The Black Arts Movement: A Concise Historical Overview

Historical Overviews of The Black Arts Movement, Kaluma ya Salaam

The Black Arts Movement, Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s
By James Edward Smethurst

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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.
Touré (Roland Snellings; also a visual artist), Brenda Walcott, and musician-writer Archie
Shepp. Touré, a major shaper of "cultural nationalism," directly influenced Jones. Along with
Umbra writer Charles Patterson and Charles's brother, William Patterson, Touré joined Jones,
Steve Young, and others at BARTS.

Umbra, which produced Umbra Magazine, was the first post-civil rights Black literary group to
make an impact as radical in the sense of establishing their own voice distinct from, and
sometimes at odds with, the prevailing white literary establishment. The attempt to merge a
Black-oriented activist thrust with a primarily artistic orientation produced a classic split in
Umbra between those who wanted to be activists and those who thought of themselves as
primarily writers, though to some extent all members shared both views. Black writers have
always had to face the issue of whether their work was primarily political or aesthetic. Moreover,
Umbra itself had evolved out of similar circumstances: In 1960 a Black nationalist literary
organization, On Guard for Freedom, had been founded on the Lower East Side by Calvin Hicks.
Its members included Nannie and Walter Bowe, Harold Cruse (who was then working on Crisis
of the Negro Intellectual, 1967), Tom Dent, Rosa Guy, Joe Johnson, LeRoi Jones, and Sarah
Wright, among others. On Guard was active in a famous protest at the United Nations of the
American-sponsored Bay of Pigs Cuban invasion and was active in support of the Congolese
liberation leader Patrice Lumumba. From On Guard, Dent, Johnson, and Walcott along with
Hernton, Henderson, and Touré established Umbra.

Another formation of Black writers at that time was the Harlem Writers Guild, led by John O.
Killens, which included Maya Angelou, Jean Carey Bond, Rosa Guy, and Sarah Wright among
others. But the Harlem Writers Guild focused on prose, primarily fiction, which did not have the
mass appeal of poetry performed in the dynamic vernacular of the time. Poems could be built
around anthems, chants, and political slogans, and thereby used in organizing work, which was
not generally the case with novels and short stories. Moreover, the poets could and did publish
themselves, whereas greater resources were needed to publish fiction. That Umbra was primarily
poetry- and performance-oriented established a significant and classic characteristic of the
movement's aesthetics.

When Umbra split up, some members, led by Askia Touré and Al Haynes, moved to Harlem in
late 1964 and formed the nationalist-oriented "Uptown Writers Movement," which included
poets Yusef Rahman, Keorapetse "Willie" Kgositsile from South Africa, and Larry Neal.


Accompanied by young "New Music" musicians, they performed poetry all over Harlem.
Members of this group joined LeRoi Jones in founding BARTS.

Jones's move to Harlem was short-lived. In December 1965 he returned to his home, Newark
(N.J.), and left BARTS in serious disarray. BARTS failed but the Black Arts center concept was
irrepressible mainly because the Black Arts movement was so closely aligned with the then-
burgeoning Black Power movement.

The mid- to late 1960s was a period of intense revolutionary ferment. Beginning in 1964,
rebellions in Harlem and Rochester, New York, initiated four years of long hot summers. Watts,
Detroit, Newark, Cleveland, and many other cities went up in flames, culminating in nationwide
explosions of resentment and anger following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s April 1968 assassination.

In his seminal 1965 poem "Black Art," which quickly became the major poetic manifesto of the
Black Arts literary movement, Jones declaimed "we want poems that kill." He was not simply
speaking metaphorically. During that period armed self-defense and slogans such as "Arm
yourself or harm yourself' established a social climate that promoted confrontation with the white
power structure, especially the police (e.g., "Off the pigs"). Indeed, Amiri Baraka (Jones changed
his name in 1967) had been arrested and convicted (later overturned on appeal) on a gun
possession charge during the 1967 Newark rebellion. Additionally, armed struggle was widely
viewed as not only a legitimate, but often as the only effective means of liberation. Black Arts'
dynamism, impact, and effectiveness are a direct result of its partisan nature and advocacy of
artistic and political freedom "by any means necessary." America had never experienced such a
militant artistic movement.

Nathan Hare, the author of The Black Anglo-Saxons (1965), was the founder of 1960s Black
Studies. Expelled from Howard University, Hare moved to San Francisco State University where
the battle to establish a Black Studies department was waged during a five-month strike during
the 1968-1969 school year. As with the establishment of Black Arts, which included a range of
forces, there was broad activity in the Bay Area around Black Studies, including efforts led by
poet and professor Sarah Webster Fabio at Merrit College.

The initial thrust of Black Arts ideological development came from the Revolutionary Action
Movement (RAM), a national organization with a strong presence in New York City. Both Touré
and Neal were members of RAM. After RAM, the major ideological force shaping the Black
Arts movement was the US (as opposed to "them') organization led by Maulana Karenga. Also
ideologically important was Elijah Muhammad's Chicago-based Nation of Islam.

These three formations provided both style and ideological direction for Black Arts artists,
including those who were not members of these or any other political organization. Although the
Black Arts movement is often considered a New York-based movement, two of its three major
forces were located outside New York City.

As the movement matured, the two major locations of Black Arts' ideological leadership,
particularly for literary work, were California's Bay Area because of the Journal of Black Poetry
and the Black Scholar, and the Chicago-Detroit axis because of Negro Digest/Black World and


Third World Press in Chicago, and Broadside Press and Naomi Long Madgett's Lotus Press in
Detroit. The only major Black Arts literary publications to come out of New York were the
short-lived (six issues between 1969 and 1972) Black Theatre magazine published by the New
Lafayette Theatre and Black Dialogue, which had actually started in San Francisco (1964-1968)
and relocated to New York (1969-1972).

In 1967 LeRoi Jones visited Karenga in Los Angeles and became an advocate of Karenga's
philosophy of Kawaida. Kawaida, which produced the "Nguzo Saba" (seven principles),
Kwanzaa, and an emphasis on African names, was a multifaceted, categorized activist
philosophy. Jones also met Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver and worked with a number of the
founding members of the Black Panthers. Additionally, Askia Touré was a visiting professor at
San Francisco State and was to become a leading (and longlasting) poet as well as, arguably, the
most influential poet-professor in the Black Arts movement. Playwright Ed Bullins and poet
Marvin X had established Black Arts West, and Dingane Joe Goncalves had founded the Journal
of Black Poetry (1966). This grouping of Ed Bullins, Dingane Joe Goncalves, LeRoi Jones,
Sonia Sanchez, Askia M. Touré, and Marvin X became a major nucleus of Black Arts leadership.

Theory and Practice. The two hallmarks of Black Arts activity were the development of Black
theater groups and Black poetry performances and journals, and both had close ties to
community organizations and issues. Black theaters served as the focus of poetry, dance, and
music performances in addition to formal and ritual drama. Black theaters were also venues for
community meetings, lectures, study groups, and film screenings. The summer of 1968 issue of
Drama Review, a special on Black theater edited by Ed Bullins, literally became a Black Arts
textbook that featured essays and plays by most of the major movers: Larry Neal, Ben Caldwell,
LeRoi Jones, Jimmy Garrett, John O'Neal, Sonia Sanchez, Marvin X, Ron Milner, Woodie King,
Jr., Bill Gunn, Ed Bullins, and Adam David Miller. Black Arts theater proudly emphasized its
activist roots and orientations in distinct, and often antagonistic, contradiction to traditional
theaters, both Black and white, which were either commercial or strictly artistic in focus.

