa Guy, Joe Johnson, LeRoi Jones, and Sarah

Wright, among others. On Guard was active in a famous protest at the United Nations of the

American-sponsored Bay of Pigs Cuban invasion and was active in support of the Congolese

liberation leader Patrice Lumumba. From On Guard, Dent, Johnson, and Walcott along with

Hernton, Henderson, and Touré established Umbra.

Another formation of Black writers at that time was the Harlem Writers Guild, led by John O.

Killens, which included Maya Angelou, Jean Carey Bond, Rosa Guy, and Sarah Wright among

others. But the Harlem Writers Guild focused on prose, primarily fiction, which did not have the

mass appeal of poetry performed in the dynamic vernacular of the time. Poems could be built

around anthems, chants, and political slogans, and thereby used in organizing work, which was

not generally the case with novels and short stories. Moreover, the poets could and did publish

themselves, whereas greater resources were needed to publish fiction. That Umbra was primarily

poetry- and performance-oriented established a significant and classic characteristic of the

movement's aesthetics.

When Umbra split up, some members, led by Askia Touré and Al Haynes, moved to Harlem in

late 1964 and formed the nationalist-oriented "Uptown Writers Movement," which included

poets Yusef Rahman, Keorapetse "Willie" Kgositsile from South Africa, and Larry Neal.



Accompanied by young "New Music" musicians, they performed poetry all over Harlem.

Members of this group joined LeRoi Jones in founding BARTS.

Jones's move to Harlem was short-lived. In December 1965 he returned to his home, Newark

(N.J.), and left BARTS in serious disarray. BARTS failed but the Black Arts center concept was

irrepressible mainly because the Black Arts movement was so closely aligned with the then-

burgeoning Black Power movement.

The mid- to late 1960s was a period of intense revolutionary ferment. Beginning in 1964,

rebellions in Harlem and Rochester, New York, initiated four years of long hot summers. Watts,

Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, and many other cities went up in flames, culminating in nationwide

explosions of resentment and anger following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s April 1968 assassination.

In his seminal 1965 poem "Black Art," which quickly became the major poetic manifesto of the

Black Arts literary movement, Jones declaimed "we want poems that kill." He was not simply

speaking metaphorically. During that period armed self-defense and slogans such as "Arm

yourself or harm yourself' established a social climate that promoted confrontation with the white

power structure, especially the police (e.g., "Off the pigs"). Indeed, Amiri Baraka (Jones changed

his name in 1967) had been arrested and convicted (later overturned on appeal) on a gun

possession charge during the 1967 Newark rebellion. Additionally, armed struggle was widely

viewed as not only a legitimate, but often as the only effective means of liberation. Black Arts'

dynamism, impact, and effectiveness are a direct result of its partisan nature and advocacy of

artistic and political freedom "by any means necessary." America had never experienced such a

militant artistic movement.

Nathan Hare, the author of The Black Anglo-Saxons (1965), was the founder of 1960s Black

Studies. Expelled from Howard University, Hare moved to San Francisco State University where

the battle to establish a Black Studies department was waged during a five-month strike during

the 1968-1969 school year. As with the establishment of Black Arts, which included a range of

forces, there was broad activity in the Bay Area around Black Studies, including efforts led by

poet and professor Sarah Webster Fabio at Merrit College.

The initial thrust of Black Arts ideological development came from the Revolutionary Action

Movement (RAM), a national organization with a strong presence in New York City. Both Touré

and Neal were members of RAM. After RAM, the major ideological force shaping the Black

Arts movement was the US (as opposed to "them') organization led by Maulana Karenga. Also

ideologically important was Elijah Muhammad's Chicago-based Nation of Islam.

These three formations provided both style and ideological direction for Black Arts artists,

including those who were not members of these or any other political organization. Although the

Black Arts movement is often considered a New York-based movement, two of its three major

forces were located outside New York City.

As the movement matured, the two major locations of Black Arts' ideological leadership,

particularly for literary work, were California's Bay Area because of the Journal of Black Poetry

and the Black Scholar, and the Chicago-Detroit axis because of Negro Digest/Black World and



Third World Press in Chicago, and Broadside Press and Naomi Long Madgett's Lotus Press in

Detroit. The only major Black Arts literary publications to come out of New York were the

short-lived (six issues between 1969 and 1972) Black Theatre magazine published by the New

Lafayette Theatre and Black Dialogue, which had actually started in San Francisco (1964-1968)

and relocated to New York (1969-1972).

In 1967 LeRoi Jones visited Karenga in Los Angeles and became an advocate of Karenga's

philosophy of Kawaida. Kawaida, which produced the "Nguzo Saba" (seven principles),

Kwanzaa, and an emphasis on African names, was a multifaceted, categorized activist

philosophy. Jones also met Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver and worked with a number of the

founding members of the Black Panthers. Additionally, Askia Touré was a visiting professor at

San Francisco State and was to become a leading (and longlasting) poet as well as, arguably, the

most influential poet-professor in the Black Arts movement. Playwright Ed Bullins and poet

Marvin X had established Black Arts West, and Dingane Joe Goncalves had founded the Journal

of Black Poetry (1966). This grouping of Ed Bullins, Dingane Joe Goncalves, LeRoi Jones,

Sonia Sanchez, Askia M. Touré, and Marvin X became a major nucleus of Black Arts leadership.

Theory and Practice. The two hallmarks of Black Arts activity were the development of Black

theater groups and Black poetry performances and journals, and both had close ties to

community organizations and issues. Black theaters served as the focus of poetry, dance, and

music performances in addition to formal and ritual drama. Black theaters were also venues for

community meetings, lectures, study groups, and film screenings. The summer of 1968 issue of

Drama Review, a special on Black theater edited by Ed Bullins, literally became a Black Arts

textbook that featured essays and plays by most of the major movers: Larry Neal, Ben Caldwell,

LeRoi Jones, Jimmy Garrett, John O'Neal, Sonia Sanchez, Marvin X, Ron Milner, Woodie King,

Jr., Bill Gunn, Ed Bullins, and Adam David Miller. Black Arts theater proudly emphasized its

activist roots and orientations in distinct, and often antagonistic, contradiction to traditional

theaters, both Black and white, which were either commercial or strictly artistic in focus.

By 1970 Black Arts theaters and cultural centers were active throughout America. The New

Lafayette Theatre (Bob Macbeth, executive director, and Ed Bullins, writer in residence) and

Barbara Ann Teer's National Black Theatre led the way in New York, Baraka's Spirit House

Movers held forth in Newark and traveled up and down the East Coast. The Organization of

Black American Culture (OBAC) and Val Grey Ward's Kuumba Theatre Company were leading

forces in Chicago, from where emerged a host of writers, artists, and musicians including the

OBAC visual artist collective whose "Wall of Respect" inspired the national community-based

public murals movement and led to the formation of Afri-Cobra (the African Commune of Bad,

Revolutionary Artists). There was David Rambeau's Concept East and Ron Milner and Woodie

King’s Black Arts Midwest, both based in Detroit. Ron Milner became the Black Arts

movement's most enduring playwright and Woodie King became its leading theater impresario

when he moved to New York City. In Los Angeles there was the Ebony Showcase, Inner City

Repertory Company, and the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles (PALSA) led by Vantile

Whitfield. In San Francisco was the aforementioned Black Arts West. BLKARTSOUTH (led by

Tom Dent and Kalamu ya Salaam) was an outgrowth of the Free Southern Theatre in New

Orleans and was instrumental in encouraging Black theater development across the south from

the Theatre of Afro Arts in Miami, Florida, to Sudan Arts Southwest in Houston, Texas, through



an organization called the Southern Black Cultural Alliance. In addition to formal Black theater

repertory companies in numerous other cities, there were literally hundreds of Black Arts

community and campus theater groups.

A major reason for the widespread dissemination and adoption of Black Arts was the

development of nationally distributed magazines that printed manifestos and critiques in addition

to offering publishing opportunities for a proliferation of young writers. Whether establishment

or independent, Black or white, most literary publications rejected Black Arts writers. The

movement's first literary expressions in the early 1960s came through two New York-based,

nationally distributed magazines, Freedomways and Liberator. Freedomways, "a journal of the

Freedom Movement," backed by leftists, was receptive to young Black writers. The more

important magazine was Dan Watts's Liberator, which openly aligned itself with both domestic

and international revolutionary movements. Many of the early writings of critical Black Arts

voices are found in Liberator. Neither of these were primarily literary journals.

The first major Black Arts literary publication was the California-based Black Dialogue (1964),

edited by Arthur A. Sheridan, Abdul Karim, Edward Spriggs, Aubrey Labrie, and Marvin

Jackmon (Marvin X). Black Dialogue was paralleled by Soulbook (1964), edited by Mamadou

Lumumba (Kenn Freeman) and Bobb Hamilton. Oakland-based Soulbook was mainly political

but included poetry in a section ironically titled "Reject Notes."

Dingane Joe Goncalves became Black Dialogue's poetry editor and, as more and more poetry

poured in, he conceived of starting the Journal of Black Poetry. Founded in San Francisco, the

first issue was a small magazine with mimeographed pages and a lithographed cover. Up through

the summer of 1975, the Journal published nineteen issues and grew to over one hundred pages.

Publishing a broad range of more than five hundred poets, its editorial policy was eclectic.

Special issues were given to guest editors who included Ahmed Alhamisi, Don L. Lee (Haki R.

Madhubuti), Clarence Major, Larry Neal, Dudley Randall, Ed Spriggs, and Askia Touré. In

addition to African Americans, African, Caribbean, Asian, and other international revolutionary

poets were presented.

Founded in 1969 by Nathan Hare and Robert Chrisman, the Black Scholar, "the first journal of

black studies and research in this country," was theoretically critical. Major African-disasporan

and African theorists were represented in its pages. In a 1995 interview Chrisman attributed

much of what exists today to the groundwork laid by the Black Arts movement:

If we had not had a Black Arts movement in the sixties we certainly wouldn't have had national

Black literary figures like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alice Walker, or Toni Morrison because much

more so than the Harlem Renaissance, in which Black artists were always on the leash of white

patrons and publishing houses, the Black Arts movement did it for itself. What you had was

Black people going out nationally, in mass, saving that we are an independent Black people and

this is what we produce.

For the publication of Black Arts creative literature, no magazine was more important than the

Chicago-based Johnson publication Negro Digest / Black World. Johnson published America's

most popular Black magazines, Jet and Ebony. Hoyt Fuller, who became the editor in 1961, was



a Black intellectual with near-encyclopedic knowledge of Black literature and seemingly

inexhaustible contacts. Because Negro Digest, a monthly, ninety-eight-page journal, was a

Johnson publication, it was sold on newsstands nationwide. Originally patterned on Reader’s

Digest, Negro Digest changed its name to Black World in 1970, indicative of Fuller’s view that

the magazine ought to be a voice for Black people everywhere. The name change also reflected

the widespread rejection of "Negro" and the adoption of "Black" as the designation of choice for

people of African descent and to indicate identification with both the diaspora and Africa. The

legitimation of "Black" and "African" is another enduring legacy of the Black Arts movement.

Negro Digest / Black World published both a high volume and an impressive range of poetry,

fiction, criticism, drama, reviews, reportage, and theoretical articles. A consistent highlight was

Fuller's perceptive column Perspectives ("Notes on books, writers, artists and the arts") which

informed readers of new publications, upcoming cultural events and conferences, and also

provided succinct coverage of major literary developments. Fuller produced annual poetry,

drama, and fiction issues, sponsored literary contests, and gave out literary awards. Fuller

published a variety of viewpoints but always insisted on editorial excellence and thus made

Negro Digest / Black World a first-rate literary publication. Johnson decided to cease publication

of Black World in April 1976: allegedly in response to a threatened withdrawal of advertisement

from all of Johnson's publications because of pro-Palestinian/anti-Zionist articles in Black World.

The two major Black Arts presses were poet Dudley Randall's Broadside Press in Detroit and

Haki Madhubuti's Third World Press in Chicago. From a literary standpoint, Broadside Press,

which concentrated almost exclusively on poetry, was by far the more important. Founded in

1965, Broadside published more than four hundred poets in more than one hundred books or

recordings and was singularly responsible for presenting older Black poets (Gwendolyn Brooks,

Sterling A. Brown, and Margaret Walker) to a new audience and introducing emerging poets

(Nikki Giovanni, Etheridge Knight, Don L. Lee/Haki Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez) who

would go on to become major voices for the movement. In 1976, strapped by economic

restrictions and with a severely overworked and overwhelmed three-person staff, Broadside

Press went into serious decline. Although it functions mainly on its back catalog, Broadside

Press is still alive.

While a number of poets (e.g., Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, and Sonia

Sanchez), playwrights (e.g., Ed Bullins and Ron Milner), and spoken-word artists (e.g., the Last

Poets and Gil Scott-Heron, both of whom were extremely popular and influential although often

overlooked by literary critics) are indelibly associated with the Black Arts movement, rather than

focusing on their individual work, one gets a much stronger and much more accurate impression

of the movement by reading seven anthologies focusing on the 1960s and the 1970s.

Black Fire (1968), edited by Baraka and Neal, is a massive collection of essays, poetry, fiction,

and drama featuring the first wave of Black Arts writers and thinkers. Because of its impressive

breadth, Black Fire stands as a definitive movement anthology.

For Malcolm X, Poems on the Life and the Death of Malcolm X (1969), edited by Dudley

Randall and Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs, demonstrates the political thrust of the movement



and the specific influence of Malcolm X. There is no comparable anthology in American poetry

that focuses on a political figure as poetic inspiration.

The Black Woman (1970), edited by Toni Cade Bambara, is the first major Black feminist

anthology and features work by Jean Bond, Nikki Giovanni, Abbey Lincoln, Audre Lorde, Paule

Marshall, Gwen Patton, Pat Robinson, Alice Walker, Shirley Williams, and others.

Edited by Addison Gayle, Jr., The Black Aesthetic (1971) is significant because it both articulates

and contextualizes Black Arts theory. The work of writers such as Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du

Bois, Langston Hughes, and J. A. Rogers showcases the movement's roots in an earlier era into

sections on theory, music, fiction, poetry, and drama, Gayle's seminal anthology features a broad

array of writers who are regarded as the chief Black Arts theorists-practitioners.

Stephen Henderson's Understanding the New Black Poetry (1972) is important not only because

of the poets included but also because of Henderson's insightful and unparalleled sixty-seven

page overview. This is the movement's most thorough exposition of a Black poetic aesthetic.

Insights and lines of thought now taken for granted were first articulated in a critical and formal

context by Stephen Henderson, who proposed a totally innovative reading of Black poetics.

New Black Voices (1972), edited by Abraham Chapman, is significant because its focus is

specifically on the emerging voices in addition to new work by established voices who were

active in the Black Arts movement. Unlike most anthologies, which overlook the South, New

Black Voices is geographically representative and includes lively pro and con articles side by

side debating aesthetic and political theory.

The seventh book, Eugene Redmond's Drumvoices, The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A

Critical History (1976), is a surprisingly thorough survey that has been unjustly neglected.

Although some of his opinions are controversial (note that in the movement controversy was

normal), Redmond's era by era and city by city cataloging of literary collectives as well as

individual writers offers an invaluable service in detailing the movement's national scope.

The Movement's Breakup. The decline of the Black Arts movement began in 1974 when the

Black Power movement was disrupted and co-opted. Black political organizations were hounded,

disrupted, and defeated by repressive government measures, such as Cointelpro and IRS probes.

Black Studies activist leadership was gutted and replaced by academicians and trained

administrators who were unreceptive, if not outright opposed, to the movements political

orientation.

Key internal events in the disruption were the split between nationalists and Marxists in the

African Liberation Support Committee (May 1974), the Sixth Pan African Congress in Tanzania

where race-based struggle was repudiated/denounced by most of the strongest forces in Africa

(Aug. 1974), and Baraka’s national organization, the Congress of Afrikan People (CAP),

officially changing from a "Pan Afrikan Nationalist" to a "Marxist Leninist" organization (Oct.

1974).



As the movement reeled from the combination of external and internal disruption,

commercialization and capitalist co-option delivered the coup de grace. President Richard

Nixon's strategy of pushing Black capitalism as a response to Black Power epitomized

mainstream co-option. As major film, record, book, and magazine publishers identified the most

salable artists, the Black Arts movement's already fragile independent economic base was totally

undermined.

In an overwhelmingly successful effort to capitalize on the upsurge of interest in the feminist

movement, establishment presses focused particular attention on the work of Black women

writers. Although issues of sexism had been widely and hotly debated within movement

publications and organizations, the initiative passed from Black Arts back to the establishment.

Emblematic of the establishment overtaking (some would argue "co-opting") Black Arts activity

is Ntozake Shange's for colored girls, which in 1976 ended up on Broadway produced by Joseph

Papp even though it had been workshopped at Woodie King's New Federal Theatre of the Henry

Street Settlement on the Lower East Side. Black Arts was not able to match the economic and

publicity offers tendered by establishment concerns.

Corporate America (both the commercial sector and the academic sector) once again selected

and propagated one or two handpicked Black writers. During the height of Black Arts activity,

each community had a coterie of writers and there were publishing outlets for hundreds, but once

the mainstream regained control, Black artists were tokenized. Although Black Arts activity

continued into the early 1980s, by 1976, the year of what Gil Scott-Heron called the "Buy-

Centennial," the movement was without any sustainable and effective political or economic

bases in an economically strapped Black community. An additional complicating factor was the

economic recession, resulting from the oil crisis, which the Black community experienced as a

depression. Simultaneously, philanthropic foundations only funded non-threatening, "arts

oriented" groups. Neither the Black Arts nor the Black Power movements ever recovered.

The Legacy. In addition to advocating political engagement and independent publishing, the

Black Arts movement was innovative in its use of language. Speech (particularly, but not

exclusively, Black English), music, and performance were major elements of Black Arts

literature. Black Arts aesthetics emphasized orality, which includes the ritual use of call and

response both within the body of the work itself as well as between artist and audience. This

same orientation is apparent in rap music and 1990s "performance poetry" (e.g., Nuyorican Poets

and poetry slams).

While right-wing trends attempt to push America's cultural clock back to the 1950s, Black Arts

continues to evidence resiliency in the Black community and among other marginalized sectors.

When people encounter the Black Arts movement, they are delighted and inspired by the most

audacious, prolific, and socially engaged literary movement in America's history.

From The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.

Copyright © 1997 by Oxford UP.



