+nelson, C. (N-D) The Black Arts Movement (For Black People and Negroes Too)

Form Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford) |1
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
The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

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-
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.
Tour (Roland Snellings; also a visual artist), Brenda Walcott, and musician-writer Archie
Shepp. Tour, a major shaper of "cultural nationalism," directly influenced Jones. Along with
Umbra writer Charles Patterson and Charles's brother, William Patterson, Tour 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 Tour 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 Tour 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 Tour
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 Tour 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. Tour, 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
Kings 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 Tour. 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 Readers
Digest, Negro Digest changed its name to Black World in 1970, indicative of Fullers 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 Barakas 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.

Form Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford) | 10
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 Womens 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,

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 Grimk 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 Tour (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 Tour 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. Tour. 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, Tour 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 Tour, 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. Tour, 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. Tour, 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

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
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
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

"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-Americans 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 Americasone 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."

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 Americathe
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 levelson 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 artour 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.

+nelson, C. (N-D) The Black Arts Movement (For Black People and Negroes Too)

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Form Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford) |1

The Black Arts

Compiled and Prepared by Cary Nelson

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

Historical Overviews of The Black Arts Movement

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

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

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

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

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

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

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

Return to The Black Arts Movement

Furious Flower: African American Poetry,

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

New Negro Renaissance

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

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Documents from the Black Arts

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

his subject will find himself unproductive.

Reprinted from Black Theater 3, pp. 9-10.

"The Revolutionary Theatre"

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

from Liberator, July, 1965, pp. 4-6.

"Black Writing is Socio-Creative Art"

Originally published in Liberator, April, 1967, pp. 8-10.

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

"Black Writing: Release from Object"

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

Originally published in Liberator, September, 1967, pp. 17, 20.

from "The Black Arts Movement"

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

The fair are fair

The day will not save them

Poems are bullshit unless they are

. .. Put it on him poem. Strip him naked

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

. . .Let Black people understand

We want a black poem. And a

from "Black Cultural Nationalism"

Return to The Black Arts Movement

The Black Arts Movement Cary Nelson

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