By 1970 Black Arts theaters and cultural centers were active throughout America. The New
Lafayette Theatre (Bob Macbeth, executive director, and Ed Bullins, writer in residence) and
Barbara Ann Teer's National Black Theatre led the way in New York, Baraka's Spirit House
Movers held forth in Newark and traveled up and down the East Coast. The Organization of
Black American Culture (OBAC) and Val Grey Ward's Kuumba Theatre Company were leading
forces in Chicago, from where emerged a host of writers, artists, and musicians including the
OBAC visual artist collective whose "Wall of Respect" inspired the national community-based
public murals movement and led to the formation of Afri-Cobra (the African Commune of Bad,
Revolutionary Artists). There was David Rambeau's Concept East and Ron Milner and Woodie
King’s Black Arts Midwest, both based in Detroit. Ron Milner became the Black Arts
movement's most enduring playwright and Woodie King became its leading theater impresario
when he moved to New York City. In Los Angeles there was the Ebony Showcase, Inner City
Repertory Company, and the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles (PALSA) led by Vantile
Whitfield. In San Francisco was the aforementioned Black Arts West. BLKARTSOUTH (led by
Tom Dent and Kalamu ya Salaam) was an outgrowth of the Free Southern Theatre in New
Orleans and was instrumental in encouraging Black theater development across the south from
the Theatre of Afro Arts in Miami, Florida, to Sudan Arts Southwest in Houston, Texas, through


an organization called the Southern Black Cultural Alliance. In addition to formal Black theater
repertory companies in numerous other cities, there were literally hundreds of Black Arts
community and campus theater groups.

A major reason for the widespread dissemination and adoption of Black Arts was the
development of nationally distributed magazines that printed manifestos and critiques in addition
to offering publishing opportunities for a proliferation of young writers. Whether establishment
or independent, Black or white, most literary publications rejected Black Arts writers. The
movement's first literary expressions in the early 1960s came through two New York-based,
nationally distributed magazines, Freedomways and Liberator. Freedomways, "a journal of the
Freedom Movement," backed by leftists, was receptive to young Black writers. The more
important magazine was Dan Watts's Liberator, which openly aligned itself with both domestic
and international revolutionary movements. Many of the early writings of critical Black Arts
voices are found in Liberator. Neither of these were primarily literary journals.

The first major Black Arts literary publication was the California-based Black Dialogue (1964),
edited by Arthur A. Sheridan, Abdul Karim, Edward Spriggs, Aubrey Labrie, and Marvin
Jackmon (Marvin X). Black Dialogue was paralleled by Soulbook (1964), edited by Mamadou
Lumumba (Kenn Freeman) and Bobb Hamilton. Oakland-based Soulbook was mainly political
but included poetry in a section ironically titled "Reject Notes."

Dingane Joe Goncalves became Black Dialogue's poetry editor and, as more and more poetry
poured in, he conceived of starting the Journal of Black Poetry. Founded in San Francisco, the
first issue was a small magazine with mimeographed pages and a lithographed cover. Up through
the summer of 1975, the Journal published nineteen issues and grew to over one hundred pages.
Publishing a broad range of more than five hundred poets, its editorial policy was eclectic.
Special issues were given to guest editors who included Ahmed Alhamisi, Don L. Lee (Haki R.
Madhubuti), Clarence Major, Larry Neal, Dudley Randall, Ed Spriggs, and Askia Touré. In
addition to African Americans, African, Caribbean, Asian, and other international revolutionary
poets were presented.

Founded in 1969 by Nathan Hare and Robert Chrisman, the Black Scholar, "the first journal of
black studies and research in this country," was theoretically critical. Major African-disasporan
and African theorists were represented in its pages. In a 1995 interview Chrisman attributed
much of what exists today to the groundwork laid by the Black Arts movement:

If we had not had a Black Arts movement in the sixties we certainly wouldn't have had national
Black literary figures like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alice Walker, or Toni Morrison because much
more so than the Harlem Renaissance, in which Black artists were always on the leash of white
patrons and publishing houses, the Black Arts movement did it for itself. What you had was
Black people going out nationally, in mass, saving that we are an independent Black people and
this is what we produce.

For the publication of Black Arts creative literature, no magazine was more important than the
Chicago-based Johnson publication Negro Digest / Black World. Johnson published America's
most popular Black magazines, Jet and Ebony. Hoyt Fuller, who became the editor in 1961, was


a Black intellectual with near-encyclopedic knowledge of Black literature and seemingly
inexhaustible contacts. Because Negro Digest, a monthly, ninety-eight-page journal, was a
Johnson publication, it was sold on newsstands nationwide. Originally patterned on Reader’s
Digest, Negro Digest changed its name to Black World in 1970, indicative of Fuller’s view that
the magazine ought to be a voice for Black people everywhere. The name change also reflected
the widespread rejection of "Negro" and the adoption of "Black" as the designation of choice for
people of African descent and to indicate identification with both the diaspora and Africa. The
legitimation of "Black" and "African" is another enduring legacy of the Black Arts movement.

Negro Digest / Black World published both a high volume and an impressive range of poetry,
fiction, criticism, drama, reviews, reportage, and theoretical articles. A consistent highlight was
Fuller's perceptive column Perspectives ("Notes on books, writers, artists and the arts") which
informed readers of new publications, upcoming cultural events and conferences, and also
provided succinct coverage of major literary developments. Fuller produced annual poetry,
drama, and fiction issues, sponsored literary contests, and gave out literary awards. Fuller
published a variety of viewpoints but always insisted on editorial excellence and thus made
Negro Digest / Black World a first-rate literary publication. Johnson decided to cease publication
of Black World in April 1976: allegedly in response to a threatened withdrawal of advertisement
from all of Johnson's publications because of pro-Palestinian/anti-Zionist articles in Black World.

The two major Black Arts presses were poet Dudley Randall's Broadside Press in Detroit and
Haki Madhubuti's Third World Press in Chicago. From a literary standpoint, Broadside Press,
which concentrated almost exclusively on poetry, was by far the more important. Founded in
1965, Broadside published more than four hundred poets in more than one hundred books or
recordings and was singularly responsible for presenting older Black poets (Gwendolyn Brooks,
Sterling A. Brown, and Margaret Walker) to a new audience and introducing emerging poets
(Nikki Giovanni, Etheridge Knight, Don L. Lee/Haki Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez) who
would go on to become major voices for the movement. In 1976, strapped by economic
restrictions and with a severely overworked and overwhelmed three-person staff, Broadside
Press went into serious decline. Although it functions mainly on its back catalog, Broadside
Press is still alive.

While a number of poets (e.g., Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, and Sonia
Sanchez), playwrights (e.g., Ed Bullins and Ron Milner), and spoken-word artists (e.g., the Last
Poets and Gil Scott-Heron, both of whom were extremely popular and influential although often
overlooked by literary critics) are indelibly associated with the Black Arts movement, rather than
focusing on their individual work, one gets a much stronger and much more accurate impression
of the movement by reading seven anthologies focusing on the 1960s and the 1970s.