Reginald Martin

Background. A central problem in the paradigmatic development of art and literary "history"

has always been whose ideas of art and literature will be empowered and, thus, whose ideas will

be used to judge what is "good" or "bad" art. The question of who empowers and validates

certain literary critical trends is beyond the scope of my inquiry here. But such battles are

historically frequent in the sometimes purposely stagnated progression of art "theory." The

problems that the progenitors of the Black Arts Movement faced were merely synecdochal of the

many traditional and frequent battles in art and literary history fought to decide whose ideas will

be censored and whose ideas will be validated and propagated. In other words, stipulative

skirmishes have always been fought within the larger battleground of general censorship to

decide whose ideas will be codified as a part of the taught canon of art history and criticism. The

trials of museum director Dennis Barrie in Cincinnati in the Mapplethorpe controversy and the

rap group 2 Live Crew (Luther Campbell, Mark Ross, Christopher Wongwon) in Florida are

other similar and related skirmishes. Those whose art triumphs over others' art know that the

spoils of that war are certificates of deposit and cold hard cash, not whether one songwriter's

love-making lyrics are more acceptable than another's, nor whether nude heterosexual images

should preclude nude homosexual images.

History and Development. The precursors to what is now called the Black Arts Movement (ca.

1962-1971) are many and interwoven. One could reasonably argue that there had been a call for

a separate black letters in the American literary mainstream since Frederick Douglass's "What

the Negro Wants" (1868). But the literary events that took place in the 1960s, influenced by

social events from the 1950s and 1960s, overshadowed all work in black letters that had gone on

before.

During this volatile period, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) wrote in his essay "The Myth of a

'Negro Literature’" (1962) that "a Negro literature, to be a legitimate product of the Negro

experience in America, must get at that experience in exactly the terms America has proposed for

it in its most ruthless identity," and that the Negro, as an element of American culture, was

"completely misunderstood by Americans." In discussing why, in his opinion, there was so little

black literature of merit, Jones wrote,

... in most cases the Negroes who found themselves in a position to pursue some art, especially

the art of literature, have been members of the Negro middle class, a group that has always gone

out of its way to cultivate any mediocrity, as long as that mediocrity was guaranteed to prove to

America, and recently to the world at large, that they were not really who they were, ie.,

Negroes.

Further, Jones wrote that as long as the Negro writer was obsessed with being accepted, middle

class, he would never be able to "tell it like it is," and, thus, would always be a failure, because

America made room only for white obfuscators, not black ones. It was from such thoughts by

Jones and the thoughts of many like-minded theoreticians such as Hoyt Fuller, that the Black

Arts Movement (BAM) took its origins.



In 1969, during his black nationalist period, Baraka laid concrete boundaries for a "nationalistic

art." Baraka wrote in "nationalism vs. Pimpart":

The Art is the National Spirit. That manifestation of it. Black Art must be the Nationalist's vision

given more form and feeling, as a razor to cut away what is not central to National Liberation. To

show that which is. As a humanistic expression it is itself raised. And these are the poles, out of

which we create, to raise, or as raised.

In this difficult passage, Baraka was proposing (in typical 1960s rhetoric) specific and limited

boundaries for acceptable art. Though a writer on all aspects of the BAM, Baraka's areas of

greatest interest were the related arts of literatures and literary criticism, and it was, indeed, the

debate on the content of black letters that would fuel the heat of the BAM from 1969 to its last

official flickerings in 1974, when Baraka wrote his amazing essay "Why I Changed My

Ideology." After Baraka formally announced that he was a socialist, no longer a black nationalist,

his guidelines for "valid" black writing changed, but his new requirements, with slightly different

emphases (liberation of an classes, races, genders) and a slightly different First Cause (Monopoly

Capitalism), were as rigid as his prior requirements. And at this time, Baraka was powerful

enough to influence others to codify his vision of acceptable art.

Baraka saw certain black writers as disrupting the essential and beautiful Black Arts Movement

of the 1960s and early 1970s. Baraka called these writers "capitulationists," and says their

movement was simultaneous with and counter to the Black Arts Movement. Baraka felt that the

simultaneity was no accident. In his long essay "Afro-American Literature and the Class

Struggle" in Black American Literature Forum (Summer 1980), Baraka, for the first time, made

several strong, personal attacks on Ishmael Reed, the fiction writer and poet, and also attacked

several black female writers whom he felt fit into the capitulationist mold. And, again, Baraka

reiterated that he believes that the groundbreakers in the Black Arts Movement (among them, the

new black aesthetic literary wing, including Addison Gayle, Houston Baker, and Clarence

Major) were doing something that was new, needed, useful, and black, and those who did not

want to see such a flourishing of black expression were "appointed" to the scene to damage the

movement.

Naming Reed and Calvin Hernton as "conservatives," Baraka wrote:

Yes, the tide was so strong that even some of the "conservatives" wrote work that took the

people's side. (The metaphysical slide [sic] of the BAM [Black Arts Movement] even allowed

Reed to adopt a rebellious tone with his "Black power poem" and "sermonette" in catechism of d

neoamerican hoodoo church, 1970, in which he saw the struggle of Blacks against national

oppression as a struggle between two churches: e.g., "may the best church win. shake hands now

and come/out-conjuring." But even during the heat and heart of the DAM, Reed would call that

very upsurge and the BAM "a goon squad aesthetic" and say that the revolutionary writers were

"fascists" or that the taking up of African culture by Black artists indicated such artists were

"tribalists."

Much of the labeling of Reed as a conservative and a "house nigger" began with the publication

of The Last Days of Louisiana Red, in which a group of characters Reed labeled as "moochers"



loiter around Ed Yellings, a small black business owner who is making active efforts to earn a

living and who, through practicing voodoo, finds a cure for cancer. Critics interpreted "the

moochers" as being stipulative of some of the BAM group. Supposedly, The Last Days of

Louisiana Red contains autocratic figures who do little more than emphasize Reed's definition of

moochers, and who continually reenact negative, black stereotypes. Ed Yellings, the industrious

black, is killed by black moocher conspirators. Does this mean blacks will turn against what

Reed believes to be the good in their own communities? Ed Yellings is a business and property

owner. Baraka wrote,

Ishmael Reed and Stanley Crouch both make the same kind of rah-rah speeches for the Black

middle class. Reed, in fact, says that those of us who uphold Black working people are

backwards ... Focus on the middle class, the property owners and music teachers, not the black

masses (Ralph) Ellison tells us. This is the Roots crowd giving us a history of the BLM [Black

Liberation Movement] as a rags-to-riches, Horatio Alger tale in brownface, going off into the

sunset and straight for Carter's cabinet or the National Book Award....

Baraka also set up a dichotomy for a "white arts movement" and a "black arts movement," but

while defining the two--one would assume toward the end of endorsing one or the other--Baraka

shows only the failings of each and discusses his points of divergence from the "Black Aesthetic

Crowd."

In Baraka's dichotomy, the "white aesthetic is bourgeois art--like the 'national interests' of the

U.S. at this late date when the U.S. is an imperialistic superpower." Immediately following this

passage, Baraka seemed to defend the black aesthetic group over Ellison's negative criticism of

them. Baraka wrote that Ellison said of the black aesthetic crowd that they "buy the idea of total

cultural separation between blacks and whites, suggesting that we've been left out of the

mainstream. But when we examine American music and literature in terms of its themes,

symbolism, rhythms, tonalities, idioms, and images it is obvious that those rejected 'Negroes'

have been a vital part of the mainstream and were from the beginning." Baraka responded, "We

know we have been exploited, Mr. Ralph, sir; what we's arguing about is that we's been

exploited! To use us is the term of stay in this joint. . . ." Baraka's point is that it makes no

difference if the corrupt personage is black; the issue is still corruption, and it is a double insult

to the oppressed when that corrupt person turns out to be black. But it is at that point that Baraka

separated himself from others in the new black aesthetic movement:

Where I differ with the bourgeois nationalists who are identified with the "Black Aesthetic" is

illuminated by a statement of Addison Gayle's: "An aesthetic based upon economic and class

determinism is one which has minimal value for Black people. For Black writers and critics the

starting point must be the proposition that the history of Black people in America is the history

of the struggle against racism" ("Blueprint for Black Criticism," First World, Jan.-Feb. 1977, p.

43). But what is the basis for racism; ie., exploitation because of one's physical characteristics?

Does it drop out of the sky? ... Black people suffer from national oppression: We are an

oppressed nation, a nation oppressed by U.S. imperialism. Racism is an even more demonic

aspect of this national oppression, since the oppressed nationality is identifiable anywhere as that

regardless of class.



Baraka reminded the reader that his disagreement with the new black aesthetic elite was not to

say that there was no such thing as a black aesthetic, but that his conception of a black aesthetic

manifested itself in his definition of it differently than it did for others. For him it was "a nation

within a nation" that was brought about by the "big bourgeoisie on Wall Street, who after the

Civil War completely dominated U.S. politics and economics, controlled the ex-planters, and

turned them into their compradors." Further, black aesthetic ideas had to be subsumed under the

larger category of the Black Arts Movement so that its ideas would be in concert with those

black ideas from drama, dance, and graphic arts.

Baraka claimed that several women writers, among them Michelle Wallace and Ntozake Shange,

like Reed, had their own "Hollywood" aesthetic, one of "capitulation" and "garbage." Toward the

end of his article, Baraka said that the "main line" of his argument bad been that "class struggle

is as much a part of the arts as it is any place else." His pleas and support were reserved for those

artists who were "struggle oriented," those who were trying to "get even clearer on the meaning

of class stand, attitude, audience, and study, and their relationship to our work."

And, thus, Baraka's argument is epanaleptic, as it turns back for support upon the same core of

arguments of the other black aestheticians with whom he has said he is in disagreement; those

arguments form a complete circle with Baraka's stated premise that black literature, black art

must do something materially positive to help black people. Art must be socially functional.

The heat and heart really left the BAM after Baraka changed from black nationalist to

Leninist/Socialist (1974) and after the death of Hoyt Fuller (1971). Baraka was by far the

strongest voice in the movement, and when he changed his ideas and said that before he had been

absolutely wrong about his views on black art and that now his Leninist/Marxist vision was

absolutely correct, many of his adherents lost faith. The basic tenets of the movement included

the ideas that art by black Americans could never be accepted by white Americans, and separate

criteria needed to be developed by black artists to appraise properly the talent of black artists.

Also, all art should be toward a political/humanistic end that would elevate all people--but

especially black people--to a higher consciousness and a better life. In a retrospective on this

artist/censor exchange, W. Lawrence Hogue wrote in "Literary Production: A Silence in Afro-

American Critical Practice" from his book Discourse and the Other: The Production of the Afro-

American Literary Text (1986) that the writers of the BAM:

in using literature to further their political ends ... understand the political function of literature.

Their strategy is to promote those Afro-American texts that present an aesthetic theory of

literature. But that strategy is silent completely on how established literary institutions and

apparatuses, throughout American literary history, have affected the production of Afro-

American literature. . . . Of course, such a discussion would cause these black aestheticians to

confront openly the ideological nature and function, and therefore the constraints and exclusions,

of their own cultural nationalist critical practices.

Thus, at least in theoretical discussion, an expansive, stylistically, thematically, and racially

absorptive and syncretic "aesthetic" would put itself arguably above what Hogue calls the

"nationalistic criteria" of the BAM regimen. In theory, a racially syncretic aesthetic would even

absorb any facets of the BAM platform it could find useful, transform them, an produce new



"discursive formations" (Foucault) that helped to explain itself or explain any kind of art text it

chose. It is partly the syncretic idea that the proponents of the BAM fought against. For them, the

only way to artistic purity was through separation from the mainstream.

Most recently, Baraka has reassessed Leninist/Marxist theory as an applicable filter for African-

American literature. He now finds that, while perhaps a Leninist/Marxist grid is not the best way

to assess and form the black arts, he still feels that at the root of any authentic black art endeavor

must be the love of black people and the love of self-affirmation.

From The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States. New York: Oxford UP,

1995. Copyright © 1995 by Oxford UP

Return to The Black Arts Movement

Furious Flower: African American Poetry,

An Overview--by Joanne V. Gabbin

The time

cracks into furious flower. Lifts its face

all unashamed. And sways in wicked grace.

-Gwendolyn Brooks

African American poetry is the aesthetic chronicle of a race, as Gwendolyn Brooks expresses it,

struggling to lift "its face all unashamed" in an alien land. From the earliest attempts of African

American poets in the eighteenth century to express lyrically their adjustment to existence in a

society that debated their humanity to their intense exploration of their voice in the waning years

of a racially charged twentieth century, they have built an aesthetic tradition that affirms them,

using a language and literary models adapted to meet their cultural purposes. From the very

beginning these poets had a challenging, often agonizing, set of problems: the selection of

subject matter, themes, and forms to express their thoughts and feelings; the cultivation of a

voice expressive of their racial consciousness; the reception of the desired audience; the support

of a publishing and critical infrastructure; the nature of their relationship with other literary

traditions; and the identification of the anima and purpose of their literary efforts. In essence,

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/blackarts/blackarts.htm

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African American poetry is metaphorically the "furious flower" of Gwendolyn Brooks' poem

"The Second Sermon on the Warpland" (1968), pointing to two significant intertwining

developments: one radical and the other aesthetic.

When Lucy Terry wrote "Bars Flight" (1746), the first poem written by an African in America,

she set in motion a poetic tradition characterized by the furious pursuit of liberation in all of its

dimensions as well as the cultivation of a cultural voice authenticated by its own distinctive oral

forms and remembered, communal values. Speaking of this first development, Stephen

Henderson in his seminal work Understanding the New Black Poetry (1972) writes that the idea

of liberation permeated African American literary consciousness from slavery to the tumultuous

1960s, when poets reflected widespread disenchantment with white middle-class values and

embraced cultural values emanating from Africa and the African diaspora. From Jupiter

Hammon to Kevin Powell the idea of liberation has informed and energized African American

poetry. African American poets have been creators and critics of social values as they envisioned

a world of justice and equality. Nineteenth-century poets voiced the slaves' complaint in the

abolitionist struggle and rallied the troops in the cause of emancipation and freedom. African

American poets in the twentieth century continued to rail against the status quo and protested

attitudes and institutions that stood to impede the civil rights movement that changed the nature

of American society. As these poets reflected African American concerns in the context of a

larger American culture, they created a body of poetry that grew out of folk roots; legitimized

poetry as a performative, participatory activity, and succeeded in creating an aesthetic tradition

defined by communal values, the primacy of musicality and improvisation, and inventive style.

Roots in Liberation

The fertile soil of American Wesleyanism and the revolutionary fervor for liberty that

culminated in the American Revolution animated the poetic impulse in Jupiter Hammon and

Phillis Wheatley. Hammon, the first African American to publish a poem, "An Evening

Thought" (1761), longed for salvation from this world and acquiesced to enslavement on earth.

Phillis Wheatley, the precocious servant of the Wheatleys of Boston, wrote her earliest verse as a

mere adolescent in the late 1760s. She chose subjects that reflected her comfortable and

privileged position and her absorption of a New England education which emphasized the

reading of the Bible and the classics. Her first volume of poems entitled Poems on Various

Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) contained occasional poems eulogizing notable figures and

celebrating significant events such as George Washington's appointment as commander of the

Continental Army. Phillis Wheatley, kidnapped at the age of seven, brought to America in a

slave ship and sold in 1761, noted as the "Sable Muse" of Boston whose fame spread to England,

aware of her own fortunate status in contrast to the lot of impoverished blacks in Boston's ghetto,

did not commit any of these subjects to poetry. Her own condemnation of slavery and censure of

so-called "Christian" slaveholders and the joys and sorrows associated with her marriage and the

birth of her children are preserved only in personal letters. Whether out of a sense of Christian

humility or a preference for personal detachment taught by neoclassical conventions, she alluded

to her own experience only on rare occasions. More pronounced, however, in her poems, as well

as Hammon's, are the issues of religious devotedness, patriotism and liberation which were not

generally clouded by the unsettling moral issues of slavery and universal equality.



It would be more than fifty years before George Moses Horton made slavery the major subject of

his poems. With The Hope of Liberty (1829), Horton staked his personal freedom on the fruits of

his pen; however, the book failed to raise the money needed to buy his freedom. He would not

realize his goal until 1865 when the Union Army freed him. Horton, who delighted the university

students at Chapel Hill with his humorous and witty jingles and parlayed his art into a money-

making enterprise, found liberty a less than lucrative subject matter. However, when Frances

Ellen Watkins Harper, the popular abolitionist orator and poet, published her Poems on

Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), she found its reception enthusiastic. The volume, which included

poems on the tragic circumstances of slavery, went through twenty editions by 1874.

Other nineteenth-century African American poets anticipated Paul Laurence Dunbar's question

concerning "why the caged bird sings." James Monroe Whitfield appears to speak for several of

his contemporaries when he has the speaker in "The Misanthropist" say, "In vain thou bid'st me

strike the lyre,/and sing a song of mirth and glee." For Whitfield, James Madison Bell and

Alberry A. Whitman, the thoughts that troubled their mind -- the evils of slavery, the hope of

freedom, struggles with oppression and violence -- were frought "with gloom and darkness, woe

and pain." These poets continued the tradition of protest begun by Horton. However, James

Campbell and Daniel Webster Davis made mirth their dominant lyric and wrote dialect poems

that mimicked the stereotypes of the popular plantation tradition. Other poets like Ann Plato and

Henrietta Ray took the route of romantic escapism.

With the publication of Oak and Ivy in 1893, Paul Laurence Dunbar inaugurated a new era in

African American literary expression, revealing himself as one of the finest lyricists America had

produced. His second book Majors and Minors (1895) attracted the favorable attention and

endorsement of the literary critic William Dean Howells. Howells's now classic introduction of

Dunbar's third volume of poems, Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), became the quintessential literary

piece of damning praise that elevated Dunbar's dialect poems above his poems written in

standard English. It ensured his acceptance and popularity among an audience of white readers

who were warmed by the good cheer of the hearthside and comforted by the aura of pastoral

contentment, hallmarks of Dunbar's bucolic verse. His obligatory mimicking of the plantation

tradition conventions popularized by Irwin Russell, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Nelson

Page resulted in a perpetuation of these conventions. However, there was no denying for many

the immense popularity, freshness, humor, and catchy rhythms of his memorable dialect poems.

Nonetheless, Dunbar's meteoric rise to fame did not accommodate a thorough and broad

appreciation of the other side of his genius displayed in his non-dialect poems. Tragically, the

young poet lived a scant ten years after the publication of Lyrics of Lowly Life, years that were

filled with regret that the world had ignored his deeper notes "to praise a jingle in a broken

tongue."

The turn of the century witnessed African American poets adopting popular literary traditions

and with varied and eclectic approaches joining other poets as the "new" American poetry burst

upon the scene. Poets such as Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Amy Lowell,

Hilda Doolittle, and Robert Frost ushered in a respect for ordinary speech, freedom of choice in

subject matter, concentration on vers libre and imagism, an unembarrassed celebration of

American culture, and irreverent experimentation. African American poets were influenced by

these experiments with local color, regionalism, realism, and naturalism and joined other



American poets in a mutual rejection of sentimentality, didacticism, romantic escape, and poetic

diction.

