Literary Criticism
The Black Arts Movement
Content Focus
The Black Arts Movement began—symbolically, at least—the day after Malcolm X
was assassinated in 1965. The poet LeRoi Jones (soon to rename himself Amiri
Baraka) announced he would leave his integrated life on New York City’s Lower East
Side for Harlem. There he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre, home to
workshops in poetry, playwriting, music, and painting.
The Black Arts, wrote poet Larry Neal, was “the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the
Black Power concept.” As with that burgeoning political movement, the Black Arts
Movement emphasized self-determination for Black people, a separate cultural
existence for Black people on their own terms, and the beauty and goodness of
being Black. Black Arts poets embodied these ideas in a defiantly Black poetic
language that drew on Black musical forms, especially jazz; Black vernacular
speech; African folklore; and radical experimentation with sound, spelling, and
grammar. Black Arts Movement poet and publisher Haki Madhubuti wrote, “And the
mission is how do we become a whole people, and how do we begin to essentially
tell our narrative, while at the same time move toward a level of success in this
country and in the world? And we can do that. I know we can do that.”
The Black Arts Movement was politically militant; Baraka described its goal as “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.” Drawing on chants, slogans, and rituals of call and response,
Black Arts poetry was meant to be politically galvanizing. Because of its politics—as
well as what some saw as its potentially homophobic, sexist, and anti-Semitic
elements—the Black Arts Movement was one of the most controversial literary
movements in US history.
The movement began to wane in the mid-1970s, in tandem with its political
counterpart, the Black Power movement. Government surveillance and violence
decimated Black Power organizations, but the Black Arts Movement fell prey to
internal schism—notably over Baraka’s shift from Black nationalism to Marxism-
Leninism—and financial difficulties.
Mainstream theaters and publishing houses embraced a select number of Black Arts
Movement poets seen as especially salable to white audiences. When these artists
moved on from Black Arts presses and theaters, the revenue from their books and
plays went with them. The independent economic support structure the movement
had hoped to build for itself was decimated. “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,” wrote poet, filmmaker, and teacher Kalamu ya Salaam. Along with the
economic recession of the 1970s and philanthropic foundations’ unwillingness to
fund arts organizations that advocated radical politics, the cooption of a few Black
artists by a white establishment meant the movement was no longer financially
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viable.
Despite its brief official existence, the movement created enduring institutions
dedicated to promoting the work of Black artists, such as Chicago’s Third World
Press and Detroit’s Broadside Press, as well as community theaters. It also created
space for the Black artists who came afterward, especially rappers, slam poets, and
those who explicitly draw on the movement’s legacy. Ishmael Reed, a sometimes
opponent of the Black Arts Movement, still noted its importance 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.”
This collection brings together poems, podcasts, and essays by or about Black Arts
Movement writers. Of course, we cannot pay tribute to every single poet's
contribution and affiliation with this movement, so this collection is intended to be a
beginning point, not the end point. To suggest additions to the collection, please
contact us here.
Legacy
BY AMIRI BARAKA
(For Blues People)
In the south, sleeping against
the drugstore, growling under
the trucks and stoves, stumbling
through and over the cluttered eyes
of early mysterious night. Frowning
drunk waving moving a hand or lash.
Dancing kneeling reaching out, letting
a hand rest in shadows. Squatting
to drink or pee. Stretching to climb
pulling themselves onto horses near
where there was sea (the old songs
lead you to believe). Riding out
from this town, to another, where
it is also black. Down a road
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where people are asleep. Towards
the moon or the shadows of houses.
Towards the songs’ pretended sea.
Young Afrikans
BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS
of the furious
Who take Today and jerk it out of joint
have made new underpinnings and a Head.
Blacktime is time for chimeful
poemhood
but they decree a
jagged chiming now.
If there are flowers flowers
must come out to the road. Rowdy!—
knowing where wheels and people are,
knowing where whips and screams are,
knowing where deaths are, where the kind kills are.
As for that other kind of kindness,
if there is milk it must be mindful.
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The milkofhumankindness must be mindful
as wily wines.
Must be fine fury.
Must be mega, must be main.
Taking Today (to jerk it out of joint)
the hardheroic maim the
leechlike-as-usual who use,
adhere to, carp, and harm.
And they await,
across the Changes and the spiraling dead,
our Black revival, our Black vinegar,
our hands, and our hot blood.
The Healing Improvisation of Hair
BY JAY WRIGHT
If you undo your do you would
be strange. Hair has been on my mind.
I used to lean in the doorway
and watch my stony woman wind
the copper through the black, and play
with my understanding, show me she cóuld
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take a cup of river water,
and watch it shimmy, watch it change,
turn around and become ash bone.
Wind in the cottonwoods wakes me
to a day so thin its breastbone
shows, so paid out it shakes me free
of its blue dust. I will arrange
that river water, bottom juice.
I conjure my head in the stream
and ride with the silk feel of it
as my woman bathes me, and shaves
away the scorn, sponges the grit
of solitude from my skin, laves
the salt water of self-esteem
over my feathering body.
How like joy to come upon me
in remembering a head of hair
and the way water would caress
it, and stress beauty in the flair
and cut of the only witness
to my dance under sorrow's tree.
This swift darkness is spring's first hour.
I carried my life, like a stone,
in a ragged pocket, but I
had a true weaving song, a sly
way with rhythm, a healing tone.
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Resources
The Healing Improvisation of Hair | The Poetry Foundation
The Black Arts Movement