Black Fire (1968), edited by Baraka and Neal, is a massive collection of essays, poetry, fiction,
and drama featuring the first wave of Black Arts writers and thinkers. Because of its impressive
breadth, Black Fire stands as a definitive movement anthology.

For Malcolm X, Poems on the Life and the Death of Malcolm X (1969), edited by Dudley
Randall and Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs, demonstrates the political thrust of the movement



and the specific influence of Malcolm X. There is no comparable anthology in American poetry
that focuses on a political figure as poetic inspiration.

The Black Woman (1970), edited by Toni Cade Bambara, is the first major Black feminist
anthology and features work by Jean Bond, Nikki Giovanni, Abbey Lincoln, Audre Lorde, Paule
Marshall, Gwen Patton, Pat Robinson, Alice Walker, Shirley Williams, and others.

Edited by Addison Gayle, Jr., The Black Aesthetic (1971) is significant because it both articulates
and contextualizes Black Arts theory. The work of writers such as Alain Locke, W. E. B. Du
Bois, Langston Hughes, and J. A. Rogers showcases the movement's roots in an earlier era into
sections on theory, music, fiction, poetry, and drama, Gayle's seminal anthology features a broad
array of writers who are regarded as the chief Black Arts theorists-practitioners.

Stephen Henderson's Understanding the New Black Poetry (1972) is important not only because
of the poets included but also because of Henderson's insightful and unparalleled sixty-seven
page overview. This is the movement's most thorough exposition of a Black poetic aesthetic.
Insights and lines of thought now taken for granted were first articulated in a critical and formal
context by Stephen Henderson, who proposed a totally innovative reading of Black poetics.

New Black Voices (1972), edited by Abraham Chapman, is significant because its focus is
specifically on the emerging voices in addition to new work by established voices who were
active in the Black Arts movement. Unlike most anthologies, which overlook the South, New
Black Voices is geographically representative and includes lively pro and con articles side by
side debating aesthetic and political theory.

The seventh book, Eugene Redmond's Drumvoices, The Mission of Afro-American Poetry: A
Critical History (1976), is a surprisingly thorough survey that has been unjustly neglected.
Although some of his opinions are controversial (note that in the movement controversy was
normal), Redmond's era by era and city by city cataloging of literary collectives as well as
individual writers offers an invaluable service in detailing the movement's national scope.

The Movement's Breakup. The decline of the Black Arts movement began in 1974 when the
Black Power movement was disrupted and co-opted. Black political organizations were hounded,
disrupted, and defeated by repressive government measures, such as Cointelpro and IRS probes.
Black Studies activist leadership was gutted and replaced by academicians and trained
administrators who were unreceptive, if not outright opposed, to the movements political
orientation.

Key internal events in the disruption were the split between nationalists and Marxists in the
African Liberation Support Committee (May 1974), the Sixth Pan African Congress in Tanzania
where race-based struggle was repudiated/denounced by most of the strongest forces in Africa
(Aug. 1974), and Baraka’s national organization, the Congress of Afrikan People (CAP),
officially changing from a "Pan Afrikan Nationalist" to a "Marxist Leninist" organization (Oct.
1974).



As the movement reeled from the combination of external and internal disruption,
commercialization and capitalist co-option delivered the coup de grace. President Richard
Nixon's strategy of pushing Black capitalism as a response to Black Power epitomized
mainstream co-option. As major film, record, book, and magazine publishers identified the most
salable artists, the Black Arts movement's already fragile independent economic base was totally
undermined.

In an overwhelmingly successful effort to capitalize on the upsurge of interest in the feminist
movement, establishment presses focused particular attention on the work of Black women
writers. Although issues of sexism had been widely and hotly debated within movement
publications and organizations, the initiative passed from Black Arts back to the establishment.
Emblematic of the establishment overtaking (some would argue "co-opting") Black Arts activity
is Ntozake Shange's for colored girls, which in 1976 ended up on Broadway produced by Joseph
Papp even though it had been workshopped at Woodie King's New Federal Theatre of the Henry
Street Settlement on the Lower East Side. Black Arts was not able to match the economic and
publicity offers tendered by establishment concerns.

Corporate America (both the commercial sector and the academic sector) once again selected
and propagated one or two handpicked Black writers. During the height of Black Arts activity,
each community had a coterie of writers and there were publishing outlets for hundreds, but once
the mainstream regained control, Black artists were tokenized. Although Black Arts activity
continued into the early 1980s, by 1976, the year of what Gil Scott-Heron called the "Buy-
Centennial," the movement was without any sustainable and effective political or economic
bases in an economically strapped Black community. An additional complicating factor was the
economic recession, resulting from the oil crisis, which the Black community experienced as a
depression. Simultaneously, philanthropic foundations only funded non-threatening, "arts
oriented" groups. Neither the Black Arts nor the Black Power movements ever recovered.

The Legacy. In addition to advocating political engagement and independent publishing, the
Black Arts movement was innovative in its use of language. Speech (particularly, but not
exclusively, Black English), music, and performance were major elements of Black Arts
literature. Black Arts aesthetics emphasized orality, which includes the ritual use of call and
response both within the body of the work itself as well as between artist and audience. This
same orientation is apparent in rap music and 1990s "performance poetry" (e.g., Nuyorican Poets
and poetry slams).

While right-wing trends attempt to push America's cultural clock back to the 1950s, Black Arts
continues to evidence resiliency in the Black community and among other marginalized sectors.
When people encounter the Black Arts movement, they are delighted and inspired by the most
audacious, prolific, and socially engaged literary movement in America's history.

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


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 Women’s Writing in the United States. New York: Oxford UP,
1995. Copyright © 1995 by Oxford UP

Return to The Black Arts Movement

Furious Flower: African American Poetry,
An Overview--by Joanne V. Gabbin
The time
cracks into furious flower. Lifts its face
all unashamed. And sways in wicked grace.
-Gwendolyn Brooks

African American poetry is the aesthetic chronicle of a race, as Gwendolyn Brooks expresses it,
struggling to lift "its face all unashamed" in an alien land. From the earliest attempts of African
American poets in the eighteenth century to express lyrically their adjustment to existence in a
society that debated their humanity to their intense exploration of their voice in the waning years
of a racially charged twentieth century, they have built an aesthetic tradition that affirms them,
using a language and literary models adapted to meet their cultural purposes. From the very
beginning these poets had a challenging, often agonizing, set of problems: the selection of
subject matter, themes, and forms to express their thoughts and feelings; the cultivation of a
voice expressive of their racial consciousness; the reception of the desired audience; the support
of a publishing and critical infrastructure; the nature of their relationship with other literary
traditions; and the identification of the anima and purpose of their literary efforts. In essence,



African American poetry is metaphorically the "furious flower" of Gwendolyn Brooks' poem
"The Second Sermon on the Warpland" (1968), pointing to two significant intertwining
developments: one radical and the other aesthetic.