Several African American women nurtured their poetic talent in this atmosphere of literary

freedom. Angelina Weld Grimké wrote lush lyrics on nature and love. Using conventional forms,

Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson explored a woman's heart in ways considered less than

conventional by an audience gradually emerging from Victorianism. Anne Spencer, never as

celebrated as her prodigious talent warranted, achieved precision in her imagery and great depth

of emotion. Unlike Spencer, who lived quietly in Lynchburg, Virginia, Georgia Douglas Johnson

was at the hub of Washington's literary circle and, with the encouragement of several literary

luminaries, published three volumes of poems. However, as was the circumstance of African

American women poets during the first three decades of the twentieth century, her limited

exposure and promotion diminished her critical reception.

This was not, however, the case for Benjamin Brawley and William Stanley Braithwaite,

nationally known scholars who also wrote poetry. Benjamin Brawley was a minor genteel poet

but a major scholar who wrote several pioneering anthologies including The Negro in Literature

and Art (1918) and Early Negro American Writers (1935), which remains an important study of

writers who published from 1761 to 1900. William Stanley Braithwaite, like Brawley, wrote a

genteel, non-racial poetry, reminiscent of British Romantic poets. In 1913 he initiated his annual

edition of the Anthology of Magazine Verse which chronicled the outpouring of American poetry

for several decades.

Two poets, however, hinted at the emergence of robust, militant racial poetry and tended seeds

that were political and aesthetic. Fenton Johnson struck a note of despair and pessimism much

like Edgar Lee Masters's and Carl Sandburg's and prophetically envisioned what black urban life

would become after its euphoric beginnings. W.E.B. DuBois, whose intellectual contribution to

American political and historical thought, sociological and cultural inquiry, journalism and

imaginative literature towers over the century's best minds, wrote little poetry. However, his

most anthologized piece, "A Litany of Atlanta," written in response to the Atlanta riot of 1906 is

representative and provides a bridge for the strains of protest prevalent in both the 1800s and the

1900s.

New Negro Renaissance

By the 1920s it was clear that an unprecedented flowering of literary expression was in full

bloom. Called alternately the New Negro Renaissance and the Harlem Renaissance, this literary

movement, according to Alain Locke, its major promoter and interpreter, was the first

opportunity for group expression and self-determination. As Locke pointed out in The New

Negro (1925), the old attitudes of self-pity and apology were replaced by a frank acceptance of

the position of African Americans in American society. A growing racial awareness among

African American writers prompted self-discovery -- discovery of the ancestral past in Africa,

discovery of folk and cultural roots reaching back into colonial times, and discovery of a new

kind of militancy, self-determination and self-reliance. Langston Hughes in his famous manifesto

"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926), captures the prevailing sentiment.



We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves

without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter.

We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored

people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build

our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free

within ourselves.

Artistic freedom was the banner under which Jean Toomer created Cane (1923), one of the

masterstrokes of the New Negro Renaissance. An unprecedented collection which combined

poetry and prose with experimental verve, it was also Toomer's revelation piece, an unrestrained

release of racial celebration. His poems in this volume are alive with the pine-scented landscape

of Georgia and capture the mysterious and illusive beauty of folk spiritualism.

Unlike Toomer, Claude McKay, the first and most radical voice to emerge in the 1920s,

personified the tensions and contradictions lived by those too conflicted by racial anomalies to

celebrate. With the publication of Harlem Shadow (1922), he became the poet that best

expressed their rage and anger and newfound militancy. The popular "If We Must Die,"

"Baptism," "To the White Fiends" expressed emotions chafing to be exposed. According to Alain

Locke, McKay "pulled the psychological cloak off the Negro and revealed even to the Negro

himself, those facts disguised till then by his shrewd protective mimicry or pressed down under

the dramatic mask of living up to what was expected of him." Ironically, McKay was

uncomfortable as a spokesman for the black race, for he saw his poems speaking to the

individual soul of all people.

In the midst of the New Negro Renaissance the issue of choice of subject matter was debated by

the literary lights of the period: Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Claude McKay, James

Weldon Johnson, Arna Bontemps, Jessie Fauset, among many others. However, Countee Cullen,

perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, agonized over the issue (freedom in choice of

subject matter, delineation of character, decorum and representativeness of portrayal, and the

bearing race should have on art). The most learned African American poet to emerge in this era,

Countee Cullen demonstrated his enormous talent in his first book entitled Color (1925). At the

young age of twenty-two, Cullen became the most famous and most quoted African American

writer at the time.

Cullen became assistant editor of Opportunity in 1926 and inaugurated his "A Dark Tower"

columns; shortly thereafter he responded to the NAACP questionnaire feature entitled "The

Negro in Art - How Shall He Be Portrayed - A Symposium," which ran in The Crisis in 1926 and

1927. He made it clear that he would not "vote for any infringement of the author's right to tell a

story, to delineate a character, or to transcribe an emotion in his own way and in light of the truth

as he sees it." However, he was quick to add that African American artists have a duty "to create

types that are truly representative." Just a year later in what appears to be a critical reversal, he

said that African American artists should not be bound by their race or restricted to race matters

simply because they are a part of that racial group. Ironically, the poet who was recognized as

best representing the emerging New Negro resented having his poetry judged on the basis of

race. "If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET."

Langston Hughes was quick and relentless in his attack on Cullen's creed in "The Negro Artist



and the Racial Mountain" (1926). Hughes' analysis and Cullen's own fierce battle with double

consciousness coalesce in the conundrum no better expressed than in Cullen's own lines in "Yet

Do I Marvel" (1925):

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:

To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

These lines capture the essence of Cullen's highest achievement and paradoxically the confluence

of his most troubling dilemmas. It was his blackness that was at once his perceived handicap and

his greatest asset.

Cullen was one of several poets who benefited from the numerous publishing opportunities and

literary prizes available to promising writers. Under the editorship of Charles S. Johnson,

Opportunity published works by Renaissance writers and offered the Alexander Pushkin Award.

The Crisis under the leadership of editor W.E.B. DuBois and literary editor Jessie Redmond

Fauset was a showplace for literary artists and annually awarded poetry prizes for outstanding

entries. For example, Arna Bontemps' early success at writing poetry won him recognition and

prizes from both Opportunity and Crisis magazines in 1926 and 1927. Bontemps's poem "A

Black Man Talks of Reaping," which won the Crisis prize, is representative of the note of

bitterness that is a consistent tone in much Renaissance literature. It is also important to note that

these magazines were instrumental in encouraging writers like Bontemps and developing an

audience for their work.

The development of the African American poetic tradition paralleled the development of an

elaborate oral tradition that encompassed every aspect and attitude of black life, offering what

Ralph Ellison called "the first drawings of any group's character." Sterling Brown, another critic

who explored fully and consistently the inexhaustible possibilities of the folk tradition, found in

its storehouse of songs, tales, sayings and speech the originality, vitality, truthfulness and

complexity that would be his touchstones in the assessment of literature. The poetry of the

nineteenth century with its mimicry of popular stereotypes, sentimentalism and escapism would

have been found wanting if held to these standards.

However, during the early twentieth century, especially during the period known as the Harlem

Renaissance, African American poetry began to flower because of a greater exploration of the

black voice as it consciously recognized and mined the black folklore. African American poets in

varying degrees engaged in a kind of literary tropism by turning away from western cosmology

and mythology in preference for expressing their own cosmology and cultural myths. In their

attempt to find a voice expressive of their racial consciousness, they turned to cultural tropes

abounding in the universe of folk parlance. Among the African American poets who explored the

unique vernacular resources of the blues, spirituals, proverbs, tales, sayings were James Weldon

Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Sterling Brown. James Weldon Johnson played a significant role

as anthologist-critic in introducing African American poetry to the American public with The

Book of American Negro Poetry (1922). In his preface, Johnson initiates the debate on the

limitations of dialect by signaling African American writers' rejection of conventionalized dialect

associated with the minstrelsy and by calling for a form of expression that would not limit the

poet's emotional and intellectual response to black life. In some of his best poetry collected in



God's Trombones (1927), he shows his skillful treatment of the black folk sermon and his use of

racially authentic language.

Langston Hughes, indisputably the poet laureate of Harlem, was the most experimental and

versatile poet of the New Negro Renaissance, launching his career as a poet at the age of

nineteen with what has become his signature poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." Over the next

forty-six years, Hughes had as his goal to discover the flow and rhythm of black life. Authoring

more than 860 poems, he never tired of exploring the color, vibrancy, and texture of black

culture and "his" beloved people who created it. In his first two volumes of poetry, The Weary

Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927) such poems as "Lenox Avenue Midnight,"

Jazzonia," and "To a Black Dancer in the Little Savoy," recreate the jazzy, blues-tinged,

frenzied, exotic world of Harlem nights.

Hughes called himself a folk poet, and he had faith in the inexhaustible resources to be mined in

folk music and speech. He sought to combine the musical forms of the blues, work songs,

ballads, and jazz stylings with poetic expression in such a way as to preserve the originality of

the former and achieve the complexity of the latter. As Hughes' biographer Arnold Rampersad

said, Hughes' fusion of African American music into his poetry was his "key technical

commitment." Some of his critics will argue that he remained too close to the folk form to

achieve much beyond weak imitation and others considered his approach too simple and lacking

in intellectual sophistication and rigor. But for Hughes it was enough that he became the voice of

African American dreamers. In tones that ranged from poignantly conciliatory to acerbically

radical, Hughes continued to point out the great distance between the premise and the promise of

America in his last volumes Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Ask Your Mama (1961) and

The Panther and the Lash (1967) published posthumously.

Like Langston Hughes, Sterling A. Brown (1901-1989) relished his title of folk poet. As such,

Brown's most significant achievement is his subtle adaptation of folk forms to the literature.

Experimenting with the blues, spirituals, work songs, and ballads, he invented combinations that

at their best retain the ethos of folk forms and intensify the literary quality of the poetry.

In his poem "Ma Rainey," one of the finest poems in his first volume of poetry, Southern Road

(1932), Brown skillfully brings together the ballad and blues forms and, demonstrating his

inventive genius, creates the blues-ballad which is a portrait of the venerated blues singer and a

chronicle of her transforming performance. With a remarkable ear for the idiom, cadence, and

tones of folk speech, Brown absorbed its vibrant qualities in his poetry. Brown came as close as

any poet had before to achieving James Weldon Johnson's ideal of original racial poetry "capable

of voicing the deepest and highest emotions and aspirations, and allowing the widest range of

subjects and the widest scope of treatment."

The next three decades, 1930-1960, trace the continuing careers of Langston Hughes and

Sterling A. Brown and mark the ascendancy of Melvin B. Tolson, Robert Hayden, Margaret

Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks. These major voices joined a growing list of poets who brought

African American poetic expression to new heights of competence and maturity. The list

includes Sam Allen (Paul Vesey), Waring Cuney, Frank Marshall Davis, Owen Dodson, Ray

Durem, Frank Horne, and Richard Wright. These poets cultivate their individual voices by



synthesizing elements from the western literary tradition and their own vernacular tradition.

They explored history as a riveting subject matter for their poetry, and they stretched the

boundaries of language to have it hold the depth and complexity that the new poetry requires.

These poets, in keeping with the continuing development of the radical/political strain in African

American poetry, also pursued a brand of social justice that emphasized integrationalism and a

sensitivity to international connections and socialistic movements.

Melvin B. Tolson demonstrates all of these interests in his poetry. In brilliant strokes of irony

and iconoclasm, he produced Rendezvous with America (1944), Libretto for the Republic of

Liberia (1953), and Harlem Gallery (1965). Tolsonian style is a synthesis of classical imagery,

racial symbolism, and extensive historical allusions. In "Psi," one of the sections of Harlem

Gallery, Tolson describes the "Negro artist" as a "flower of the gods, whose growth is dwarfed at

an early stage." Certainly, this was not Tolson's personal complaint; for, in truth, only his critical

response was dwarfed, never his considerable gifts as a poet.

Equally gifted, Robert Hayden throughout his distinguished career as a poet held to his credo that

poets "are the keepers of a nation's conscience, the partisans of freedom and justice, even when

they eschew political involvement. By the very act of continuing to function as poets they are

affirming what is human and eternal." Hayden, like Countee Cullen, insisted that poets should

not be restricted to racial themes or any subject matter or polemic that would fetter their artistic

expression. His consistent refusal to be limited by subject matter or to be relegated to a double

standard of criticism ironically found him at odds with the white literary establishment as well as

the 1960s proponents of the Black Aesthetic and often exacted stiff penalties of critical neglect

and racial ostracism. Though Hayden never retreated from his position, two of his most

outstanding poems, "Middle Passage" (1945) and "Frederick Douglass" (1947), show his lifelong

commitment to exploring African American history and folklore. In A Ballad of Remembrance

(1962), Hayden brought together revised versions of these poems and some of the best portraits

of historical figures in American literature including "The Ballad of Nat Turner," "Runagate

Runagate," and "Homage to the Empress of the Blues." Ironically, because of the excellence of

his book, Robert Hayden, who had resisted racial categorization in judging his poetry, won The

Grand Prix de la Poesie, a prize reserved to honor the best poet of Negritude in the world.

Untroubled by a Hayden-like sensitivity to racial subject matter, Margaret Walker made the full

absorption of racial material one of her highest goals. In her most famous poem, "For My

People" she mirrors the collective soul of black folk. As W.E.B. DuBois had succeeded in

announcing the political, economic and cultural strivings of African Americans in The Souls of

Black Folk (1903), Walker accomplished a stunning psychological portrait of "her people"

during the unsettling years of Depression, and throughout the succeeding decades. As Eugenia

Collier writes the poem "melts away time and place and it unifies Black listeners," deriving its

power from "the reservoir of beliefs, values, and archetypal characters yielded by our collective

historical experience." With a verbal brilliance owing to an impressive absorption of the myths,

rituals, music, and folklore of the African American tradition, Margaret Walker shares her

cultural memories and creates new ones in For My People (1942), Prophets for a New Day

(1970) and October Journey (1972).



Another major voice, Gwendolyn Brooks, has produced some of the most outstanding poetry

written in the twentieth century. With poetry that benefits from great compression, technical

acumen, and emotional complexity, no poet lays better claim to heir of two hundred years of the

maturation of African American poetry than Gwendolyn Brooks. In 1950 Brooks won the

Pulitzer Prize for her volume of poetry Annie Allen, becoming the first African American to win

this award. In 1968 she was named Poet Laureate of Illinois, succeeding the late Carl Sandburg.

Author of more than twenty books including A Street in Bronzeville (1945), The Bean Eaters

(1960), In the Mecca (1968) and Riot (1969), she is a master at manipulating language until it

distills the pure essence of the life and character that she astutely observes in Chicago and the

world. Brooks joined other poets who were writing in the 1950s -- Owen Dodson, Sam Allen,

Ray Durem, Margaret Esse Danner, Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs -- in responding poetically

to a nation carrying the anlage of social change in its mounting civil rights movement. The year

1955 witnessed the Montgomery Bus Boycott which brought Rosa Parks and Martin Luther

King, Jr. to national prominence; it also witnessed the senseless lynching of Emmett Till, a

fourteen-year-old black boy accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. The latter

event had a profound effect on Gwendolyn Brooks and is the subject of two of her poems, "A

Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi, Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon" and

"The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till."

Furious Flower

Ten years later another event, the assassination of Malcolm X, would capture the imagination of

a group of younger poets and be the catalyst for the Black Arts Movement and the furious

flowering of African American poetry that it produced. Malcolm's ideas provided the radical,

philosophical framework for the movement. According to Larry Neal in Visions of a Liberated

Future (1989), he "touched all aspects of contemporary black nationalism." Malcolm's voice

sounded the tough urban street style, and his life became a symbol and inspiration. With his

words resonating in their consciousness, and his image inspiring a revolutionary world vision,

poets such as David Henderson, James A. Emanuel, Robert Hayden and Etheridge Knight paid

tribute to him after his death.

Three poets inspired by the example of Malcolm X emerged as the moving spirits and visionaries

of the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Larry Neal, and

Askia Muhammad Touré (Rolland Snellings). Baraka saw the movement as a revolutionary force

"to create an art, a literature that would fight for black people's liberation with as much intensity

as Malcolm X our 'Fire Prophet' and the rest of the enraged masses who took to the streets in

Birmingham after the four little girls had been murdered by the Klan and FBI, or the ones who

were dancing in the street in Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit." Baraka captures in this statement

the revolutionary fervor and commitment that led him, Larry Neal, and Askia Touré to create the

Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in Harlem, that led to the collaboration with Neal in

publishing Black Fire (1968), the seminal anthology of the period; and that guided his constant

spiritual striving toward building a black nation in America.

Out of this striving came a poetry that was emblazoned with the liberation struggle. Baraka, poet,

activist and playwright, gained a strong reputation as a poet among the avant-garde artists of

Greenwich Village during the 1950s and collected his early poetry in Preface to a Twenty-



Volume Suicide Note (1961). Since that time he has published fourteen books of poetry including

The Dead Lecturer (1964), Black Magic Poetry (1969), In Our Terribleness (1970), It's Nation

Time (1970), Spirit Reach (1972), Funk Lore (1996) and Wise Why's Y's: A Griot's Tale (1995).

His poetry is experimental, explosive, improvisational, and allied to black music, especially jazz.

Like Baraka, Larry Neal wrote poetry that had the sound and the pulsing, pumping rhythm of

black music. His early death at forty-three curtailed a brilliant career as a poet, essayist, teacher

and community activist. However, his essays, drama, and poetry have been collected in Visions

of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings (1989). "Poppa Stoppa Speaks from His

Grave" and "Don't Say Goodbye to the Porkpie Hat" are excellent examples of the hip, urbane,

jazz-digging style that was his signature.

The music of John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Theolonious Monk, and other jazz greats also

suffuses the poetry of Askia M. Touré. To a rich lyricism he adds a cosmic vision that was first

apparent in JuJu: Magic Songs for the Black Nation (with Ben Caldwell, 1970) and Songhai

(1973) and continues in From the Pyramids to the Projects (1990). His commitment to raising

the national consciousness carried over to the 1990s, when his messages challenged the

destructive forces wielding genocide both physical and mental. Reflecting on the Black Arts

Movement, Touré contends that it was "the largest cultural upsurge that our people have had in

this century and that we were organically-linked writers, activists, musicians, playwrights and

such."

