The Black Arts Movement

The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was the creative arm of the Black Power Movement. The term "Black Power" originated in part from a Richard Wright work by the same name, and was further coined by Stokely Carmichael, co-founder of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (or "SNCC"). A philosophical movement that urged the need for African American autonomy through political and economic independence, the Black Power Movement gave rise to organizations such as the Black Panther Party.

Huey P. Newton

Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton
Largely inspired by the writings of Malcolm X and Mao Tse-tung, the Black Panther Party advocated, in accordance with the philosophies of its co-founder Huey P. Newton, a policy of armed aggression against an oppressive, and corrupt white governmental infrastructure in the U.S.
*From Huey P. Newton Website

Photo taken by student, Christina Hill, March 2019

El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, or Malcolm X, whose ideology and affiliations with Black Nationalism inspired and galvanized the Black Power Movement.

The Black Arts Movement, produced such figures as Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Amiri Baraka (or, LeRoi Jones) who advocated the poetic form--particularly spoken word poetry--for its immediacy and thrift to articulate the anger, frustration, hostility, and desires of the artist for a new era in race relations. These poets advocated solidarity among members of the African American diaspora, and the need to assert their rights by force if necessary. Kaluma ya Salaam observes that "[b]oth 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. As previously mentioned, the 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" (Kaluma ya Salaam 1)

The following video features Amiri Baraka calling for "poetry that kills."

"From a historical perspective, it is clear that the Black Arts Era is, in many ways an echo of both Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance. Once again, African Americans questioned the terms of their identity, history, and future prospects as citizens of the United States. They were concerned with the meaning and purpose of art both as a factor in social change and as an economic enterprise. Relevant questions about stylistics, form and discourse/language as well as intended audience and purpose were again debated. Yet the terms and circumstances of these questions and concerns were distinctly different, if for no other reason than writers of the Black Arts era were aware that their literary predecessors had raised similar issues during Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance. From that legacy dating back to one hundred years before, they determined that artists needed to exert more control over the production and marketing of their works. Moreso than Reconstruction and Harlem Renaissance authors, Black Arts era writers questioned both the personal and the communal significance of literary production and distribution. Many chose to be published by small (and often transitory) presses that allowed them greater freedom of expression, that targeted a particular readership, or that simply promised greater financial profit...
     "Whereas Langston Hughes had said in the 1920s that writers were going to create whether people liked or understood them or not, the proponents of the Black Arts era contended that their work be understood by African Americans, that it must be both political and aesthetic, and to be successful, it must move their audiences to action" (Moody 343-4).

     Maya Angelou

  Nikki Giovanni

Rita Dove

Lucille Clifton

Questions for Discussion: In what ways has the Black Power Movement shaped and influenced contemporary African American popular culture?

What other movements, literary or cultural, sprang from the Black Power Movement?

Alice Walker's 1970 (re)discovery of Zora Neale Hurston's fiction catalyzed a literary movement among African American female writers. How might Walker's discovery of a lineage of literary 'foremothers' coincide with the aims of the Black Power Movement?

Kaluma ya Salaam lists several of the generative collections of Black Arts poetry and other writings in:

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.