When Lucy Terry wrote "Bars Flight" (1746), the first poem written by an African in America,
she set in motion a poetic tradition characterized by the furious pursuit of liberation in all of its
dimensions as well as the cultivation of a cultural voice authenticated by its own distinctive oral
forms and remembered, communal values. Speaking of this first development, Stephen
Henderson in his seminal work Understanding the New Black Poetry (1972) writes that the idea
of liberation permeated African American literary consciousness from slavery to the tumultuous
1960s, when poets reflected widespread disenchantment with white middle-class values and
embraced cultural values emanating from Africa and the African diaspora. From Jupiter
Hammon to Kevin Powell the idea of liberation has informed and energized African American
poetry. African American poets have been creators and critics of social values as they envisioned
a world of justice and equality. Nineteenth-century poets voiced the slaves' complaint in the
abolitionist struggle and rallied the troops in the cause of emancipation and freedom. African
American poets in the twentieth century continued to rail against the status quo and protested
attitudes and institutions that stood to impede the civil rights movement that changed the nature
of American society. As these poets reflected African American concerns in the context of a
larger American culture, they created a body of poetry that grew out of folk roots; legitimized
poetry as a performative, participatory activity, and succeeded in creating an aesthetic tradition
defined by communal values, the primacy of musicality and improvisation, and inventive style.

Roots in Liberation

The fertile soil of American Wesleyanism and the revolutionary fervor for liberty that
culminated in the American Revolution animated the poetic impulse in Jupiter Hammon and
Phillis Wheatley. Hammon, the first African American to publish a poem, "An Evening
Thought" (1761), longed for salvation from this world and acquiesced to enslavement on earth.
Phillis Wheatley, the precocious servant of the Wheatleys of Boston, wrote her earliest verse as a
mere adolescent in the late 1760s. She chose subjects that reflected her comfortable and
privileged position and her absorption of a New England education which emphasized the
reading of the Bible and the classics. Her first volume of poems entitled Poems on Various
Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) contained occasional poems eulogizing notable figures and
celebrating significant events such as George Washington's appointment as commander of the
Continental Army. Phillis Wheatley, kidnapped at the age of seven, brought to America in a
slave ship and sold in 1761, noted as the "Sable Muse" of Boston whose fame spread to England,
aware of her own fortunate status in contrast to the lot of impoverished blacks in Boston's ghetto,
did not commit any of these subjects to poetry. Her own condemnation of slavery and censure of
so-called "Christian" slaveholders and the joys and sorrows associated with her marriage and the
birth of her children are preserved only in personal letters. Whether out of a sense of Christian
humility or a preference for personal detachment taught by neoclassical conventions, she alluded
to her own experience only on rare occasions. More pronounced, however, in her poems, as well
as Hammon's, are the issues of religious devotedness, patriotism and liberation which were not
generally clouded by the unsettling moral issues of slavery and universal equality.



It would be more than fifty years before George Moses Horton made slavery the major subject of
his poems. With The Hope of Liberty (1829), Horton staked his personal freedom on the fruits of
his pen; however, the book failed to raise the money needed to buy his freedom. He would not
realize his goal until 1865 when the Union Army freed him. Horton, who delighted the university
students at Chapel Hill with his humorous and witty jingles and parlayed his art into a money-
making enterprise, found liberty a less than lucrative subject matter. However, when Frances
Ellen Watkins Harper, the popular abolitionist orator and poet, published her Poems on
Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), she found its reception enthusiastic. The volume, which included
poems on the tragic circumstances of slavery, went through twenty editions by 1874.

Other nineteenth-century African American poets anticipated Paul Laurence Dunbar's question
concerning "why the caged bird sings." James Monroe Whitfield appears to speak for several of
his contemporaries when he has the speaker in "The Misanthropist" say, "In vain thou bid'st me
strike the lyre,/and sing a song of mirth and glee." For Whitfield, James Madison Bell and
Alberry A. Whitman, the thoughts that troubled their mind -- the evils of slavery, the hope of
freedom, struggles with oppression and violence -- were frought "with gloom and darkness, woe
and pain." These poets continued the tradition of protest begun by Horton. However, James
Campbell and Daniel Webster Davis made mirth their dominant lyric and wrote dialect poems
that mimicked the stereotypes of the popular plantation tradition. Other poets like Ann Plato and
Henrietta Ray took the route of romantic escapism.

With the publication of Oak and Ivy in 1893, Paul Laurence Dunbar inaugurated a new era in
African American literary expression, revealing himself as one of the finest lyricists America had
produced. His second book Majors and Minors (1895) attracted the favorable attention and
endorsement of the literary critic William Dean Howells. Howells's now classic introduction of
Dunbar's third volume of poems, Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), became the quintessential literary
piece of damning praise that elevated Dunbar's dialect poems above his poems written in
standard English. It ensured his acceptance and popularity among an audience of white readers
who were warmed by the good cheer of the hearthside and comforted by the aura of pastoral
contentment, hallmarks of Dunbar's bucolic verse. His obligatory mimicking of the plantation
tradition conventions popularized by Irwin Russell, Joel Chandler Harris, and Thomas Nelson
Page resulted in a perpetuation of these conventions. However, there was no denying for many
the immense popularity, freshness, humor, and catchy rhythms of his memorable dialect poems.
Nonetheless, Dunbar's meteoric rise to fame did not accommodate a thorough and broad
appreciation of the other side of his genius displayed in his non-dialect poems. Tragically, the
young poet lived a scant ten years after the publication of Lyrics of Lowly Life, years that were
filled with regret that the world had ignored his deeper notes "to praise a jingle in a broken
tongue."

The turn of the century witnessed African American poets adopting popular literary traditions
and with varied and eclectic approaches joining other poets as the "new" American poetry burst
upon the scene. Poets such as Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, Amy Lowell,
Hilda Doolittle, and Robert Frost ushered in a respect for ordinary speech, freedom of choice in
subject matter, concentration on vers libre and imagism, an unembarrassed celebration of
American culture, and irreverent experimentation. African American poets were influenced by
these experiments with local color, regionalism, realism, and naturalism and joined other


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

Several African American women nurtured their poetic talent in this atmosphere of literary
freedom. Angelina Weld Grimké wrote lush lyrics on nature and love. Using conventional forms,
Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson explored a woman's heart in ways considered less than
conventional by an audience gradually emerging from Victorianism. Anne Spencer, never as
celebrated as her prodigious talent warranted, achieved precision in her imagery and great depth
of emotion. Unlike Spencer, who lived quietly in Lynchburg, Virginia, Georgia Douglas Johnson
was at the hub of Washington's literary circle and, with the encouragement of several literary
luminaries, published three volumes of poems. However, as was the circumstance of African
American women poets during the first three decades of the twentieth century, her limited
exposure and promotion diminished her critical reception.

This was not, however, the case for Benjamin Brawley and William Stanley Braithwaite,
nationally known scholars who also wrote poetry. Benjamin Brawley was a minor genteel poet
but a major scholar who wrote several pioneering anthologies including The Negro in Literature
and Art (1918) and Early Negro American Writers (1935), which remains an important study of
writers who published from 1761 to 1900. William Stanley Braithwaite, like Brawley, wrote a
genteel, non-racial poetry, reminiscent of British Romantic poets. In 1913 he initiated his annual
edition of the Anthology of Magazine Verse which chronicled the outpouring of American poetry
for several decades.