Several forces converged to create the outpouring of African American poetry that has taken

place since 1960. The political and social upheavals brought about by the civil rights movement

of the 1950s and 1960s ushered in a dramatic change in the legal and social status of African

Americans. With its non-violent strategies of sit-ins, marches, freedom rides, boycotts, voter

registration drives, the movement united two generations of African American poets around the

dream of freedom and equality and supplied them with a wealth of cultural heroes including

Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Emmett Till, Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, who

became the subject matter of their poetry. The assassination of Martin Luther King inspired a

groundswell of poems from such poets as Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, Sam Allen, Quincy

Troupe, and Mari Evans. In the wake of the urban riots and fires that were the people's response

to King's martyrdom came the Black Power movement with its bold language of racial

confrontation, cultural separation, and its insistence upon self defense, self reliance, and black

pride. With their iconoclastic attacks on all aspects of white middle class values, it is not

surprising that the poets who shaped the Black Arts movement, the Black Power's cultural wing,

rejected unequivocally Western poetic conventions. Their poetic technique emphasized free

verse; typographical stylistics; irreverent, often scatological, diction; and linguistic

experimentation. In addition to Baraka, Neal and Touré, prominent among these poets were

Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, Etheridge Knight, A.B. Spellman, Calvin C.

Hernton, Mari Evans, David Henderson, June Jordan, Clarence Major, Jayne Cortez, Henry

Dumas, Carolyn M. Rodgers, and Quincy Troupe.

Following Maulana Ron Karenga's dictum that black art must be "functional, collective and

committed," these poets addressed their messages primarily to African Americans and African

people in the diaspora, and in their messages the artist and the political activist become one.



Poets such as Sam Allen, Margaret Burroughs, and Margaret Danner set out to reclaim the lost

African heritage, continuing the "literary Garveyism" that began in the 1920s. The strains of Pan

Africanism, nurtured by W.E.B. DuBois appear in the poetry of W. Keorapetse Kgositisile, an

exile from South Africa, and the confluence of African and European cultures mesh in the poetry

of West Indian poet Derek Walcott, continuing the tradition of the Negritude movement. Not

only were these poets extending their boundaries, but they were also exploring the interior spaces

of the African American identity. Henry Dumas, "whose brief life held out the promise of

brilliant and passionate writing," according to Eugene Redmond in Drumvoices (1976), studded

his poetry with raw and angry dimensions of the African American psyche. Conrad Kent Rivers,

who also died too young, was concerned with his inner world where pain, violence and

destruction only ended with death. In the hands of Lucille Clifton, Lance Jeffers, Raymond

Patterson, and Johari Amini, among others, the concept of blackness is sculpted into a composite

of courage, endurance, beauty, and stoicism - positive images for a nation reconstructing itself.

And more often than not, these poets created their own journals to disseminate their messages.

Hoyt Fuller, the influential editor of Negro Digest and Black World, edited NOMMO, the journal

of the OBAC Writers Workshop and, like Gwendolyn Brooks, had a great impact on the younger

poets as mentor and cultural guide. Tom Dent and Kalamu ya Salaam edited Nkombo, the journal

of BLKARTSOUTH, a cultural organization that grew out of the Free Southern Theater in New

Orleans. Burning Spear featured the poetry of the Howard poets such as Lance Jeffers. The

collection was an outgrowth of the Dasein Literary Society at Howard University. As The Crisis

and Opportunity magazines had stimulated artistic and intellectual activity during the New Negro

Renaissance, several journals founded during the late 1960s and 1970s increased readership for

African American poetry over the next twenty years. Notable among them are the Journal of

Black Poetry, founded by Joe Goncalves; The Black Scholar, founded by Robert Chrisman;

Black Dialogue, founded by Abdul Karim and Edward S. Spriggs; Callaloo, founded in 1974 by

Charles H. Rowell, Tom Dent and Jerry Ward; and Obsidian, founded by Alvin Aubert in 1975

with Gerald Barrax assuming the editorship in 1985. Many poets were also responsible for

establishing presses that encouraged emerging poets to publish. Haki Madhubuti's Third World

Press in Chicago, Dudley Randall's Broadside Press in Detroit, and Naomi Long Madgett's Lotus

Press became invaluable outlets for African American poetic expression.

The proliferation of the ideas and impact of the Black Arts Movement was due largely to the

formation of cultural organizations and Writers Workshops committed to encouraging African

American poets and increasing readership among an African American audience. The Umbra

Workshop first gathered in Greenwich Village and Lower East Side of New York in 1941 and

listed among its members David Henderson, Calvin C. Hernton, Tom Dent, Ishmael Reed, Askia

M. Touré, Raymond Patterson, Charles Patterson and Lorenzo Thomas. It produced the first

issue of Umbra in 1963. In Chicago, Haki Madhubuti and Walter Bradford were among the

founding members of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), which brought

together Carolyn Rodgers, Gwendolyn Brooks, Johari Amini, Sterling Plumpp, Eugene Perkins,

Ebon (Leo Thomas Hale), and Angela Jackson, among others. Zealous in carrying out the ideals

of black solidarity and empowerment, they read in schools, community centers, bars, parks, on

street corners.



Since the 1970s, these contemporary African American poets have developed a form of

communal performance art that draws heavily on what Stephen Henderson called black music

and black speech as poetic referents. The poets' work evidenced a full absorption of musical

forms such as blues and jazz, call-and-response features, improvising lines, evoking tones,

rhythm, structure of folk form, and the entire range of spoken virtuosity seen in the sermon, the

rap, the dozens, signifying, toasts, and folktales. Poets such as Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez,

Haki Madhubuti, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Askia M. Touré, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Sun

Ra, and Ted Joans discovered how to transform the printed poem into a performance that

unleashes the elegance and power of black speech and music. For example, Jayne Cortez's ability

to evoke the jazz sound of Arnette Colemen, Bessie Smith and John Coltrane in her first volume

of poetry Pisstained Stairs (1969) suggested the power that she would develop as a performance

poet. Sonia Sanchez significantly influenced the cultural landscape by the urgency of her

sustained committed voice, often rendered in her deeply spiritual chanting/singing style. Eugene

Redmond, Sarah Webster Fabio, Gil Scott-Heron, and Ted Joans are representative of those

poets who incorporate "rap," blues, jazz, and soul music in their poetry making it move with the

rhythm of contemporary beats. Nikki Giovanni achieved national popularity as she wedded her

visionary, truth-telling poetry with the sounds of gospel music in her best-selling album "Truth Is

On Its Way" in 1971. Haki Madhubuti, with his explosive, annunciatory kinetic rap style, has

been one of the most imitated poets among young artists seeking to develop a performance style.

Though much of the poetry was involved with music, orature and performance, for Alvin Aubert

the poem will have to "perform itself on the page." His poems in If Winter Come: Collected

Poems, 1967-1992 (1994), Pinkie Gordon Lane's I Never Scream: New and Selected Poems

(1985) and Naomi Long Madgett's Octavia and Other Poems (1988) illustrate a reliance upon

quieter, muted strains to enhance their poetry.

The cultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s not only changed the way African Americans

thought about their political and social status as American citizens, for the poets it also planted

the seeds for a truly liberated exploration of literary possibilities. Poets such as Lucille Clifton,

Audre Lorde, Jay Wright, and Michael S. Harper cultivated their poetic imaginations in line with

more personal and individualized goals. In An Ordinary Woman (1974), Lucille Clifton floods

her private and public identities with light, illuminating family histories and relationships in

epigrammatic flashes. Audre Lorde, during the course of a thirty-year career, struggled against

the poet's death of being "choked into silence by icy distinction." In volumes such as Coal (1973)

and The Black Unicorn (1978) she resisted categorization and definition by a narrow expectation

of her humanity by boldly exploring all of the essences of womanhood. Jay Wright's eclecticism

led him to create poetry that is a multicultural mosaic of his interest in history, anthropology,

cosmology, religion and social thought as evident in Death as History (1967). As suggested by

the title of Michael S. Harper's second book of poems, History Is Your Own Heartbeat, history is

the heartbeat of his poetry as he chronicles personal and kinship relationships and cultural

histories that link complex emotional and philosophical experiences shared by diverse ethnic

groups.

Rita Dove, acknowledging her own debt to the Black Arts Movement, said that if it had not been

for the movement, America would not be ready to accept a poet who explored a text other than

blackness. Unencumbered by a necessarily political message, Dove in her Pulitzer Prize winning

book Thomas and Beulah (1987) brings wholeness and elegance to the histories of her



grandparents. Dove, who held the post of Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 until

1995, is representative of a large accomplished group of poets who published their first poems

during the late 1970s and 1980s: Yusef Komunyakaa, Cornelius Eady, Melvin Dixon, Dolores

Kendrick, Thylias Moss, Toi Derricotte, Gloria Oden, and Sherley Anne Williams.

Elizabeth Alexander is emblematic of the promise and wide range of variegated voices that have

sprung forth during the first half of the 1990's. Her first collection, The Venus Hottentot (1990),

reveals poems that explore the interior lives of historical figures, exposing emotions and

experiences that strikingly illuminate public concerns. In a poem called "The Dark Room: An

Invocation" she hails talented young poets who make up The Dark Room Collective: Thomas

Sayers Ellis, Sharan Strange, Kevin Young, Carl Phillips and Natasha Trethewey, to name a few.

In highly individual styles, they shape metaphors and images in a fisted reading of contemporary

life. Other young poets, such as Ras Baraka, Kevin Powell, Jabari Asim and Esther Iverem, place

themselves in the tradition of struggle that they see as artistic, political, spiritual, and

psychological; they seek to revisit the ideals of the Black Arts Movement in the language of a

hip-hop nation.

In the closing decade of the twentieth century, African American poetry is again experiencing an

expansive, renewing phrase that some have termed the "Third Renaissance." This sense of

renewal was dramatically evident at the Furious Flower Conference in 1994, when the largest

gathering of poets and critics in more than two decades, met at James Madison University in

Virginia to read, discuss, and celebrate African American poetry. The conference, dedicated to

Gwendolyn Brooks, brought together three generations of poets. In doing so it symbolized the

continuity in the African American poetic expression and signaled the dimensions of its future

development. Seasoned poets who began writing in the 1960s are continuing to write with skill

and power. Sonia Sanchez's Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995) and Gerald Barrax's

Leaning Against the Sun (1992) are prime examples. Derek Walcott's Nobel Prize for Literature

in 1992, Rita Dove's appointment as Poet Laureate of the United States, and Gwendolyn Brooks'

naming by the National Endowment for the Humanities as the Jefferson Lecturer for 1994

represent the unprecedented achievement of African American poets as recipients of the nation's

highest honors. This newest renaissance is also marked by the emergence of a group of young

poets who have been published in such anthologies as In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young

Black Writers (1992), edited by Kevin Powell and Ras Baraka and On the Verge: Emerging

Poets and Artists (1993), edited by Thomas Sayers Ellis and Joseph Lease.

Just as Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "TheSecond Sermon on the Warpland" suggests "furious

flower" as a metaphor for the aesthetic chronicle of African American poetry, it also encourages

the emerging generation to bloom "in the noise and whip of the whirlwind." After 250 years of

African American poetry, these young poets are "the last of the loud," ferocious in their call for

humanism and beautiful in their response to the magic and music of language.

from The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Ed. William L. Andrews, Trudier

Harris and Frances Smith Foster. Copyright © Oxford University Press.




Documents from the Black Arts

Movement

"On Black Art"

by Ron Karenga

Black Art must be for the people, by the people and from the people. That is to say, it must be

functional, collective

and committing.

Soul is extra-scientific, that is to say, outside of science; therefore we will allow no scientific

disproof of it.

All that we do and create is based on tradition and reason, that is to say, foundation and

movement. We began to

build on a traditional [sic], but it is out of movement that we complete our creation.

Art for art's sake is an invalid concept, all art reflects the value system from which it comes.

We say inspiration is the real basis of education. In a word, images inspire us, academic

assertions bore us.

Our art is both form and feeling but more feeling than form.

Our creative motif must be revolution; all art that does not discuss or contribute to revolutionary

change is invalid.

That is [...] why the "blues" are invalid, they teach resignation, in a word, acceptance of reality--

and we have come

to change reality.

There is no better subject for Black artists than Black people, and the Black artist who doesn't

choose and develop


http://www.english.illinois.edu/_vti_bin/shtml.dll/maps/blackarts/documents.htm/map



his subject will find himself unproductive.

All art is collective and reflects the values of the people. Therefore what makes us able to

identify an artist's work

is not individuality, but personality, which is an expression of the different personal experiences

of the artist within

the Black framework.

Suppose Ray Charles had to sing Beethoven or Bach's Carols, or Miles Davis had to play in the

Philharmonic; it

wouldn't go off at all. That's why we have to have a pattern of development that is suited to our

own needs.

The truth is that which needs to be told, and true creation is that which needs to be created and

what we need to

create is Black images which speak to and inspire Black people.

We need a new language to break the linguistic straight [sic] jacket of our masters, who taught us

his language so

he could understand us, although we could hardly understand ourselves.

In terms of history, all we need at this point is heroic images; white people have enough dates for

everybody.

All education and creation is invalid unless it can benefit the maximum amount of Blacks.

Art is an expression of soul and creativity, sensitivity, and impulse is the basis.

Sensitivity, creativity and impulse are abstract to those who don't have them. There is no art in

the world you

should have to go to school to appreciate.

Borrowing does not mean you become what others are. What is important here is the choice of

what one borrows

and how he shapes it in his own images. Whites are no less white by borrowing from Black and

vice versa.

There is no such thing as art for art's sake. If that's so, why don't you lock yourself up somewhere

and paint or

write and keep it only to yourself.

The white boy's classical music is static. He values the form rather than the soul force behind the

creation. That is

why he still plays tunes written two or three hundred years ago.

All art should be the product of a creative need and desire in terms of Black people.

In Africa you won't find artists of great name because art is done by all for all.



There is no premium on art in Africa just as there is no premium on dancing in the ghetto. All

Blacks can dance.

In African art, the object was not as important as the soul force behind the creation of the object.

All art must be revolutionary and in being revolutionary it must be collective, committing, and

functional.

Whites can imitate or copy soul, but they can't create out of that context.

All nationalists believe in creativity as opposed to destruction and a nationalist must create for

the Black nation.

Black art initiates, supports and promotes change. It refuses to accept values laid down by dead

white men. It sets

its own values and re-enforces them with hard and/or soft words and sounds.

All art consciously or unconsciously represents and promotes the values of its culture.

Language and imagery must come from the peopl and be returned to the people in a beautiful

language which

everybody can easily understand.

Soul is a combination of sensitivity, creativity and impulse. It is feeling and form, body and soul,

rhythm and

movement, in a word, the essence of Blackness.

Muddy Waters and those in the same school are very deep, and so when bourgeois Negroes say

that Muddy

Waters is too deep for them, they are saying, in a word, that Muddy Waters is more down to

earth.

Reprinted from Black Theater 3, pp. 9-10.

Online Source: http://www.umich.edu/~eng499/documents/karenga1.html

"The Revolutionary Theatre"

by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

This essay was originally commissioned by the New York Times in December 1964, but was

refused, with the statement that the editors could not understand it. The Village Voice also

refused to run this essay. It was first published in Black Dialogue. --LeRoi Jones

The Revolutionary Theatre should force change, it should be change. (All their faces turned into

the lights and you work on them black nigger magic, and cleanse them at having seen the

http://www.umich.edu/~eng499/documents/karenga1.html



ugliness and if the beautiful see themselves, they will love themselves.) We are preaching virtue

again, but by that to mean NOW, what seems the most contructive uses of the world.

The Revolutionary Theatre must EXPOSE! Show up the insides of these humans, look into black

skulls. Because they have been trained to hate. The Revolutionary Theatre must hate them for

hating. For presuming with their technology to deny the supremacy of the Spirit. They will all

die because of this.

The Revolutionary Theatre must teach them their deaths. It must crack their faces open to the

mad cries of the poor. It must teach them about silence and the truths lodged there. It must kill

any God anyone names except common Sense. The Revolutionary Theatre should flush the fags

and murders out of Lincoln's face.

It should stagger through our universe correcting, insulting, preaching, spitting craziness . . . but

a craziness taught to us in our most rational moments. People must be taught to trust true

scientists (knowers, diggers, oddballs) and that the holiness of life is the constant possibility of

widening the consciousness. And they must be incited to strike back against any agency that

attempts to prevent this widening.

The Revolutionary Theatre must Accuse and Attack anything that can be accused and attacked. It

must Accuse and Attack because it is a theatre of Victims. It looks at the sky with the victims'

eyes, and moves the victims to look at the strength in their minds and their bodies.

Clay, in Dutchman, Ray, in The Toilet, Walker in The Slave are all victims. In the Western sense

they could be heroes. But the Revolutionary Theatre, even if it is Western, must be anti-Western.

It must show horrible coming attractions of The Crumbling of The West. Even as Artaud

designed The Conquest of Mexico, so we must design The Conquest of White Eye, and show the

missionaries and wiggly Liberals dying under blasts of concrete. For sound effects, wild screams

of joy, from all the peoples of the world.

The Revolutionary Theatre must take dreams and give them a reality. It must isolate the ritual

and historical cycles of reality. But it must be food for all these who need food, and daring

propaganda for the beauty of the Human Mind. But it is a political theatre, a weapon to help in

the slaughter of these dimwitted fat-bellied white guys who somehow believe that the rest of the

world is here for them to slobber on.

This should be a theatre of World Spirit. Where the spirit can be shown to be the most competent

force in the world. Force. Spirit. Feeling. The language will be anybody's, but tightened by the

poet's backbone. And even the language must show what the facts are in this consciousness epic,

what's happening. We will talk about the world, and the preciseness with which we are able to

summon the world, will be our art. Art is method. And art, "like any ashtray or senator" remains

in the world. Wittgenstein said ethics and aesthetics are one. I believe this. So the Broadway

theatre is a theatre of reaction whose ethics like its aesthetics reflects the spiritual values of this

unholy society, which sends young crackers all over the world blowing off colored peoples

heads. (In some of these flippy southern towns they even shoot up the immigrants' Favorite Son,

be it Michael Schwerner or J.F. Kennedy.)



The Revolutionary Theatre is shaped by the world, and moves to reshape the world, using as its

force the natural force and perpetual vibrations of the mind in the world. We are history and

desire, what we are, and what any experience can make us.

It is a social theatre, but all theatre is social theatre. But we will change the drawing rooms into

places where real things can be said about a real world, or into smoky rooms where the

destruction of Washington can be plotted. The Revolutionary Theatre must function like an

incendiary pencil planted in Curtis Lemay's cap. So that when the final curtain goes down brains

are splattered over the seats and the floor, and bleeding nuns must wire SOS's to Belgians with

gold teeth.

Our theatre will show victims so that their brothers in the audience will be better able to

understand that they are the brothers of victims, and that they themselves are victims, if they are

blood brothers. And what we show must cause the blood to rush, so that pre-revolutionary

temperaments will be bathed in this blood, and it will cause their deepest souls to move, and they

find themselves tensed and clenched, even ready to die, at what the soul has been taught. We will

scream and cry, murder, run through the streets in agony, if it means some soul will be moved,

moved to actual life understanding of what the world is, and what it ought to be. We are

preaching virtue and feeling, and a natural sense of the self in the world. All men live in the

world, and the world ought to be a place for them to live.