Two poets, however, hinted at the emergence of robust, militant racial poetry and tended seeds
that were political and aesthetic. Fenton Johnson struck a note of despair and pessimism much
like Edgar Lee Masters's and Carl Sandburg's and prophetically envisioned what black urban life
would become after its euphoric beginnings. W.E.B. DuBois, whose intellectual contribution to
American political and historical thought, sociological and cultural inquiry, journalism and
imaginative literature towers over the century's best minds, wrote little poetry. However, his
most anthologized piece, "A Litany of Atlanta," written in response to the Atlanta riot of 1906 is
representative and provides a bridge for the strains of protest prevalent in both the 1800s and the
1900s.

New Negro Renaissance

By the 1920s it was clear that an unprecedented flowering of literary expression was in full
bloom. Called alternately the New Negro Renaissance and the Harlem Renaissance, this literary
movement, according to Alain Locke, its major promoter and interpreter, was the first
opportunity for group expression and self-determination. As Locke pointed out in The New
Negro (1925), the old attitudes of self-pity and apology were replaced by a frank acceptance of
the position of African Americans in American society. A growing racial awareness among
African American writers prompted self-discovery -- discovery of the ancestral past in Africa,
discovery of folk and cultural roots reaching back into colonial times, and discovery of a new
kind of militancy, self-determination and self-reliance. Langston Hughes in his famous manifesto
"The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926), captures the prevailing sentiment.



We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves
without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter.
We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored
people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build
our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free
within ourselves.

Artistic freedom was the banner under which Jean Toomer created Cane (1923), one of the
masterstrokes of the New Negro Renaissance. An unprecedented collection which combined
poetry and prose with experimental verve, it was also Toomer's revelation piece, an unrestrained
release of racial celebration. His poems in this volume are alive with the pine-scented landscape
of Georgia and capture the mysterious and illusive beauty of folk spiritualism.

Unlike Toomer, Claude McKay, the first and most radical voice to emerge in the 1920s,
personified the tensions and contradictions lived by those too conflicted by racial anomalies to
celebrate. With the publication of Harlem Shadow (1922), he became the poet that best
expressed their rage and anger and newfound militancy. The popular "If We Must Die,"
"Baptism," "To the White Fiends" expressed emotions chafing to be exposed. According to Alain
Locke, McKay "pulled the psychological cloak off the Negro and revealed even to the Negro
himself, those facts disguised till then by his shrewd protective mimicry or pressed down under
the dramatic mask of living up to what was expected of him." Ironically, McKay was
uncomfortable as a spokesman for the black race, for he saw his poems speaking to the
individual soul of all people.

In the midst of the New Negro Renaissance the issue of choice of subject matter was debated by
the literary lights of the period: Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Claude McKay, James
Weldon Johnson, Arna Bontemps, Jessie Fauset, among many others. However, Countee Cullen,
perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, agonized over the issue (freedom in choice of
subject matter, delineation of character, decorum and representativeness of portrayal, and the
bearing race should have on art). The most learned African American poet to emerge in this era,
Countee Cullen demonstrated his enormous talent in his first book entitled Color (1925). At the
young age of twenty-two, Cullen became the most famous and most quoted African American
writer at the time.

Cullen became assistant editor of Opportunity in 1926 and inaugurated his "A Dark Tower"
columns; shortly thereafter he responded to the NAACP questionnaire feature entitled "The
Negro in Art - How Shall He Be Portrayed - A Symposium," which ran in The Crisis in 1926 and
1927. He made it clear that he would not "vote for any infringement of the author's right to tell a
story, to delineate a character, or to transcribe an emotion in his own way and in light of the truth
as he sees it." However, he was quick to add that African American artists have a duty "to create
types that are truly representative." Just a year later in what appears to be a critical reversal, he
said that African American artists should not be bound by their race or restricted to race matters
simply because they are a part of that racial group. Ironically, the poet who was recognized as
best representing the emerging New Negro resented having his poetry judged on the basis of
race. "If I am going to be a poet at all, I am going to be POET and not NEGRO POET."
Langston Hughes was quick and relentless in his attack on Cullen's creed in "The Negro Artist


and the Racial Mountain" (1926). Hughes' analysis and Cullen's own fierce battle with double
consciousness coalesce in the conundrum no better expressed than in Cullen's own lines in "Yet
Do I Marvel" (1925):

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

These lines capture the essence of Cullen's highest achievement and paradoxically the confluence
of his most troubling dilemmas. It was his blackness that was at once his perceived handicap and
his greatest asset.

Cullen was one of several poets who benefited from the numerous publishing opportunities and
literary prizes available to promising writers. Under the editorship of Charles S. Johnson,
Opportunity published works by Renaissance writers and offered the Alexander Pushkin Award.
The Crisis under the leadership of editor W.E.B. DuBois and literary editor Jessie Redmond
Fauset was a showplace for literary artists and annually awarded poetry prizes for outstanding
entries. For example, Arna Bontemps' early success at writing poetry won him recognition and
prizes from both Opportunity and Crisis magazines in 1926 and 1927. Bontemps's poem "A
Black Man Talks of Reaping," which won the Crisis prize, is representative of the note of
bitterness that is a consistent tone in much Renaissance literature. It is also important to note that
these magazines were instrumental in encouraging writers like Bontemps and developing an
audience for their work.

The development of the African American poetic tradition paralleled the development of an
elaborate oral tradition that encompassed every aspect and attitude of black life, offering what
Ralph Ellison called "the first drawings of any group's character." Sterling Brown, another critic
who explored fully and consistently the inexhaustible possibilities of the folk tradition, found in
its storehouse of songs, tales, sayings and speech the originality, vitality, truthfulness and
complexity that would be his touchstones in the assessment of literature. The poetry of the
nineteenth century with its mimicry of popular stereotypes, sentimentalism and escapism would
have been found wanting if held to these standards.

However, during the early twentieth century, especially during the period known as the Harlem
Renaissance, African American poetry began to flower because of a greater exploration of the
black voice as it consciously recognized and mined the black folklore. African American poets in
varying degrees engaged in a kind of literary tropism by turning away from western cosmology
and mythology in preference for expressing their own cosmology and cultural myths. In their
attempt to find a voice expressive of their racial consciousness, they turned to cultural tropes
abounding in the universe of folk parlance. Among the African American poets who explored the
unique vernacular resources of the blues, spirituals, proverbs, tales, sayings were James Weldon
Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Sterling Brown. James Weldon Johnson played a significant role
as anthologist-critic in introducing African American poetry to the American public with The
Book of American Negro Poetry (1922). In his preface, Johnson initiates the debate on the
limitations of dialect by signaling African American writers' rejection of conventionalized dialect
associated with the minstrelsy and by calling for a form of expression that would not limit the
poet's emotional and intellectual response to black life. In some of his best poetry collected in


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

Langston Hughes, indisputably the poet laureate of Harlem, was the most experimental and
versatile poet of the New Negro Renaissance, launching his career as a poet at the age of
nineteen with what has become his signature poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." Over the next
forty-six years, Hughes had as his goal to discover the flow and rhythm of black life. Authoring
more than 860 poems, he never tired of exploring the color, vibrancy, and texture of black
culture and "his" beloved people who created it. In his first two volumes of poetry, The Weary
Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927) such poems as "Lenox Avenue Midnight,"
Jazzonia," and "To a Black Dancer in the Little Savoy," recreate the jazzy, blues-tinged,
frenzied, exotic world of Harlem nights.