What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician, etc.) is a practical vector

from the soul. It stores all data, and can be called on to solve all our "problems." The imagination

is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as "things." Imagination (image) is all

possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, and use (idea) is possible.

And so begins that image's use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.

The popular white man's theatre like the popular white man's novel shows tired white lives, and

the problems of eating white sugar, or else it herds bigcaboosed blondes onto huge stages in

rhinestones and makes believe they are dancing or singing. WHITE BUSINESSMEN OF THE

WORLD, DO YOU WANT TO SEE PEOPLE REALLY DANCING AND SINGING??? ALL OF

YOU GO UP IN HARLEM AND GET YOURSELF KILLED. THERE WILL BE DANCING AND

SINGING, THEN, FOR REAL! (In The Slave, Walker Vessels, the black revolutionary, wears an

armband, which is the insignia of the attacking army . . . a big redlipped minstrel, grinning like

crazy.)

The liberal white man's objection to the theatre of the revolution (if he is "hip" enough) will be

on aesthetic grounds. Most white Western artists do not need to be "political," since usually,

whether they know it or not, they are in complete sympathy with the most repressive social

forces in the world today. There are more junior birdmen fascists running around the West today

disguised as Artists than there are disguised as fascists. (But then, that word, Fascist, and with it,

Fascism, has been made obsolete by the word America, and Americanism. The American Artist

usually turns out to be just a super-Bourgeois, because, finally, all he has to show for his sojourn

through the world is "better taste" than the Bourgeois . . . many times not even that.



Americans will hate the revolutionary theatre because it will be out to destroy them and whatever

they believe is real. American cops will try to close the theatres where such nakedness of the

human spirit is paraded. American producers will say the revolutionary plays are filth, usually

because they will treat human life as if it was actually happening. American directors will say

that the white guys in the plays are too abstract and cowardly ("don't get me wrong . . . I mean

aesthetically . . .") and they will be right.

The force we want is of twenty million spooks storming America with furious cries and

unstoppable weapons. We want actual explosions and actual brutality; AN EPOCH IS

CRUMBLING and we must give it the space and hugeness of its actual demise. The

Revolutionary Theatre, which is now peopled with victims, will soon begin to be peopled with

new kinds of heroes . . . not the weak Hamlets debating whether or not they are ready to die for

what's on their minds, but men and women (and minds) digging out from under a thousand years

of "high art" and weakfaced dalliance. We must make an art that will function as to call down the

actual wrath of world spirit. We are witchdoctors, and assassins, but we will open a place for the

true scientists to expand our consciousness. This is a theatre of assault. The play that will split

the heavens for us will be called THE DESTRUCTION OF AMERICA. The heroes will be Crazy

Horse, Denmark Vessey, Patrice Lumumba, but not history, not memory, not sad sentimental

groping for a warmth in our despair; these will be new men, new heroes, and their enemies most

of you who are reading this.

from Liberator, July, 1965, pp. 4-6.

Online Source: http://www.umich.edu/~eng499/documents/baraka1.html

"Black Writing is Socio-Creative Art"

by Charles H. Fuller, Jr.

What is Black writing? For some time Black writers have been asking themselves this question

in the hope that an answer would awaken a new literary renaissance, one that would free them

from the yoke of the white literary community--a community that, through its offers of reward,

has confused and clandestinely oppressed every Black writer who has tried to deal with the

problem. What is Black writing? Black writing is socio-creative art. It is a manner of self-

expression, an artistic form born directly from the collective social situation in which the Afro-

American found himself in this nation, and this nation only. It is the only art form in the world

directly related to the historical, economic, educational, and social growth and development of a

people and as such maintains a unique position in the literature of the world.

The reason for the difficulty and many of the sleepless nights has been that Black writers (who

incidentally have always known what the answer was) tried desperately to explain it in terms of

white standards and by so doing to achieve white literary celebration. But art born out of

oppression can not be explained in the terms of the unoppressed, since the condition of the

oppressor does not allow him to deal with a form that might conceivably make the oppressed his

equal. in order for him to remain in power, he must discard any creations of the oppressed people

http://www.umich.edu/~eng499/documents/baraka1.html



as valueless even though he has given them the tools to build their creation. Hence it is not

surprising for us to hear expressions like "social protest" hurled as a definition for great Black art

and discussions of the subject being attended by Black writers. What has to be done is not the

self-defeating discussions and comparisons of Black writers to their white counterparts but an

examination of what we have done for ourselves. If we continue by our discussions to assume

that what we do is any less than equal to what they (whites) have created, we will be

perpetuating the dilemma they have set in our path. A dilemma so insidious that its corrosive

effects have left many Black writers without purpose of the will to search for it. We have been

asked to believe that in order for Black

writers to become artists, they must forget who and what they are and follow in the footsteps of

white men who created work founded on the idea that the highest form of art was self-

expression. We are asked at the same time to be and not to be true to ourselves. We are asked to

get off the race issue when we are tied to it hand and foot--and simply because we are the issue.

If it is true that Black men historically and presently are in protest of a society that has denied

them entrance into theso-called mainstream by every device conceivable, then it is sheer folly to

think that they would create work that would not reflect this and an act of oppression to assume

that what they create is not art. Socio-creative art is what Black men bring into existence when

they sit down to write--indeed it corresponds directly, for us, to the meaning of art. Our lives and

our art are one in the same struggle, and to continue to accept or debate the white standards of

evaluation, nurtured by racial oppression, is to commit a kind of literary suicide.

It seems to me, and I repeat it again, the fundamental issue here is how we evaluate what we do.

We could get into a discussion about technical things, about verse structure, about the precise use

of the English language, but it would not change the issue. If we are not prepared to cast off the

trappings of the white man and his oppressive brick walls, we will commit a crime against

ourselves more heinous than his against us. We will render a whole body of literature worthless,

when in truth there is more in Hughes, Wright, Dunbar, and Jones for us than in Hemingway,

Joyce, Proust, Mann or the countless other white writers. To what in the so-called classical

literature of our times can we Black men here and now in this country relate? (For the benefit of

those who will counter the above statement with "Classical literature expresses universal

concepts, and these need no color to be understood," let me first agree with them but then

continue by saying that the physical embodiment of universal concepts such as love, hate, power,

weakness, etc. [as well as the environmental conditions that suck these

abstractions into life] is the only means by which we may know them. If white men are not

expected to relate these concepts to us because they live in the white community, how can we

possibly relate to their examples, by ignoring our ability to exhibit these qualities, perpetuate our

oppression?) The white world is simply not qualified or prepared to evaluate Black writing, and

consequently the task of setting up standards which will realistically deal with Black writers

must fall to the Black community where it belongs. We must say what has and has not value

where our writers are concerned.

But some of us are afraid. We are caught up in the money thing or the celebrity game, and we are

not sure about

this business of evaluating our own work--"What would Bertrand Russell think? Or Eliot. And

what frame of

reference can we use, and what is the role of the Black writer in all of this ... this ... new



business?"

Let me answer each question. As for the first two, I don't give a damn. To the third, however, let

me say that unlike any other writer of today, the Black writer has and has always had as a frame

of reference the peculiar historical and social nature of his people in white America at his

disposal. He, since he shares in this, is a part of his frame of reference. Let me explain: every

Black writer is a product and therefore a part of the Black community; and whether he likes it or

not and in spite of his motives he draws from that community many of the ideas that fill his

work. It follows that when he addresses his audience, he will be in part expressing the life and

needs of that community and by his skill translating that life into things to be emulated or

discarded depending on his own point of view and the degree to which white America has

impressed him. The frame of reference to which he relates is his community, and he and it are

what they are because of the peculiar nature of his people in this country. What then is his role--

this man who must draw from himself and his people the content of his work? His role must be

to address only that community from which he comes. Black writers must begin a dialogue with

the Black community.

Why? Simply because it is unnatural not to. Let us backtrack a bit to the great white writers.

There has not been one of them who has really addressed the Black community, the Oriental

community, the Asian community or the South American community. For those of you who will

say that they have addressed the world, let me answer by saying they addressed the world in

power. For us to address this world and expect its support is absurd.

When we address our own community, a new set of values created by the community takes over.

We become unexpendible parts in an ever-moving cycle. We address our community which in

turn takes from us, acts upon our statements; and from this action provides food for our work. In

effect we simply return to the status situation we occupied before our quest for celebration; we

become the community and vice versa. It will be through the Black writer that the ideas and

needs of the community will find expression and through the community that he will be able to

determine those needs. Surely only that community should be qualified to say how well its Black

writers expressed or express its needs.

But we cannot get away from the manner in which this is to be accomplished since this, in

essence, is what everyone is asking when they ask: what is the role of the Black writer? They are

asking: How can we do this?

We can do it by recognizing that the Black community is not interested in the same kind of

approach to writing as the white community. The Black community is not made up of writers,

dilettantes or large bodies of college-trained professionals. It is made up of people struggling to

survive, and we must be prepared to deal realistically with what our people do with their leisure

time. Black men do not have time to read huge philosophical tracts or dabble in the merits of so-

called classical sculpture; and those that do are greatly outnumbered by their white counterparts.

The Black man's leisure time, if he has any, is spent within a relatively small social circle in a

community where familiarity with each other is the only condition for social prominence. Black

writers can not go to a man whose relative social position is secured outside of white culture but

with the symbols of white culture. He would laugh at them and rightly so.



Such a man, no less intelligent than any other, must be reached on a level he can relate to,

otherwise Black writers might just as well stay at home. (Those writers who disagree with this

might try reading Shakespeare in their neighborhood taprooms.) And what has just been said in

no way means that this level is below that of whites. It is a white racist lie that men must absorb

certain kinds of things before they are "cultured." Culture depends on the history of a people and

as such is not comparable to any other culture. But we do not want to get sidetracked. How do

we reach the Black community? We use anything in that community that is easily identifiable--

landmarks, ideas, dances--anything. Only when Black writers relate their work to easily

recognized symbols and ideas can any hope of a realistic dialogue between writer and

community occur. Once this dialogue is started, new standards will emerge. Standards whose

emphasis will be placed not on the object with its structural excellence but on its simple capacity

to be used by those to whom it is directed. We are already discussing a change in Black writing--

that is, the end of art as an object.

Absurd? Let us restate the definition of socio-creative art. It is a manner of self-expression and

artistic form born directly from the collective social situation in which the Afro-American found

himself in this country. Probably the most apparent thing about the Black community today is its

constant state of change, and each change must of necessity produce a change in the writing of

the Black writer who addresses his community. He must know what is taking place and be

flexible enough to give life to new changes. What today has value might tomorrow be discarded,

and the Black writer must be prepared to address his community in whatever manner is

acceptable to them during each stage of change. What must ultimately result is a new art form--

still socio-creative but elastic, an art form written and presented for particular incidents and once

presented would have no further value except a record of the community's historical growth. No

single work would take precedence over the people it served, and nothing would be written for

its own sake. Only the sum total of a Black writer's work would have value. As the

dialogue continued, the Black writer might find that the value of writing itself would change and

be forced to relegate his work to a place where it would simply be the tool of the audio and

visual arts.

There are many areas which have not been dealt with in this particular explanation, areas that

concern the necessity for change in the image of the Black man in writing and the specific

method of presentation that will guarantee a community audience for a Black writer; but these

are merely extensions of what has just been said, subjects that can be dealt with individually after

the true nature of Black writing is accepted by its writers.

It is not that we have been unaware of the true nature of Black writing. We have simply tried to

avoid admitting the truth to ourselves. Instead, operating on the totally unfounded premise that

our art had to be explained in terms of the white literary community, we thereby created a false

aura of respectability and scholarship. Whatever the value of Black writing, it must proceed as a

direct result of the service it will perform for the Black community, and the sooner we accept our

roles as the community voice, the closer we will be to a solution to the struggle.

Originally published in Liberator, April, 1967, pp. 8-10.

Online Source: http://www.umich.edu/~eng499/documents/fuller1.html

http://www.umich.edu/~eng499/documents/fuller1.html



"Black Writing: Release from Object"

by Charles H. Fuller, Jr.

The question has been asked, "Is the Black writer free to do whatever he chooses creatively?" To

which I have replied, "Of course not, it is absurd to believe he is." However, in my two previous

discussions [in Liberator magazine] there is an entire area of analysis, basically historical, which

I blame myself for not clarifying.

The history of Western thought begins clearly with the work of Aristotle. As it applies to Art, its

evolution to the present day may be traced in three statements: (a) Art for the sake of instruction,

(b) Art for the sake of Art, and finally, (c) Art for the sake of the artist. But how did this

evolution occur? And what is it that prompts Black artists to make absurd statements like, "We

must be free to do what we feel is significant and not relegate our work to the masses--or

subordinate it to anything else"?

Let us go back briefly to the past and pick up the thread of these Black writers' confusion. In his

Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle declares that "an object pursued for its own sake possesses a

higher degree of finality than one pursued with an eye to something else ..." and "something

which is always chosen for its own sake, and never for the sake of something else, is without

qualification a final end." Aristotle considered the final end a good, and in this context believed

that there were many goods. His statements did two things. In Art, they placed the object above

all else, and opened the door to a world of chaos. Where things may be pursued for their own

sake as goods, all manner of things are pursuable. Note, however, that the statements appeared

not in his Poetics but in his Ethics--not with the purpose of defining Art but of defining how men

ought to live.

We are now free to examine the roots out of which the statements were derived, and the twist the

evolving West placed on them. If Art in its very beginnings grew out of religious rites carried to

the West from civilizations of Africa and the East, then it is not difficult to understand how a

Greek, whose only contact with art was after the fact and came in yearly religious festivals in his

country, would assume that the object (sacrifice) which produced the effect (the thing prayed for)

would have precedence over those who prayed (the people). It is always thought that the kind of

sacrifice produced the right effect. But is this true? Isn't it rather, the need that produced the right

kind of sacrifice?

Art began when men set out to say something to the elements--or those things man looked to for

his continued survival. He took to his gods the needs and aspirations of his people, telling as he

offered his sacrifices what he, and they, had done to deserve them. If writing (or any art form) is

an attempt at communication, it first began as a service of the people--a tool, used by them to

talk to their gods. As a service, it had of necessity to be responsive to their needs--it would have

done little good to dance for wheat, when corn was needed. We must also ask ourselves if the

sacrifice was greater than the need, or simply a manifestation of that need--a tool, a service--

something to demonstrate how much was needed and which, once fulfilling the need, was



abandoned. It would seem that Art, as we know it today, was simply a show of need. But the

West has always glorified things, from relics to books of e e cummings' poetry, with the result

that the reason and meaning of the object became less and less connected to what was originally

intended. Instead of creating objects that mirrored the needs of a society, objects were created to

mirror the needs of other objects. Art became an object, and the work and the man who created it

transcended the struggling society from which it sprang. It neither serves this society nor is in

most instances recognizable.

Historically, we have reached Art for the sake of the Artist.

The Black writer who says, "We are free in Art to do whatever we feel like doing," is implying

that the object he chooses to create takes precedence over the desire of his people for it.

Whatever value is placed on it springs from his estimation, not from any decision of his people.

In the context expressed above, does this statement show any awareness of the roots of Art? That

is, does it mirror the needs and aspirations of a people?

We have said previously that Black writing is Socio-creative Art, that it is a manner of self-

expression, an artistic form born directly from the collective, social situation in which the Afro-

American found and finds himself in this nation. It is directly related to our total evolution as a

people in this country, and as such, first set out to mirror the needs and aspirations of our people

against white injustice. Consider, if you will, its roots in this country and compare them with the

roots of Art itself. Does this mean that if it adheres to this close association it is primitive Art?

The West has chosen the word primitive. It would seem to me that any society whose first

concerns was the needs of its people is highly developed.

If we can swallow that Black writing in this country did not begin as object, we can understand

its present need to reflect the revolution its people are engaged in, and see a fluidity and elasticity

in Black writing that can never be hoped for in the West. Black writing must twist and bend with

its people, be creative because they are creative, mirror their needs, and become their voice,

being judged by those who gave it life. Its longevity will be limited to the nourishment it

provides its people, and its writers should be considered no more than good cooks.

We cannot do this, however, if--and I say this with much sadness--Black writers consistently

refuse to see themselves as they are and continue to live in a world where their precious poems

and short stories are more valuable than the lives of their people. Black Art must go out to Black

people, and they must judge its value--if it does not and they do not, to whom, may I ask, can it

go?

It should be fairly obvious to Black writers why songs like "All I Need," "Ain't No Mountain

High Enough," etc., succeed in the Black community--why LeRoi Jones, Bill Davis, Larry Neal

have reached the Black community. These people, along with others like Marvin Gaye, James

Brown and the Temptations, present in their work the needs, aspirations and struggles of Black

people in a manner far more accessible, understandable and beneficial than all the unread poetry

the "free" writers produce. We must return to fundamental concerns. Who are we concerned

with, what are our needs, and how do we accomplish them, for all? This will take for most of us

an entire re-evaluation of Art and its relationship to the people.



It is absurd in this time of struggle, when Black people are rebelling and dying throughout this

nation, to ask questions of the sort that opened this article. Of course we're not free to do what

we feel like doing at the exclusion of our people--they must always come first!

Originally published in Liberator, September, 1967, pp. 17, 20.

Online Source: http://www.umich.edu/~eng499/documents/fuller2.html

from "The Black Arts Movement"

by Larry Neal

The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him

from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.

As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America. In

order to perform this task, the Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the western

cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology. The

Black Arts and the Black Power concept both relate broadly to the Afro-American’s desire for

self-determination and nationhood. Both concepts are nationalistic. One is concerned with the

relationship between art and politics; the other with the art of politics.

Recently, these two movements have begun to merge: the political values inherent in the Black

Power concept are now finding concrete expression in the aesthetics of Afro-American

dramatists, poets, choreographers, musicians, and novelists. A main tenet of Black Power is the

necessity for Black people to define the world in their own terms. The Black artist has made the

same point in the context of aesthetics. The two movements postulate that there are in fact and in

spirit two Americas—one black, one white. The Black artist takes this to mean that his primary

duty is to speak to the spiritual and cultural needs of Black people. Therefore, the main thrust of

this new breed of contemporary writers is to confront the contradictions arising out of the Black

man's experience in the racist West. Currently, these writers are re-evaluating western aesthetics,

the traditional role of the writer, and the social function of art. Implicit in this re-evaluation is the

need to develop a "black aesthetic." It is the opinion of many Black writers, I among them, that

the Western aesthetic has run its course; it is impossible to construct anything meaningful within

its decaying structure. We advocate a cultural revolution in art and ideas. The cultural values

inherent in western history must either be radicalized or destroyed, and we will probably find

that even radicalization is impossible. In fact, what is needed is a whole new system of ideas.

Poet Don L. Lee expresses it:

. . . We must destroy Faulkner, dick, jane, and other perpetuators of evil. It's time for DuBois,

Nat Turner, and Kwame Nkrumah. As Frantz Fanon points out: destroy the culture and you

destroy the people. This must not happen. Black artists are culture stabilizers; bringing back old

values, and introducing new ones. Black Art will talk to the people and with the will of the

people stop impending "protective custody."

http://www.umich.edu/~eng499/documents/fuller2.html



The Black Arts Movement eschews "protest" literature. It speaks directly to Black people.

Implicit in the concept of protest literature, as Brother Knight has made clear, is an appeal to

white morality:

Now any Black man who masters the technique of his particular art form, who adheres to the

white aesthetic, and who directs his work toward a white audience is, in one sense, protesting.

And implicit in the act of protest is the belief that a change will be forthcoming once the masters

are aware of the protestor's "grievance" (the very word connotes begging, supplications to the

gods). Only when that belief has faded and protestings end, will Black art begin.

Brother Knight also has some interesting statements about the development of a "Black

aesthetics:

Unless the Black artist establishes a "Black aesthetic" he will have no future at all. To accept the

white aesthetic is to accept and validate a society that will not allow him to live. The Black artist

must create new forms and new values, sing new songs (or purify old ones); and along with other

Black authorities, be must create a new history, new symbols, myths and legends (and purify old

ones by fire). And the Black artist, in creating his own aesthetic, must be accountable for it only

to the Black people, Further, he must hasten his own dissolution as an individual (in the Western

sense)—painful though the process may be, having been breast-fed the poison of "individual

experience."

When we speak of a "Black aesthetic" several things are meant. First, we assume that there is

already in existence the basis for such an aesthetic. Essentially, it consists of an African-

American cultural tradition. But this aesthetic is finally, by implication, broader than that

tradition. It encompasses most of the useable elements of Third World culture. The motive

behind the Black aesthetic is the destruction of the white thing, the destruction of white ideas,

and white ways of looking at the world. The new aesthetic is mostly predicated on an Ethics

which asks the question: whose vision of the world is finally more meaningful, ours or the white

oppressors? What is truth? Or more precisely, whose truth shall we express, that of the oppressed

or of the oppressors? These are basic questions. Black intellectuals of previous decades failed to

ask them. Further, national and international affairs demand that we appraise the world in terms

of our own interests. It is clear that the question of human survival is at the core of contemporary

experience. The Black artist must address himself to this reality in the strongest terms possible.

In a context of world upheaval, ethics and aesthetics must interact positively and be consistent

with the demands for a more spiritual world. Consequently, the Black Arts Movement is an

ethical movement. Ethical, that is, from the viewpoint of the oppressed. And much of the

oppression confronting the Third World and Black America is directly traceable to the Euro-

American cultural sensibility. This sensibility, anti-human in nature, has, until recently,

dominated the psyches of most Black artists and intellectuals; it must be destroyed before the

Black creative artist can have a meaningful role in the transformation of society.

It is this natural reaction to an alien sensibility that informs the cultural attitudes of the Black

Arts and the Black Power movement. It is a profound ethical sense that makes a Black artist

question a society in which art is one thing and the actions of men another. The Black Arts



Movement believes that your ethics and your aesthetics are one. That the contradictions between

ethics and aesthetics in western society is symptomatic of a dying culture.

The term "Black Arts" is of ancient origin, but it was first used in a positive sense by LeRoi

Jones:

We are unfair

And unfair

We are black magicians

Black arts we make

in black labs of the heart

The fair are fair

and deathly white

The day will not save them

And we own the night

There is also a section of the poem "Black Dada Nihilismus" that carries the same motif. But a

fuller amplification of the nature of the new aesthetics appears in the poem "Black Art":

Poems are bullshit unless they are

teeth or trees or lemons piled

on a step. Or black ladies dying

of men leaving nickel hearts

beating them down. Fuck poems

and they are useful, would they shoot

come at you, love what you are,

breathe like wrestlers, or shudder

strangely after peeing. We want live

words of the hip world, live flesh &

coursing blood. Hearts and Brains

Souls splintering fire. We want poems

like fists beating niggers out of jocks

or dagger poems in the slimy bellies

of the owner-jews . . .

Poetry is a concrete function, an action. No more abstractions. Poems are physical entities: fists,

daggers, airplane poems, and poems that shoot guns. Poems are transformed from physical

objects into personal forces:

. .. Put it on him poem. Strip him naked

to the world. Another bad poem cracking

steel knuckles in a jewlady's mouth

Poem scream poison gas on breasts in green berets . . .



Then the poem affirms the integral relationship between Black Art and Black people:

. . .Let Black people understand

that they are the lovers and the sons

of lovers and warriors and sons

of warriors Are poems & poets &

all the loveliness here in the world

It ends with the following lines, a central assertion in both the Black Arts Movement and the

philosophy of Black Power:

We want a black poem. And a

Black World.

Let the world be a Black Poem

And let All Black People Speak This Poem

Silently

Or LOUD

The poem comes to stand for the collective conscious and unconscious of Black America—the

real impulse in back of the Black Power movement, which is the will toward self-determination

and nationhood, a radical reordering of the nature and function of both art and the artist. . . .

from The Black Aesthetic. Ed. Addison Gayle, Jr. New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1971.

Copyright © 1971 by Addison Gayle, Jr.

from "Black Cultural Nationalism"

by Ron Karenga

Black art, like everything else in the black community, must respond positively to the reality of

revolution.

It must become and remain a part of the revolutionary machinery that moves us to change

quickly and creatively. We have always said, and continue to say, that the battle we are waging

now is the battle for the minds of Black people, and that if we lose this battle, we cannot win the

violent one. It becomes very important then, that art plays the role it should play in Black

survival and not bog itself down in the meaningless madness of the Western world wasted. In

order to avoid this madness, black artists and those who wish to be artists must accept the fact

that what is needed is an aesthetic, a black aesthetic, that is a criteria for judging the validity

and/or the beauty of a work of art.

Pursuing this further, we discover that all art can be judged on two levels—on the social level

and on the artistic level. In terms of the artistic level, we will be brief in talking about this,

because the artistic level involves a consideration of form feeling, two things which obviously



involve more technical consideration and terminology than we have space, time or will to

develop adequately here. Let it be enough to say that the artistic consideration, although a

necessary part, is not sufficient. What completes the picture is that social criteria for judging art.

And it is this criteria that is the most important criteria. For all art must reflect and support the

Black Revolution, and any art that does not discuss and contribute to the revolution is invalid, no

matter bow many lines and spaces are produced in proportion and symmetry and no matter how

many sounds are boxed in or blown out and called music.

All we do and create, then, is based on tradition and reason, that is to say, on foundation and

movement. For we begin to build on traditional foundation, but it is out of movent, that is

experience, that we complete our creation. Tradition teaches us, Leopold Senghor tells us, that all

African art has at least three characteristics: that is, it is functional, collective and committing or

committed. Since this is traditionally valid, it stands to reason that we should attempt to use it as

the foundation for a rational construction to meet our present day needs. And by no mere

coincidence we find that the criteria is not only valid, but inspiring. That is why we say that all

Black art, irregardless of any technical requirements, must have three basic characteristics which

make it revolutionary. In brief, it must be functional, collective and committing. It must be

functional, that is useful, as we cannot accept the false doctrine of "art for art's sake." For, in fact,

there is no such thing as "art for art's sake." All art reflects the value system from which it

comes. For if the artist created only for himself and not for others, he would lock himself up

somewhere and paint or write or play just for himself. But he does not do that. On the contrary,

he invites us over, even insists that we come to hear him or to see his work; in a word, he

expresses a need for our evaluation and/or appreciation and our evaluation cannot be a favorable

one if the work of art is not first functional, that is, useful.

So what, then, is the use of art—our art, Black art? Black art must expose the enemy, praise the

people and support the revolution. It must be like LeRoi Jones' poems that are assassins' poems,

poems that kill and shoot guns and "wrassle cops into alleys taking their weapons, leaving them

dead with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland." It must be functional like the poem of another

revolutionary poet from "US," Clyde Halisi, who described the Master's words as "Sun Genies,

dancing through the crowd snatching crosses and St. Christopher's from around niggers' necks

and passing the white gapped legs in their minds to Simbas to be disposed of."

Or, in terms of painting, we do not need pictures of oranges in a bowl or trees standing

innocently in the midst of a wasteland. If we must paint oranges and trees, let our guerrillas be

eating those oranges for strength and using those trees for cover. We need new images, and

oranges in a bowl or fat white women smiling lewdly cannot be those images. All material is

mute until the artist gives it a message, and that message must be a message of revolution. Then

we have destroyed "art for art's sake," which is of no use anyhow, and have developed art for all

our sake, art for Mose the miner, Sammy the shoeshine boy, T.C. the truck driver and K.P. the

unwilling soldier. In conclusion, the real function of art is to make revolution, using its own

medium.

The second characteristic of Black art is that it must be collective. In a word, it must be from the

people and must be returned to the people in a form more beautiful and colorful than it was in

real life. For that is what art is: everyday life given more form and color. And in relationship to



that, the Black artist can find no better subject than Black People themselves, and the Black artist

who does not choose or develop this subject will find himself unproductive. For no one is any

more than the context to which he owes his existence, and if an artist owes his existence to the

Afroamerican context, then he also owes his art to that context and therefore must be held

accountable to the people of that context. To say that art must be collective, however, raises four

questions. Number one, the question of popularization versus elevation; two, personality versus

individuality; three, diversity in unity; and four, freedom to versus freedom from.

from The Black Aesthetic. Ed. Addison Gayle, Jr. New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1971.

Copyright © 1971 by Addison Gayle, Jr.



The Black Arts Movement

Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s

By James Edward Smethurst

A 2005 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, black nationalist, and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African American artists and intellectuals in the

1960s coalesced to form the Black Arts Movement, the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement. In this comprehensive analysis, James Smethurst

examines the formation of the Black Arts Movement and demonstrates how it deeply influenced the production and reception of literature and art in the

United States through its negotiations of the ideological climate of the Cold War, decolonization, and the civil rights movement.

Taking a regional approach, Smethurst examines local expressions of the nascent Black Arts Movement, a movement distinctive in its geographical

reach and diversity, while always keeping the frame of the larger movement in view. The Black Arts Movement, he argues, fundamentally changed

American attitudes about the relationship between popular culture and "high" art and dramatically transformed the landscape of public funding for

the arts.

—Publisher, University of North Carolina Press

"Mapping important connections and offering a cornucopia of information, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s is a

truly valuable contribution to the study of American letters. Smethurst gets it right! His thorough research and astute analysis overcome two decades of

deliberate critical misrepresentation to help us examine a tumultuous era

when visionary leadership and nationwide grassroots participation created a dynamic, paradigm-changing cultural renaissance."

—Lorenzo Thomas, University of Houston-Downtown

"A momentous and singular contribution to the study of literary ethnic

nationalism in particular, and post-World War II cultural history in general. Anyone interested in United States culture and politics in the 1950s, 1960s,

and 1970s will be drawn to The Black Arts Movement as a chronicle, survey, and fabulous reference."

—Alan Wald, University of Michigan

In this study we see how the arts and politics were one, in the holistic tradition of African culture and civilization.

—Marvin X, "History" in Beyond Religion, Toward Spirituality (2007)

Studies of the Black Arts Movement have come a long way since the early

1990s. At that time, David Lionel Smith published a visionary essay, "The Black Arts Movement and Its Critics," bemoaning the "paucity" of scholarship

on the efflorescence of African American culture, intellectualism, and politics that spanned the 1960s and 1970s. The essay complains that "the most

rudimentary work" remains incomplete, and recent scholarship tends to be "openly hostile" and "deeply partisan." Consequently, the movement comes

across as an "unappealing" and counterproductive confusion of social theory, aesthetics, nationalism, ethnic chauvinism, and sexism, a negative portrayal

that oversimplifies the era's ideological and historical circumstances. Thus,

Smith calls for "careful and balanced scholarship" to set the record straight.1

Since David Lionel Smith's clarion call for scholars in 1991, "careful and balanced scholarship" has slowly but surely emerged. William L. Van Deburg,

Madhu Dubey, Eddie S. Glaude, Adolph Reed Jr., James C. Hall, Jerry Watts, Wahneema Lubiano, Phillip Brian Harper, and Winston Napier have all

researched the ways in which aesthetics, race, gender, sexuality, and class have intersected during the movement.2 Two books published this past

year, James Edward Smethurst's The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s and Cheryl Clarke's "After Mecca":

Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement, advance this research by approaching the movement in two different but complementary ways.

Smethurst's The Black Arts Movement is an enormous repository of information . . .

—Gene Jarrett American Quarterly 57.4 (2005) 1243-1251

Introduction

In earlier drafts of this introduction, I began by suggesting that African American studies, Chicana/o studies, Asian American studies, and other

fields broadly constituting the somewhat nebulous universe of ethnic studies were haunted by the ethnic or racial nationalisms that in their various

manifestations flourished in the United States from about 1965 to 1975.

I based this observation on the fact that, even though relatively little

scholarly work had been done on the Black Power movement and other political nationalist movements and even less on the Black Arts movement

and its Chicana/o, Asian American, and Puerto Rican analogues, the departments, degree-granting committees, research centers, institutes, and

so on of the above listed fields owed their inception in large part to the institutional and ideological spaces carved out by the Black Power, Chicano,

Asian American, and other nationalist movements.[1]

Indeed, many of these departments, programs, and committees (and publishers, book imprints, academic book series, art galleries, video and film

production companies, and theaters) were the direct products of 1960s and 1970s nationalism.

As I began to write, a number of the institutions of ethnic studies, often

under the rubric of "Africana studies," still presented themselves as

nationalist or Afrocentric, say, Temple University's Africana Studies Department, preserving a relatively untroubled sense of connection to earlier

nationalist institutions and ideologies.

Others, including my own W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, displayed a general

stance toward the Black Arts and Black Power movements that might be described as critical support.

However, many of the most high-profile institutions and scholars of African

American studies and ethnic studies maintained a far more ambivalent, if not hostile, relationship to the Black Power movement, the Black Arts

movement, and other forms of political and artistic nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s. For instance, Harvard's Henry Louis Gates Jr. provocatively

derogated the Black Arts movement in the pages of a 1994 Time magazine

article, declaring, "erected on the shifting foundation of revolutionary politics, this 'renaissance' was the most short-lived of all."[2]

Typically for such attacks, Gates's piece was not primarily about the Black

Arts movement but instead discussed what the author saw as a contemporary "renaissance" of African American art, with the Black Arts

invoked and then dismissed with minimal description as a sort of nonmovement against which the new black creativity could be favorably

judged. Such invocations and shorthand dismissals were (and still are) common. Yet this persistent referencing of the Black Power and Black Arts

movements evinced an unquiet spirit that haunted even the most ambivalent or hostile present-day African Americanists, who must admit that their place

in the academy was largely cleared for them by the activist nationalism of

the 1960s and 1970s—however narrow that nationalism might seem to them

now (or seemed to them then).

Until recently, what longer works we had for the most part were memoirs or biographies of individual participants in the various movements rather than

historical analyses of the broader movements themselves. For example, the 1990s saw a number of often lurid biographies and autobiographies of

former Black Panthers, such as Elaine Brown's A Taste of Power (1992), David Hilliard and Lewis Cole's This Side of Glory (1993), and Hugh

Pearson's The Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America (1994), but no serious academic history of the BPP.[3]

These works have been generally aimed at a popular audience for whom Black Power, especially the BPP, remains a fascinating subject.

This fascination with the BPP and other Black Power and Black Arts activists

serves as a reminder that outside academia the Black Power, Black Arts,

Chicano, Nuyorican, and Asian American movements never really disappeared enough to be called hauntings.[4] The continuing influence of

African American, Chicana/o, and Asian American nationalism can be seen in literature produced since 1975.

On some writers, such as Alice Walker, Cherie Moraga, and Sherley Anne

Williams, the influence was in large part negative, as they reacted against what they saw as the sexism and homophobia of 1960s and 1970s

nationalisms—though a vision of community descended from the Black Arts and Black Power movements often remained.

Others, notably Amiri Baraka, Frank Chin, and Sonia Sanchez, moved away

from nationalism toward a "Third World Marxism," or some other sort of activist politics at odds with their earlier positions but acknowledged a

positive, nationalist legacy while critiquing what they saw as the limitations

of the Black Arts and Black Power movements, such as an underestimation of the impact of class on the African American liberation movement. Still

other artists, such as Alurista and Toni Morrison (Chloe Wofford), continued to embrace what was essentially a nationalist stance in their work long after

1975.

More recently, editors have assembled anthologies of African American writing, such as Keith Gilyard's Spirit and Flame (1996), Kevin Powell's Step

into a World (2000), and Tony Medina, Samiya A. Bashir, and Quraysh Ali Lansana's Role Call (2002), which look back to the key nationalist

anthologies, particularly LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Larry Neal's Black Fire (1968), for inspiration.

Finally, the Black Arts movement made a considerable impression on artists

and intellectuals too young to remember its events firsthand. Many of the more explicitly political hip-hop artists owe and acknowledge a large debt to

the militancy, urgent tone, and multimedia aesthetics of the Black Arts movement and other forms of literary and artistic nationalism. The

phenomenal growth of hip-hop-inflected performance poetry and poetry slam events and venues, often run by African Americans, recalls the Black

Arts movement in both popularity and geographical dispersion.

As with the theaters, poetry readings, workshops, and study groups of the Black Arts era, it is a rare city or region today that does not boast some

regular series of performance poetry or poetry slams. When I lived in Jacksonville, Florida, in the late 1990s, one could attend such events three

or four nights a week. At least two of the regular venues were in or very near historically black communities and were substantially run by young

African American poets. Many of the black fans and performers in these

poetry venues (and not a few white, Asian American, and Latina/o participants) looked back to the Black Arts movement as one of their chief

inspirations.

Such a sense of ancestry can be seen also in the lionization of Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, and the Last Poets on Russell Simmons's

four-part Def Poetry Jam spoken-word series hosted by rapper Mos Def that debuted on the HBO television network in 2002.

Yet despite the continuing presence of the Black Power and Black Arts

legacies, whether positive or negative, in academia and cultural expression, there was, until comparatively recently, little sustained scholarly attention to

either the political or cultural sides of the nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Even now, academic assessments of the Black Arts and

Black Power movements are frequently made in passing and generally seem

to assume that we already know all we need to know about these intertwined movements and their misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism,

and eschewal of practical politics for the pathological symbolic.

Less often, other commentators attempt to flatten out the contradictions and what might now be perceived as the extremism of the movements, pointing

out, for example, echoes of the Declaration of Independence in the early BPP's Ten-Point Program and ignoring the plan's invocation of the Bolshevik

slogan of "Land, Peace, and Bread."