Hughes called himself a folk poet, and he had faith in the inexhaustible resources to be mined in
folk music and speech. He sought to combine the musical forms of the blues, work songs,
ballads, and jazz stylings with poetic expression in such a way as to preserve the originality of
the former and achieve the complexity of the latter. As Hughes' biographer Arnold Rampersad
said, Hughes' fusion of African American music into his poetry was his "key technical
commitment." Some of his critics will argue that he remained too close to the folk form to
achieve much beyond weak imitation and others considered his approach too simple and lacking
in intellectual sophistication and rigor. But for Hughes it was enough that he became the voice of
African American dreamers. In tones that ranged from poignantly conciliatory to acerbically
radical, Hughes continued to point out the great distance between the premise and the promise of
America in his last volumes Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951), Ask Your Mama (1961) and
The Panther and the Lash (1967) published posthumously.

Like Langston Hughes, Sterling A. Brown (1901-1989) relished his title of folk poet. As such,
Brown's most significant achievement is his subtle adaptation of folk forms to the literature.
Experimenting with the blues, spirituals, work songs, and ballads, he invented combinations that
at their best retain the ethos of folk forms and intensify the literary quality of the poetry.

In his poem "Ma Rainey," one of the finest poems in his first volume of poetry, Southern Road
(1932), Brown skillfully brings together the ballad and blues forms and, demonstrating his
inventive genius, creates the blues-ballad which is a portrait of the venerated blues singer and a
chronicle of her transforming performance. With a remarkable ear for the idiom, cadence, and
tones of folk speech, Brown absorbed its vibrant qualities in his poetry. Brown came as close as
any poet had before to achieving James Weldon Johnson's ideal of original racial poetry "capable
of voicing the deepest and highest emotions and aspirations, and allowing the widest range of
subjects and the widest scope of treatment."

The next three decades, 1930-1960, trace the continuing careers of Langston Hughes and
Sterling A. Brown and mark the ascendancy of Melvin B. Tolson, Robert Hayden, Margaret
Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks. These major voices joined a growing list of poets who brought
African American poetic expression to new heights of competence and maturity. The list
includes Sam Allen (Paul Vesey), Waring Cuney, Frank Marshall Davis, Owen Dodson, Ray
Durem, Frank Horne, and Richard Wright. These poets cultivate their individual voices by


synthesizing elements from the western literary tradition and their own vernacular tradition.
They explored history as a riveting subject matter for their poetry, and they stretched the
boundaries of language to have it hold the depth and complexity that the new poetry requires.
These poets, in keeping with the continuing development of the radical/political strain in African
American poetry, also pursued a brand of social justice that emphasized integrationalism and a
sensitivity to international connections and socialistic movements.

Melvin B. Tolson demonstrates all of these interests in his poetry. In brilliant strokes of irony
and iconoclasm, he produced Rendezvous with America (1944), Libretto for the Republic of
Liberia (1953), and Harlem Gallery (1965). Tolsonian style is a synthesis of classical imagery,
racial symbolism, and extensive historical allusions. In "Psi," one of the sections of Harlem
Gallery, Tolson describes the "Negro artist" as a "flower of the gods, whose growth is dwarfed at
an early stage." Certainly, this was not Tolson's personal complaint; for, in truth, only his critical
response was dwarfed, never his considerable gifts as a poet.

Equally gifted, Robert Hayden throughout his distinguished career as a poet held to his credo that
poets "are the keepers of a nation's conscience, the partisans of freedom and justice, even when
they eschew political involvement. By the very act of continuing to function as poets they are
affirming what is human and eternal." Hayden, like Countee Cullen, insisted that poets should
not be restricted to racial themes or any subject matter or polemic that would fetter their artistic
expression. His consistent refusal to be limited by subject matter or to be relegated to a double
standard of criticism ironically found him at odds with the white literary establishment as well as
the 1960s proponents of the Black Aesthetic and often exacted stiff penalties of critical neglect
and racial ostracism. Though Hayden never retreated from his position, two of his most
outstanding poems, "Middle Passage" (1945) and "Frederick Douglass" (1947), show his lifelong
commitment to exploring African American history and folklore. In A Ballad of Remembrance
(1962), Hayden brought together revised versions of these poems and some of the best portraits
of historical figures in American literature including "The Ballad of Nat Turner," "Runagate
Runagate," and "Homage to the Empress of the Blues." Ironically, because of the excellence of
his book, Robert Hayden, who had resisted racial categorization in judging his poetry, won The
Grand Prix de la Poesie, a prize reserved to honor the best poet of Negritude in the world.

Untroubled by a Hayden-like sensitivity to racial subject matter, Margaret Walker made the full
absorption of racial material one of her highest goals. In her most famous poem, "For My
People" she mirrors the collective soul of black folk. As W.E.B. DuBois had succeeded in
announcing the political, economic and cultural strivings of African Americans in The Souls of
Black Folk (1903), Walker accomplished a stunning psychological portrait of "her people"
during the unsettling years of Depression, and throughout the succeeding decades. As Eugenia
Collier writes the poem "melts away time and place and it unifies Black listeners," deriving its
power from "the reservoir of beliefs, values, and archetypal characters yielded by our collective
historical experience." With a verbal brilliance owing to an impressive absorption of the myths,
rituals, music, and folklore of the African American tradition, Margaret Walker shares her
cultural memories and creates new ones in For My People (1942), Prophets for a New Day
(1970) and October Journey (1972).



Another major voice, Gwendolyn Brooks, has produced some of the most outstanding poetry
written in the twentieth century. With poetry that benefits from great compression, technical
acumen, and emotional complexity, no poet lays better claim to heir of two hundred years of the
maturation of African American poetry than Gwendolyn Brooks. In 1950 Brooks won the
Pulitzer Prize for her volume of poetry Annie Allen, becoming the first African American to win
this award. In 1968 she was named Poet Laureate of Illinois, succeeding the late Carl Sandburg.
Author of more than twenty books including A Street in Bronzeville (1945), The Bean Eaters
(1960), In the Mecca (1968) and Riot (1969), she is a master at manipulating language until it
distills the pure essence of the life and character that she astutely observes in Chicago and the
world. Brooks joined other poets who were writing in the 1950s -- Owen Dodson, Sam Allen,
Ray Durem, Margaret Esse Danner, Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs -- in responding poetically
to a nation carrying the anlage of social change in its mounting civil rights movement. The year
1955 witnessed the Montgomery Bus Boycott which brought Rosa Parks and Martin Luther
King, Jr. to national prominence; it also witnessed the senseless lynching of Emmett Till, a
fourteen-year-old black boy accused of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. The latter
event had a profound effect on Gwendolyn Brooks and is the subject of two of her poems, "A
Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi, Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon" and
"The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till."

Furious Flower

Ten years later another event, the assassination of Malcolm X, would capture the imagination of
a group of younger poets and be the catalyst for the Black Arts Movement and the furious
flowering of African American poetry that it produced. Malcolm's ideas provided the radical,
philosophical framework for the movement. According to Larry Neal in Visions of a Liberated
Future (1989), he "touched all aspects of contemporary black nationalism." Malcolm's voice
sounded the tough urban street style, and his life became a symbol and inspiration. With his
words resonating in their consciousness, and his image inspiring a revolutionary world vision,
poets such as David Henderson, James A. Emanuel, Robert Hayden and Etheridge Knight paid
tribute to him after his death.

Three poets inspired by the example of Malcolm X emerged as the moving spirits and visionaries
of the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Larry Neal, and
Askia Muhammad Touré (Rolland Snellings). Baraka saw the movement as a revolutionary force
"to create an art, a literature that would fight for black people's liberation with as much intensity
as Malcolm X our 'Fire Prophet' and the rest of the enraged masses who took to the streets in
Birmingham after the four little girls had been murdered by the Klan and FBI, or the ones who
were dancing in the street in Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit." Baraka captures in this statement
the revolutionary fervor and commitment that led him, Larry Neal, and Askia Touré to create the
Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in Harlem, that led to the collaboration with Neal in
publishing Black Fire (1968), the seminal anthology of the period; and that guided his constant
spiritual striving toward building a black nation in America.

Out of this striving came a poetry that was emblazoned with the liberation struggle. Baraka, poet,
activist and playwright, gained a strong reputation as a poet among the avant-garde artists of
Greenwich Village during the 1950s and collected his early poetry in Preface to a Twenty-


Volume Suicide Note (1961). Since that time he has published fourteen books of poetry including
The Dead Lecturer (1964), Black Magic Poetry (1969), In Our Terribleness (1970), It's Nation
Time (1970), Spirit Reach (1972), Funk Lore (1996) and Wise Why's Y's: A Griot's Tale (1995).
His poetry is experimental, explosive, improvisational, and allied to black music, especially jazz.

Like Baraka, Larry Neal wrote poetry that had the sound and the pulsing, pumping rhythm of
black music. His early death at forty-three curtailed a brilliant career as a poet, essayist, teacher
and community activist. However, his essays, drama, and poetry have been collected in Visions
of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings (1989). "Poppa Stoppa Speaks from His
Grave" and "Don't Say Goodbye to the Porkpie Hat" are excellent examples of the hip, urbane,
jazz-digging style that was his signature.

The music of John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Theolonious Monk, and other jazz greats also
suffuses the poetry of Askia M. Touré. To a rich lyricism he adds a cosmic vision that was first
apparent in JuJu: Magic Songs for the Black Nation (with Ben Caldwell, 1970) and Songhai
(1973) and continues in From the Pyramids to the Projects (1990). His commitment to raising
the national consciousness carried over to the 1990s, when his messages challenged the
destructive forces wielding genocide both physical and mental. Reflecting on the Black Arts
Movement, Touré contends that it was "the largest cultural upsurge that our people have had in
this century and that we were organically-linked writers, activists, musicians, playwrights and
such."

Several forces converged to create the outpouring of African American poetry that has taken
place since 1960. The political and social upheavals brought about by the civil rights movement
of the 1950s and 1960s ushered in a dramatic change in the legal and social status of African
Americans. With its non-violent strategies of sit-ins, marches, freedom rides, boycotts, voter
registration drives, the movement united two generations of African American poets around the
dream of freedom and equality and supplied them with a wealth of cultural heroes including
Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Emmett Till, Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, who
became the subject matter of their poetry. The assassination of Martin Luther King inspired a
groundswell of poems from such poets as Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, Sam Allen, Quincy
Troupe, and Mari Evans. In the wake of the urban riots and fires that were the people's response
to King's martyrdom came the Black Power movement with its bold language of racial
confrontation, cultural separation, and its insistence upon self defense, self reliance, and black
pride. With their iconoclastic attacks on all aspects of white middle class values, it is not
surprising that the poets who shaped the Black Arts movement, the Black Power's cultural wing,
rejected unequivocally Western poetic conventions. Their poetic technique emphasized free
verse; typographical stylistics; irreverent, often scatological, diction; and linguistic
experimentation. In addition to Baraka, Neal and Touré, prominent among these poets were
Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, Etheridge Knight, A.B. Spellman, Calvin C.
Hernton, Mari Evans, David Henderson, June Jordan, Clarence Major, Jayne Cortez, Henry
Dumas, Carolyn M. Rodgers, and Quincy Troupe.

Following Maulana Ron Karenga's dictum that black art must be "functional, collective and
committed," these poets addressed their messages primarily to African Americans and African
people in the diaspora, and in their messages the artist and the political activist become one.


Poets such as Sam Allen, Margaret Burroughs, and Margaret Danner set out to reclaim the lost
African heritage, continuing the "literary Garveyism" that began in the 1920s. The strains of Pan
Africanism, nurtured by W.E.B. DuBois appear in the poetry of W. Keorapetse Kgositisile, an
exile from South Africa, and the confluence of African and European cultures mesh in the poetry
of West Indian poet Derek Walcott, continuing the tradition of the Negritude movement. Not
only were these poets extending their boundaries, but they were also exploring the interior spaces
of the African American identity. Henry Dumas, "whose brief life held out the promise of
brilliant and passionate writing," according to Eugene Redmond in Drumvoices (1976), studded
his poetry with raw and angry dimensions of the African American psyche. Conrad Kent Rivers,
who also died too young, was concerned with his inner world where pain, violence and
destruction only ended with death. In the hands of Lucille Clifton, Lance Jeffers, Raymond
Patterson, and Johari Amini, among others, the concept of blackness is sculpted into a composite
of courage, endurance, beauty, and stoicism - positive images for a nation reconstructing itself.

And more often than not, these poets created their own journals to disseminate their messages.
Hoyt Fuller, the influential editor of Negro Digest and Black World, edited NOMMO, the journal
of the OBAC Writers Workshop and, like Gwendolyn Brooks, had a great impact on the younger
poets as mentor and cultural guide. Tom Dent and Kalamu ya Salaam edited Nkombo, the journal
of BLKARTSOUTH, a cultural organization that grew out of the Free Southern Theater in New
Orleans. Burning Spear featured the poetry of the Howard poets such as Lance Jeffers. The
collection was an outgrowth of the Dasein Literary Society at Howard University. As The Crisis
and Opportunity magazines had stimulated artistic and intellectual activity during the New Negro
Renaissance, several journals founded during the late 1960s and 1970s increased readership for
African American poetry over the next twenty years. Notable among them are the Journal of
Black Poetry, founded by Joe Goncalves; The Black Scholar, founded by Robert Chrisman;
Black Dialogue, founded by Abdul Karim and Edward S. Spriggs; Callaloo, founded in 1974 by
Charles H. Rowell, Tom Dent and Jerry Ward; and Obsidian, founded by Alvin Aubert in 1975
with Gerald Barrax assuming the editorship in 1985. Many poets were also responsible for
establishing presses that encouraged emerging poets to publish. Haki Madhubuti's Third World
Press in Chicago, Dudley Randall's Broadside Press in Detroit, and Naomi Long Madgett's Lotus
Press became invaluable outlets for African American poetic expression.