However, it seems to me that there is currently such an upsurge in the recovery, revaluation, and rethinking of the Black Power and Black Arts

movements that the haunting metaphor does not entirely serve. Komozi

Woodard's A Nation within a Nation (1999) signaled the beginning of a new

scholarly moment in its efforts to ground its examination of a single figure (Amiri Baraka) within the context of a detailed portrait of Black Power in a

local community (Newark, New Jersey) and its relation to the broader movement. The year 1999 also saw the publication of Rod Bush's We Are

Not What We Seem, which also engaged Black Power with a new seriousness—if on a more general level than Woodard's study. This scholarly

rethinking of Black Power and its legacy has become even more pronounced more recently.

The appearance of the autobiography of Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael),

Ready for Revolution (2003), written with Michael Thelwell, has also dramatically changed the historiographical landscape of Black Power. Scot

Brown's account of the Us organization founded by Maulana Karenga (Ronald Everett), Fighting for US (2003), too, marks a new era in the study of Black

Power, with far more attention to the specifics of how the movement worked

on the ground in particular places and much more extensive and careful use of primary sources than had been the case before.

And it needs to be noted that important new studies of major Black Power

figures, organizations, regional activities, and/or institutions by such scholars as Matthew Countryman, Peniel Joseph, Donna Murch, Stephen

Ward, and Fanon Che Wilkins have appeared as dissertations or will appear in the near future (as of this writing) in book form. Much remains to be done

(and is being done), particularly with respect to providing a broad overview of Black Power that records and respects the movement's ideological and

regional variations. Still, it is clear that, rather than a haunting presence invoked and then dismissed, Black Power has become a major area of active

and open investigation and debate.

Until recently, scholars have devoted even less attention to the Black Arts as

a national movement with significant regional variations than to Black Power. A similarly narrow focus on a few individual figures with little

consideration of institutions can be particularly seen in many academic investigations of the art and literature of 1960s and 1970s nationalism,

especially of what were the dominant literary genres of the Black Arts movement, poetry and drama. Few book-length studies since Stephen

Henderson's Understanding the New Black Poetry (1972) have attempted to assess the characteristics and development of the literary Black Arts

movement.[5]

There are a number of valuable memoirs by leading literary figures of the era, such as Amiri Baraka's The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (first

published in 1984 and reprinted with substantial revisions in 1997) and

Somethin' Proper (1998) by Marvin X (Marvin Jackmon). There are also a

handful of often brief studies of various circles like the Umbra Poets Workshop and OBAC, institutions like Broadside Press, or individuals, usually

Baraka (e.g., Werner Sollors's Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a Populist Modernism [1978], Jerry Watts's Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art

of a Black Intellectual [2001], and William Harris's The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic [1985]).

While valuable, the few published book-length considerations of the Black

Arts movement and the culture of Black Power that existed until recently, most notably William Van Deburg's important New Day in Babylon (1992),

basically investigated general aspects of these movements synchronically, without much effort to delineate historical and geographical specifics. In

short, there seemed to be an assumption that, as with the Black Power movement, the basic shape of the Black Arts movement, its development,

and its regional variations were somehow known.

It is true that the wide stylistic, thematic, and ideological range of Black Arts

writers and artists make it difficult in a broad study like this to pay close attention to the local variations of the movement. But one could say the

same about twentieth-century American modernism, which has been the subject of many general or comparative scholarly projects. Even the best

study of the formal characteristics of post-World War II African American poetry, Aldon Nielsen's groundbreaking Black Chant (1997), only tentatively

and suggestively points to some possible influences on and origins of the formally and politically radical African American avant-garde of the 1950s,

1960s, and 1970s.

For example, he alludes to Russell Atkins's argument for an African American avant-garde tradition descending from Langston Hughes without elaborating

on how that tradition might be drawn and from where it might have come in

the 1950s.[6] Similarly, Nielsen makes a claim for a certain kinship between "experimental" poetry by black and white authors, but there is not much

concrete consideration of the relationship of the work of the black avant-garde of the 1950s through the 1970s to that of their white, Chicana/o, and

Nuyorican counterparts—or to the development of the Black Arts as a cultural and political movement.

This observation is not intended to diminish Nielsen's achievement in

opening up poets and poetic formations to literary scholarship—not to mention his acumen in the reading of this body of work. As Nielsen himself

mentions in the acknowledgments section of Black Chant, he was forced to prune much material due to the exigencies of academic publishing.[7] My

critique of Nielsen is only meant to suggest how much more new critical

work is needed.

And this work is beginning to be done. As with the study of the Black Power movement, a new scholarship examining Black Arts literature and art has

started to flourish in work by such scholars as Melba Joyce Boyd, Kimberly Benston, James Sullivan, James C. Hall, David Lionel Smith, Lorenzo

Thomas, Mike Sell, Michael Bibby, Kalamu ya Salaam (Val Ferdinand), Daniel Widener, Cynthia Young, Howard Ramsby, and Bill Mullen. Thomas, along

with Nielsen, particularly charted the way for a rethinking of radical black poetry and drama in the 1960s and 1970s.

Of course, Thomas has been doing this sort of thing for years, but his work

took on a new prominence with the publication of his collection of essays on modern African American poetry, Extraordinary Measures (2000). Boyd's

study of Dudley Randall, Broadside Press, and the Black Arts movement in

Detroit, Wrestling with the Muse (2003), is a model of what an engaged study of the local manifestations of the movement might be.

These scholars need to be congratulated for beginning a vital intellectual

conversation, a conversation that has taken on a new urgency with various popular culture and "high" culture representations and interpretations of the

legacy of 1960s and 1970s nationalism, such as Mario Van Peebles's film Panther, Spike Lee's Malcolm X, Danzy Senna's popular novel Caucasia, and

even the film Forrest Gump. This conversation takes up the questions, to paraphrase Harry Levin, What was the Black Arts movement? What were its

sources? What were its regional variations and commonalities? This book also echoes the set of questions that scholars of the New Negro Renaissance

have raised since the 1980s: Was the movement a "failure" in something other than the sense that all cultural movements (whether British Pre-

Raphaelite, Russian futurist, German expressionist, U.S. abstract

expressionist, or Brazilian tropicalian) ultimately "fail" to achieve their most visionary aims—and simply end? Who says so? And why do they say it?

The Black Arts Movement, then, enters an intellectual conversation already

in progress—though it is a conversation that was hardly more than a whisper in academia at the end of the twentieth century. It undertakes to map the

origins and development of the different strains of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts movement with special attention to the its regional variations

while delineating how the movement gained some sense of national coherence institutionally, aesthetically, and ideologically, even if it never

became exactly homogeneous. It is not an attempt to write an exhaustive history of the entire movement—a subject that seems to me beyond the

scope of a single book. For reasons having to do with my particular interests

and intellectual background as well as with the character of the Black Arts

movement itself, there is a special, though not exclusive, emphasis on what was sometimes known as the "New Black Poetry" in this study.

The beginnings of the Black Arts movement are seen against the interrelated

rise of the "New American Poetry" (as largely codified by Donald M. Allen's 1960 anthology of the same name) and postwar, avant-garde theater in the

United States (and such groups as the Living Theater, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and El Teatro Campesino) and the subsequent emergence of

the literary activities connected to the Chicano movement, the Nuyorican writers, the circle of Asian American writers associated with the seminal

1975 anthology Aiiieeeee!, and what would become known as the multicultural studies movement. This examination considers the published

and unpublished works of the writers in question as well as the institutional contexts in which the works were produced.

I also pay particular attention to the way the nascent Black Arts movement negotiated the ideological climate of the Cold War, decolonization, and the

reemergent civil rights movement, particularly the black student movement that began in 1960. As James Hall observes, "while accounts of African-

American literary battles of the sixties often appropriately detail attitudes toward cultural nationalism and black power, too often cold war (and prior)

ideological orientations are placed to one side."[8] What Hall calls "prior ideological orientations" and their institutional expressions are crucial in

understanding the political and cultural matrix in which the Black Arts grew. As Robert Self argues:

Mid-century black communities embraced multiple political crosscurrents,

from ideologies of racial uplift and integrationism to Garveyite nationalism and black capitalism to workplace-based black power (as in the BSCP

[Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters]) and, especially in the East Bay,

radical laborite socialism and communism. These crosscurrents produced a lively and productive debate over the future of African American

neighborhoods and the cities in which they were situated. This rich political tradition belies a facile integration/separation or civil rights/Black Power

dichotomy in black politics, which are inadequate frameworks for understanding the range of African American responses to the changing face

of urban life either before or after 1945.[9]

While Self might underestimate the disruptive impact of Cold War repression (and Cold War ideological disenchantment) on some of the "crosscurrents"

he enumerates, even in the East Bay, his basic point is well taken and can be equally applied to black cultural politics. To that end, I trace the

continuities as well as the ruptures between the Old Left (and what could be

thought of as the old nationalism) and the new black political and cultural

radicalisms, much as Maurice Isserman and some other "revisionist" historians of the Left have done for the organized political movements of the

1960s.

I note, for instance, many well-known dramatic gestures by African American artists and intellectuals that symbolically signaled a break with

older literary politics and aesthetics, such as the vitriolic debate in the Umbra group in 1963-64 after John F. Kennedy's assassination over whether

to publish a poem by Ray Durem attacking Kennedy; Amiri Baraka's move to Harlem and the founding of BARTS in 1965 (allegedly catalyzed by Malcolm

X's assassination); and the transformation of the Watts Writers group's Douglass House into the House of Respect in 1966.

It is important to recall, though, that these dramatic moments not only

indicate rejections of older political and cultural radicalisms by black artists

and intellectuals but also stand as signposts alerting us to the very existence of organic links to older political and cultural movements that the continuing

power of gestures of generational disaffiliation might cause us to miss or underestimate. Take the way in which Langston Hughes served as a bridge

between different generations of radical black artists. His generosity in encouraging, promoting, and mentoring younger black writers is well-known.

Nonetheless, speaking personally, it was a revelation to me while undertaking this project to discover the crucial role that Hughes played in

the emergence of the Black Arts movement in so many cities (New York, Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, New Orleans, and on and on). Instances of

Hughes's contributions to the movement are scattered throughout this study.

David Lionel Smith argues with respect to the Black Arts movement that "it

must be understood . . . as emanating from various local responses to a

general development within American culture of the 1960s." [10] In this spirit, while always attempting to place these local responses within a larger

context, The Black Arts Movement is organized regionally for the most part to look at how connections between different groups of black artists and

intellectuals took place on a grassroots level and to get a sense of the significant regional variations of the movement.

My approach resembles Kalamu ya Salaam's local/national/local model of

Black Arts movement development in his (as of this writing) unpublished introduction to the movement, The Magic of Juju. According to Salaam, the

movement started out as disparate local initiatives across a wide geographic area, coalescing into a national movement with a sense of a broader

coherence that, in turn, inspired more local, grassroots activities.[11]

I would add that there was a continuing, bidirectional interplay between the national and the local in which the national inspired the local, even as the

local confirmed and deepened a sense of the national as truly encompassing the nation—both in the geographical sense of covering the United States and

in the ideological sense of engaging the entire black nation. BARTS and the work of Amiri Baraka, for instance, may have helped stimulate the

development and shape of BLKARTSOUTH in New Orleans, but the growth of radical Black Arts groups and institutions in New Orleans, Houston, Miami,

Memphis, Durham, Atlanta, and other cities in the South confirmed to activists in centers more commonly the focus of accounts of the movement

(e.g., New York, Newark, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles) that it really was nation time.

Lorenzo Thomas's path-breaking discussions of African American Left and

nationalist subcultures in the emergence of the Black Arts movement in New

York City also significantly informs how I come at this dialectic of local and national. Keeping Thomas's work in mind, it should be recalled that there

were already transregional and even international networks in place, particularly those of various Left and nationalist (and Left nationalist) groups

and their supporters, before the creation of BARTS in 1965. These networks were media of interchange between proto-Black Arts individuals and

organizations in different cities. In other words, the movement was always local and always national.

This impossibility of completely separating the local and the national dictates

that this study cannot be entirely regional in organization and that there will be a certain overlap between chapters. Cultural and political styles (and

cultural and political activists) circulated widely and constantly in the Black Arts and Black Power movements (and their immediate forerunners). As a

result, certain issues and phenomena, such as Black Arts and Black Power

conceptions of history, the relationship between the visual and the oral (and between text and performance) in Black Arts literature, and the connection

between the Black Arts, Black Power, and other nationalist political and cultural movements, were significantly transregional. The Chicano

movement, for example, was not only a phenomenon of the West and the Southwest (and the South, depending on how one categorizes Texas) but

also of many midwestern cities where there had long been significant Chicana/o communities.

When Chicago BPP leader Fred Hampton called for "Brown Power for Brown

People" (basically meaning Chicana/o and Puerto Rican power), he was not speaking abstractly but was making a statement rooted in local Chicago

politics. Similarly, as Michelle Joan Wilkinson notes, "Neorican" or

"Chicagorican" writers in the Midwest were an important strain of the larger

Black Arts-influenced movement of writers of Puerto Rican descent on the mainland often grouped under the rubric of "Nuyorican."[12]

As a result, I take up some discussions of transregional phenomena in the

more general and thematically organized Chapters 1 and 2. However, other transregional subjects are considered in chapters focusing on the areas with

which the subjects were most associated. For example, I take up the connection between the Black Arts and Chicano movements at greatest

length in the section of the book devoted to the West Coast.

The first chapter of this study outlines the state of American culture and politics, particularly African American art and literature (and its critical and

institutional contexts during the age of the Cold War, civil rights, and decolonization in the 1950s) and the rise of the New American Poetry. In this

regard, I look at the ascendancy of the New Critical and New York

Intellectual models of poetic excellence that privileged a streamlined and restrictive neomodernist aesthetic. As a corollary to this ascendancy, I detail

the character, influence, and eventual isolation or destruction (by external and internal forces) of Popular Front aesthetics and the Popular Front

institutions that played a large role in the artistic and intellectual life of the United States in the 1930s and 1940s.

The first chapter also notes the development of distinct, though

interconnected schools of New American Poetry (or postmodern poetry, if you will) that received such names as the "Beats," the "New York school,"

the "California Renaissance," and the "Black Mountain poets," in which many early Black Arts writers found a temporary home to one degree or another.

The opposition of all these countercultural schools to the New Criticism and

their more murky relationship to the New York Intellectuals will be a special

concern in the first chapter. The focus of this part of the study is the revival of Popular Front poetics within these various "schools" and the

transformation of the cultural politics of the Popular Front by the still potent domestic and international Cold War as well as by the liberationist rhetoric of

the civil rights, anticolonialist, and nonaligned movements. This tracing of the legacy of the Popular Front includes the issues of the relationship of

popular culture to poetic practice, the interpretation of the heritage of European modernism, especially surrealism, Dadaism, and futurism (both

Soviet and Italian), the American Whitmanic tradition, and the figuration of ethnicity, especially among the Beats (e.g., Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso,

Jack Kerouac, and Bob Kaufman).

Of course, the participation of African American poets and intellectuals,

particularly Kaufman, Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans, Russell Atkins, and A. B. Spellman, within (or on the fringes of) these "schools" is an important

aspect of this part of my project. However, equally crucial is delineating the influence of established African American writers and intellectuals, notably

Langston Hughes, on the New American Poetry.

The second chapter takes up the early development of Black Arts ideology and the impact of this ideology on artistic practice. In its four sections, the

chapter deals with the theorization of the relation of Black Arts to popular culture (and by extension, a popular audience) and the impact of this

theorization on texts and performance (and textual performance); Black Arts conceptions of history; gender and Black arts practice and ideology; and the

interplay between textuality, visuality, orality, and performance in Black Arts works.

As is noted in this chapter, while these issues might have a particular association with a certain region in their early forms (e.g., the conception of

a popular avant-garde that issued from circles of black artists and intellectuals in New York and Philadelphia), they cannot be tied ultimately to

a particular city or area. As a result, I consider them in a separate chapter rather than trying to subsume them in the following chapters that take up

the movement in specific regions.

Chapter 3 looks closely at the embryonic Black Arts movement in New York City and elsewhere in the Northeast and at the early institutions and

formations that nurtured it in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I argue that the importance of New York and other East Coast centers, particularly

Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia, for the Black Arts movement lies largely in the manner in which the region served as an incubator for Black

Power and Black Arts ideologies, poetics, and activists.

The strong traditions of African American political and artistic radicalism in

the region and the peculiarly close geographical relationship of centers of black population, notably New York and Philadelphia, inspired and informed

what Aldon Nielsen has characterized as the black artistic diaspora that settled there, particularly in the Lower East Side of New York. These

institutions and formations include the Market Place Gallery readings organized by Raymond Patterson in the late 1950s, the Umbra Poets

Workshop (including Calvin Hernton, David Henderson, Ishmael Reed, Lorenzo Thomas, Askia Muhammad Toure [Rolland Snellings], and Tom

Dent), and the magazines Umbra, Liberator, Black America, and Freedomways.

Also examined here are the relationships between proto-Black Arts poets

and the "New American" poets and their institutions on the Lower East Side, including the "older generation" of New American poets (such as Allen

Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Charles Olson, Diane di Prima, Ed Dorn, and Amiri Baraka) and the "second generation" (such as Ted Berrigan, Ed Sanders,

Bernadette Mayer, and Lorenzo Thomas) as well as "Nuyorican" writers (such as Victor Hernandez Cruz, Miguel Algarín, and Miguel Piñero).

One point that should be obvious with the mention of Baraka and Thomas is

that the proto-Black Arts writers and New American poets were often one and the same. The formal and thematic choices of the proto-Black Arts poets

and Nuyorican artists are examined through these new institutional contexts and the context of the changing civil rights movement (e.g., the growth of

cultural nationalism in organizations such as SNCC) and the emergence of the New Left, particularly the SDS and the PL.

The fourth chapter considers the growth of crucial Black Arts and Chicano movement institutions in the Midwest, particularly the intense interplay

between black political and cultural radicals in Chicago and Detroit. This chapter pays special attention to the interactions, whether antagonistic or

sympathetic, between older black artists (such as Robert Hayden, Margaret Burroughs, Gwendolyn Brooks, Melvin Tolson, Margaret Walker, and

Langston Hughes) and the generally young activists of the emergent Black Arts movement. It also traces the links between still vital Left traditions and

the Black Power and Black Arts movements.

A particular focus of this chapter is the relatively successful Midwestern emphasis on creating black cultural institutions, such as OBAC, the AACM,

the DuSable Museum, the Concept East Theatre, the eta Creative Arts Foundation, Broadside Press, Third World Press, and Negro Digest/Black

World, that significantly, with some modifications, maintained the Black Arts

legacy far beyond the collapse of the movement nationally. As part of this impulse toward institution building, the movement in the Midwest was

successful in producing a mass audience for poetry (and avant-garde music, visual art, dance, theater, and criticism) that had never been seen before in

the United States.