The proliferation of the ideas and impact of the Black Arts Movement was due largely to the
formation of cultural organizations and Writers Workshops committed to encouraging African
American poets and increasing readership among an African American audience. The Umbra
Workshop first gathered in Greenwich Village and Lower East Side of New York in 1941 and
listed among its members David Henderson, Calvin C. Hernton, Tom Dent, Ishmael Reed, Askia
M. Touré, Raymond Patterson, Charles Patterson and Lorenzo Thomas. It produced the first
issue of Umbra in 1963. In Chicago, Haki Madhubuti and Walter Bradford were among the
founding members of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), which brought
together Carolyn Rodgers, Gwendolyn Brooks, Johari Amini, Sterling Plumpp, Eugene Perkins,
Ebon (Leo Thomas Hale), and Angela Jackson, among others. Zealous in carrying out the ideals
of black solidarity and empowerment, they read in schools, community centers, bars, parks, on
street corners.



Since the 1970s, these contemporary African American poets have developed a form of
communal performance art that draws heavily on what Stephen Henderson called black music
and black speech as poetic referents. The poets' work evidenced a full absorption of musical
forms such as blues and jazz, call-and-response features, improvising lines, evoking tones,
rhythm, structure of folk form, and the entire range of spoken virtuosity seen in the sermon, the
rap, the dozens, signifying, toasts, and folktales. Poets such as Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez,
Haki Madhubuti, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Askia M. Touré, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Sun
Ra, and Ted Joans discovered how to transform the printed poem into a performance that
unleashes the elegance and power of black speech and music. For example, Jayne Cortez's ability
to evoke the jazz sound of Arnette Colemen, Bessie Smith and John Coltrane in her first volume
of poetry Pisstained Stairs (1969) suggested the power that she would develop as a performance
poet. Sonia Sanchez significantly influenced the cultural landscape by the urgency of her
sustained committed voice, often rendered in her deeply spiritual chanting/singing style. Eugene
Redmond, Sarah Webster Fabio, Gil Scott-Heron, and Ted Joans are representative of those
poets who incorporate "rap," blues, jazz, and soul music in their poetry making it move with the
rhythm of contemporary beats. Nikki Giovanni achieved national popularity as she wedded her
visionary, truth-telling poetry with the sounds of gospel music in her best-selling album "Truth Is
On Its Way" in 1971. Haki Madhubuti, with his explosive, annunciatory kinetic rap style, has
been one of the most imitated poets among young artists seeking to develop a performance style.
Though much of the poetry was involved with music, orature and performance, for Alvin Aubert
the poem will have to "perform itself on the page." His poems in If Winter Come: Collected
Poems, 1967-1992 (1994), Pinkie Gordon Lane's I Never Scream: New and Selected Poems
(1985) and Naomi Long Madgett's Octavia and Other Poems (1988) illustrate a reliance upon
quieter, muted strains to enhance their poetry.

The cultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s not only changed the way African Americans
thought about their political and social status as American citizens, for the poets it also planted
the seeds for a truly liberated exploration of literary possibilities. Poets such as Lucille Clifton,
Audre Lorde, Jay Wright, and Michael S. Harper cultivated their poetic imaginations in line with
more personal and individualized goals. In An Ordinary Woman (1974), Lucille Clifton floods
her private and public identities with light, illuminating family histories and relationships in
epigrammatic flashes. Audre Lorde, during the course of a thirty-year career, struggled against
the poet's death of being "choked into silence by icy distinction." In volumes such as Coal (1973)
and The Black Unicorn (1978) she resisted categorization and definition by a narrow expectation
of her humanity by boldly exploring all of the essences of womanhood. Jay Wright's eclecticism
led him to create poetry that is a multicultural mosaic of his interest in history, anthropology,
cosmology, religion and social thought as evident in Death as History (1967). As suggested by
the title of Michael S. Harper's second book of poems, History Is Your Own Heartbeat, history is
the heartbeat of his poetry as he chronicles personal and kinship relationships and cultural
histories that link complex emotional and philosophical experiences shared by diverse ethnic
groups.

Rita Dove, acknowledging her own debt to the Black Arts Movement, said that if it had not been
for the movement, America would not be ready to accept a poet who explored a text other than
blackness. Unencumbered by a necessarily political message, Dove in her Pulitzer Prize winning
book Thomas and Beulah (1987) brings wholeness and elegance to the histories of her


grandparents. Dove, who held the post of Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 until
1995, is representative of a large accomplished group of poets who published their first poems
during the late 1970s and 1980s: Yusef Komunyakaa, Cornelius Eady, Melvin Dixon, Dolores
Kendrick, Thylias Moss, Toi Derricotte, Gloria Oden, and Sherley Anne Williams.

Elizabeth Alexander is emblematic of the promise and wide range of variegated voices that have
sprung forth during the first half of the 1990's. Her first collection, The Venus Hottentot (1990),
reveals poems that explore the interior lives of historical figures, exposing emotions and
experiences that strikingly illuminate public concerns. In a poem called "The Dark Room: An
Invocation" she hails talented young poets who make up The Dark Room Collective: Thomas
Sayers Ellis, Sharan Strange, Kevin Young, Carl Phillips and Natasha Trethewey, to name a few.
In highly individual styles, they shape metaphors and images in a fisted reading of contemporary
life. Other young poets, such as Ras Baraka, Kevin Powell, Jabari Asim and Esther Iverem, place
themselves in the tradition of struggle that they see as artistic, political, spiritual, and
psychological; they seek to revisit the ideals of the Black Arts Movement in the language of a
hip-hop nation.

In the closing decade of the twentieth century, African American poetry is again experiencing an
expansive, renewing phrase that some have termed the "Third Renaissance." This sense of
renewal was dramatically evident at the Furious Flower Conference in 1994, when the largest
gathering of poets and critics in more than two decades, met at James Madison University in
Virginia to read, discuss, and celebrate African American poetry. The conference, dedicated to
Gwendolyn Brooks, brought together three generations of poets. In doing so it symbolized the
continuity in the African American poetic expression and signaled the dimensions of its future
development. Seasoned poets who began writing in the 1960s are continuing to write with skill
and power. Sonia Sanchez's Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995) and Gerald Barrax's
Leaning Against the Sun (1992) are prime examples. Derek Walcott's Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1992, Rita Dove's appointment as Poet Laureate of the United States, and Gwendolyn Brooks'
naming by the National Endowment for the Humanities as the Jefferson Lecturer for 1994
represent the unprecedented achievement of African American poets as recipients of the nation's
highest honors. This newest renaissance is also marked by the emergence of a group of young
poets who have been published in such anthologies as In the Tradition: An Anthology of Young
Black Writers (1992), edited by Kevin Powell and Ras Baraka and On the Verge: Emerging
Poets and Artists (1993), edited by Thomas Sayers Ellis and Joseph Lease.

Just as Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "TheSecond Sermon on the Warpland" suggests "furious
flower" as a metaphor for the aesthetic chronicle of African American poetry, it also encourages
the emerging generation to bloom "in the noise and whip of the whirlwind." After 250 years of
African American poetry, these young poets are "the last of the loud," ferocious in their call for
humanism and beautiful in their response to the magic and music of language.

from The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Ed. William L. Andrews, Trudier
Harris and Frances Smith Foster. Copyright © Oxford University Press.



Return to The Black Arts Movement

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


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