The fifth chapter discusses how the Black Arts movement on the West Coast emerged (and eventually distinguished itself) from strong Left, nationalist,

and bohemian traditions in California. It shows how the Bay Area and Los Angeles made large contributions to the development (and the idea) of the

Black Arts movement as a broad, transregional phenomenon. It describes the process by which the San Francisco Bay Area provided some of the most

important early national institutions of the movement, particularly the Black

Arts and Black Power journals Soulbook, Black Dialogue, and JBP.

It also examines how black artists in California, primarily in Los Angeles, early on popularized the idea of a new militant black literature, theater, and

art across the United States as writers, theater workers, and visual artists associated with the Watts arts scene gained a national prominence as

epitomizing the militant black artist, in much the same manner that Watts itself became the iconic epicenter of a new African American political mood

represented as compounded equally of anger and pride following the Watts uprising of 1965. This iconic status that followed from the uprising also

generated considerable private and public money for radical black cultural initiatives in Watts, with the same opportunities and pitfalls that became

typical of foundation and public financing of the Black Arts movement across the country.

Finally, this chapter discusses the Black Arts movement and its impact on the Chicano movement, Asian American literary nationalism, and the

embryonic multicultural movement.

Chapter 6 focuses on the Black Arts movement in the South—where the majority of African Americans still lived in the 1960s and 1970s. The

southern Black Arts movement, especially the community-oriented institutions that characterized the movement in Houston, Memphis, Jackson,

Miami, and New Orleans, lacked the high media profile that its counterparts in the Northeast, Midwest, and California achieved. Nonetheless, this chapter

not only traces the outlines of the movement in the South but also shows that the reports of the activities in the South, particularly in Black World and

JBP, did reach an audience outside the region.

Such reports, along with the contributions of southern political and cultural

activists to national political and cultural events, such as the 1970 inaugural CAP convention in Atlanta and the 1972 National Black Political Convention

in Gary, Indiana, provided the Black Power and Black Arts movements a sense of truly encompassing the black nation, a sense that could never be

gained otherwise, given the symbolic and demographic meanings of the South for African Americans.

A Note on Definitions

This study is filled with locutions pairing the Black Arts and Black Power

movements. It is a relative commonplace to briefly define Black Arts as the cultural wing of the Black Power movement. However, one could just as

easily say that Black Power was the political wing of the Black Arts

movement. There were, of course, major black political leaders who were

also major cultural figures before the 1960s—one thinks particularly of W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Paul Robeson. And there were

others remembered primarily as political figures with a youthful background in the arts, such as Bayard Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph. Certainly, all of

these figures posited a Left or civil rights culturalism as major parts of their political agendas.

However, the Black Power movement distinguished itself by the sheer

number of its leaders (and members) who identified themselves primarily as artists and/or cultural organizers or who had, like Rustin and Randolph,

some early professional interest in being artists. It is also difficult to recall earlier moments when radical black political groups made arts organizations

primary points of concentration, as RAM did with respect to the Umbra Poets Workshop and BARTS. Finally, while Amiri Baraka's speech at the first CAP

convention in 1970 that ended in a wild performance of his poem "It's Nation

Time" might not be absolutely unique as convention speeches go, I at least cannot think of anything quite like it in earlier political-cultural moments.

As will be seen in many places in this study, Black Power and Black Arts

circuits were often the same, not just ideologically, but practically. Black organizers/artists might set up Black Power meetings, say, of the ALSC, in

different cities while on some sort of performance tour. Conversely, one might be in town for a big meeting or political convention and put on

readings, concerts, plays, and so on.

One obvious problem that makes both "Black Power" and "the Black Arts" such elastic terms is that there was no real center to the interlocked

movements. That is to say, there was no predominant organization or ideology with which or against which various artists and activists defined

themselves. While the BPP at times approached such a hegemony in terms

of the public image of Black Power (especially in the mass media), in a grassroots organizational sense and in an ideological sense, no group

approached the dominance that the CPUSA exercised over black radical art and politics in the 1930s and 1940s—even if that hegemony took the form of

a direct opposition, as in the various cases of the then Trotskyist C. L. R. James, the Socialists A. Phillip Randolph and Frank Crosswaith, or the

nationalist James Lawson.

However, while noting the relative decentralization, and occasionally the disunity, of the Black Power and Black Arts movements, the common thread

between nearly all the groups was a belief that African Americans were a people, a nation, entitled to (needing, really) self-determination of its own

destiny. While notions of what that self-determination might consist (and of

what forms it might take) varied, these groups shared the sense that

without such power, African Americans as a people and as individuals would remain oppressed and exploited second-class (or non-) citizens in the United

States.

While the right to self-determination had often been a mark of both black nationalism and much of the Left (since at least the late 1920s), making the

actual seizing and exercise of self-determination the central feature of political and cultural activity differentiated Black Power from any major

African American political movement since the heyday of Garveyism. And unlike the Garveyites, a major aspect of most tendencies of the Black Power

and Black Arts movements was an emphasis on the need to develop, or expand upon, a distinctly African American or African culture that stood in

opposition to white culture or cultures.

Again, some precedents for this emphasis can be found in the cultural work

of the Left and of relatively small nationalist groups of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. And the political-cultural formation known as the New Negro

Renaissance or the Harlem Renaissance certainly used the arts as an instrument to attempt to dismantle racism and Jim Crow. But never before, I

think, was such artistic activity made an absolute political priority and linked to the equally emphatic drive for the development and exercise of black self-

determination within a large black political-cultural movement in the United States.

Some preliminary definition and nuancing of such a contested term as

"nationalism" is required because it subsumes ideologies, institutions, political practices, and aesthetic stances that are often distinguished from

each other. Maulana Karenga's division of black nationalism into religious nationalists (e.g., the NOI), political nationalists (e.g., the BPP), economic

nationalists (e.g., the black cooperative movement), and cultural nationalists

(e.g., Us) points out something of the complexity of nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Various other taxonomies of nationalism primarily rely on the

binary of revolutionary nationalists and cultural nationalists (sometimes with a third category of territorial nationalists) that marked the terminology of

the Black Power and Black Arts era.

I both use and question this opposition of revolutionary nationalist/cultural nationalist. Like "cultural nationalist," "revolutionary nationalist" is an elastic

term that includes a range of often conflicting ideological positions. As Karenga points out, virtually every variety of African American nationalism

proclaimed the need for some sort of political revolution.[13] I take a major defining characteristic of revolutionary nationalism to be an open

engagement with Marxism (and generally Leninism), particularly with

respect to political economy, Leninist notions of imperialism, and often

Communist formulations of the "national question."

Of course, black revolutionary nationalists often had a rocky, if not actively hostile, relationship to surviving "Old Left" organizations—though as we shall

see, the connections between the Old Left and young black political and cultural radicals of the 1960s and 1970s were in many cases much more live

than has often been allowed. It should also be pointed out that though he found Marxism rooted in a deeply problematic Eurocentrism, varieties of

Marxism nonetheless marked even the cultural nationalism of Maulana Karenga, particularly in his conceptions of ideology, culture, and

hegemony—if only in identifying problems for which he sought a more usable African framework for understanding and solving.

Finally, one of the ironies attending the period is that very often nationalist

groups took up positions originally articulated or popularized by the Left but

that had been repudiated by their Left originators. Probably the most prominent of these positions is that of the black nation or republic in the

South adapted by such nationalist groups as the RNA from the old "Black Belt thesis" of the CPUSA, a position that the Communists formally

abandoned in the 1950s.

For my purposes, I define "cultural nationalism" in the context of the 1960s United States relatively broadly as an insider ideological stance (or a

grouping of related stances) that casts a specific "minority" group as a nation with a particular, if often disputed, national culture. Generally

speaking, the cultural nationalist stance involves a concept of liberation and self-determination, whether in a separate republic, some sort of federated

state, or some smaller community unit (say, Harlem, East Los Angeles, or the Central Ward of Newark). It also often entails some notion of the

development or recovery of a true "national" culture that is linked to an

already existing folk or popular culture.

In the case of African Americans, cultural nationalism also usually posited that the bedrock of black national culture was an African essence that

needed to be rejoined, revitalized, or reconstructed, both in the diaspora and in an Africa deformed by colonialism. Of course, this is also an extremely

simplistic definition. For one thing, cultural nationalist ideas and organizations deeply touched a wide range of black political and cultural

activists from more or less "regular" Democrats to the separatists of the RNA. Even such a reformist Democratic politician as Newark mayor Kenneth

Gibson would announce the following at the first CAP convention: You have to understand that nobody is going to take care of you—of you,

and people like you. We have to understand that nobody is going to deal

with our problems but us. We have to understand that nobody is going to

deal with the realities. And the realities and the basis that we are talking about—those realities—are the basis of nationalism. And so, nationalism is

simply the expression of our recognition of the fact that in the final analysis it is Black people who must solve the problems of Black people.[14]

And there were other Black Power and Black Arts leaders, such as Kwame

Ture, whose ideology in many respects comprehended both revolutionary nationalism and cultural nationalism.

In short, the ideological divisions between cultural and revolutionary

nationalists were often a matter of emphasis, tactical maneuvers in wars of position among nationalist organizations and activists, or attempts by

African American nationalist theorists to find a workable, analytical structure by which to delineate and evaluate the Black Power and Black Arts

movements. As with their predecessors in the Second, Third, and Fourth

Internationals who debated, split, and expelled each other over revisionism, ultraleftism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, and so on, such usages (and the

polemics that surrounded them) are worth recalling in order to make distinctions among different groups and tendencies, but with caution. I will

make some further observations about intergroup and intragroup variations of cultural nationalism and revolutionary nationalism, and some further

caveats about the use of the terms themselves, in the course of this study.

Also, the rubrics of "Left" or "the Left" are quite elastic. Generally speaking, I use "the Left" to cover a spectrum of Marxist (for the most part)

individuals, institutions, and organizations. "Communist Left" denotes the CPUSA and its circle of influence. While such a locution may seem a bit

vague, it is an attempt to find an appellation that could cover people whom I know to have been CPUSA members, others whom I believe (but am not

absolutely sure) were party members, and still others whom I suspect never

joined but strongly supported many of the initiatives of the CPUSA, especially in its work among African Americans. Of course, the uncertainty of

organizational affiliation applies to individuals in other Left circles, especially the Left nationalists of such quasi-underground organizations as RAM in the

1960s. However, the peculiar intensity of anti-Communism in the United States and the continuing impact of the Cold War make the CPUSA and its

members and supporters a special case.

It is also worth noting that the CPUSA, never a monolithic organization, despite its rhetoric of "democratic centralism" in which centralism was often

emphasized over democracy, was in some ways more diffuse in terms of how it (and its members) worked on the ground during the period covered

by this study than it was before or since. In the 1950s and 1960s, the

CPUSA was highly factionalized by debates on how to respond to

McCarthyism and the Cold War, on what were the implications of Khrushchev's revelations about Stalin for party policy and organization (not

to mention morality), on what was the meaning of independence and revolution in former colonial nations for the world Communist movement, on

how to respond to the upsurge of the civil rights movement and a new black nationalism, and so on.

Many left the CPUSA during the course of the debates, reducing the party to

a fraction of its former membership. For those who might have joined the CPUSA during the 1960s, many were daunted both by the pressures of anti-

Communism, including the legacy of Stalinism, and by a sense that many of the top Communist leaders were out of step with the changes in the post-

Bandung Conference, post-Stalin world. There was also a widespread feeling that the CPUSA had in many respects retreated from its positions most

consonant with the new nationalism. For example, the notion of African

Americans as a nation was largely abandoned by the CPUSA during the 1950s—in no small part due to the rise of a mass civil rights movement

addressing issues of black citizenship as well as demographic changes that made the idea of a "Black Belt republic" in the South even more problematic

than it had been when it was first promoted in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Undoubtedly, there was much discomfort with, and often open opposition to,

various sorts of African American nationalism on the part of many in the top leadership of the CPUSA, limiting its public impact on the Black Arts and

Black Power movements in important ways. The pronouncements of party general secretary Gus Hall and the Central Committee of the CPUSA had

little direct influence on the new nationalist and new radical black cultural and political organizations in the 1960s.

However, many rank-and-file Communists and local leaders had a far more favorable or tolerant attitude about working with, encouraging, and joining

in incipient Black Power and Black Arts organizations and activities. Even older national officers and functionaries, especially such black leaders as

James Jackson, William Patterson, Claude Lightfoot, and Henry Winston, might denounce "bourgeois nationalism" one day and then work closely with

nationalists on some particular campaign—or allow rank-and-file members to work within Black Power or Black Arts organizations without serious

interference—the next. In short, the influence of the Communist Left is sometimes hard to define precisely because the actual work of the CPUSA on

the ground locally (and even nationally) was often in contradiction to its stated positions.

"Trotskyist" indicates a number of groups (and their supporters) descended

from Leon Trotsky's Fourth International, particularly the SWP and the WP and their offshoots. Here, also, a certain amount of imprecision is inevitable

since many of the individuals and organizations to emerge from this Left tradition with the greatest impact on the Black Arts and Black Power

movements, including James Boggs, Grace Lee Boggs, C. L. R. James, and the Correspondence and Facing Reality groups, split with the SWP (and

Trotsky) over such issues as the nature of the Soviet Union and the need for a vanguard revolutionary party. Thus, calling them "Trotskyist" is

problematic.

Similarly, "Maoist" is applied with ambiguity to individuals and organizations that in many cases split from the CPUSA in the late 1950s and early 1960s,

seeing the CPUSA as reformist, revisionist, bureaucratic, Eurocentric, and hopelessly tied to a stodgy, overcentralized (if not sinisterly dictatorial),

neocapitalist Soviet Union. Instead, they held up China under Mao as an icon

of a new, truly revolutionary, antirevisionist, post-Bandung Conference Marxism. The most important of these groups for purposes of this study is

the PL—though other Maoist or Third World Marxist formations, such as the LRBW, would be far more significant for the Black Arts and Black Power

movements in the long run.

Some scholars question whether the PL was genuinely "Maoist."[15] Even during the time covered by this study, many of those who might seem to be

in this general category, such as the radical black journalist Richard Gibson, who was a leader of Fair Play for Cuba (and who took Amiri Baraka to Cuba

on a trip that was a milestone in Baraka's political development), preferred to consider themselves "antirevisionists" rather than Maoists.[16] So, again,

such categories as "Maoist" or "antirevisionist" are reductive or a bit vague, if useful.

In sum, such shorthands are convenient but do not begin to do justice to the complexities of the Left. The edges of the circles referenced above are often

very blurry, even if at times they seem incredibly rigid. This should not be surprising, since nearly all these groups shared a single political family

tree—a tree that branched during intense ideological splits and crises. As a result, there was inevitable ideological and even practical overlap at the

same time that there was often vicious rivalry between these groups.

Of course, much the same can be said about the various African American nationalist organizations of the era. And while the leaders of various groups

might seem to have considered each other just about the worst people on earth, on a grassroots level, many people would participate in a wide range

of radical Left and nationalist groups and activities at the same time.

Although it might seem logically inconsistent to, say, simultaneously be a

member of a CPUSA youth organization study group, attend SWP forums, go to Cuba through a PL tour, and spend a lot of time at the local NOI mosque,

such things were common. Again, even leading leftists were far more ideologically tolerant or eclectic in terms of their personal and political

associations than one might expect—especially during the formative days of the Black Arts and Black Power movements.

As a result, I often use such phrases as "CPUSA-influenced" or "associated

with the SWP" to indicate that an institution or event was in whole or in part led, initiated, organized, and so on by individuals closely tied to those Left

groups, usually with some degree of organizational support, but that the institution or event was not "controlled" by those Left groups. "Communist,"

as an adjective or noun, refers to the CPUSA (as opposed to the uncapitalized "communist," which would comprehend the SWP, the WP, and

the PL, all of which saw themselves as "communist" in the Leninist sense).

Likewise, "Socialist" refers to the Socialist Party and "socialist" to the general idea of socialism as a political and economic system, an idea to which nearly

all the Left groups mentioned in this study subscribed. I prefer to avoid the term "front" (except in the case of "Popular Front") because of its obvious

Cold War connotations.

While I try to indicate the degree to which a particular institution or individual was connected to the Left, precision is not always possible—both

because the ideological orientation of institutions (and even of individuals) was often not unified and because the persistence of Cold War attitudes (and

individual change of opinion) even today makes some people reluctant to reveal their precise political affiliation back in the 1950s and 1960s. Again,

even when that affiliation seems obvious, actual behavior is sometimes quite surprising—at least to the outsider. For example, many, if not all, of the

founders of the journal Freedomways were members of or sympathetic to

the CPUSA—or at least what remained of the overlapping black political and cultural circles of the Popular Front.

There was considerable support for the journal in the CPUSA leadership—

after all, James Jackson, among the most prominent African Americans in the party and editor of the Communist newspaper The Worker in the early

1960s, was married to the managing editor of Freedomways, Esther Cooper Jackson. Nonetheless, the editors of the journal tended to be more open to

black nationalism than many of the top leaders of the CPUSA—and had a hostile relationship to the historian Herbert Aptheker, who wielded enormous

influence in the top echelons of the party with respect to what would now be thought of as African American studies. In short, as Lenin quoted from

Goethe's Faust in the 1917 Letters on Tactics, "'Theory, my friend, is grey,

but green is the eternal tree of life.'"[17]

My use of generational categories merits some comment also. Generally speaking, I use the terms "older writers" and "older artists" to designate

those artists and intellectuals who were born in the early twentieth century and came of age during what I think of as the extended Popular Front era,

from the mid-1930s to about 1948. "Younger writers," "younger artists," and so on refer to those born in the 1930s and 1940s, coming to artistic and

intellectual maturity during the Cold War. Of course, even within those broad groupings, there are considerable differences between age cohorts.

Someone who was a seven-year-old when the United States entered World War II, as was Amiri Baraka, will have a somewhat different outlook than

someone born during the war, as was Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee).

Also, it is worth recalling that artists' career cohorts do not always coincide

with their generational peers, in important ways. For example, Dudley Randall's generational peers were really the Popular Front cohort that

included Esther Cooper Jackson, Margaret Burroughs, Margaret Walker, and his close friend Robert Hayden. But though, as Randall himself said, in many

ways he remained much influenced by the political and cultural world of the Great Depression, his literary career did not really take off until the 1960s.

So, like other sorts of political and cultural categories, generational divisions

have some use as analytical categories, but only to a point. To help readers sort out these age groups, I have included a selected list of black artists and

activists mentioned in this study with their dates of birth in Appendix 1. I have also included a time line (Appendix 2) to help readers navigate the

complicated chronology of the Black Arts and Black Power movements.

Source: http://uncpress.unc.edu/chapters/smethurst_black.html

http://uncpress.unc.edu/chapters/smethurst_black.html

http://rbgnation.ning.com/group/revolutionarypoetsunite

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